Japan-style Westernisation

Delvestius

Banned
Which just makes me wonder what state could be powerful enough given the circumstances to defend from the Europeans. Unlike Japan, firearms were pretty uncommon, and they were all pretty much "on the way" location-wise.. If the silk road went through Indochina instead, I think the plausibility of such a situation would rise dramatically.
 
Which just makes me wonder what state could be powerful enough given the circumstances to defend from the Europeans. Unlike Japan, firearms were pretty uncommon, and they were all pretty much in the middle of things.. If the silk road went through Indochina instead, I think the plausibility of such a situation would rise dramatically.

Well, presumably we have time to play around with things if we're looking at a POD as far back as taking the Mongols out of the picture.

But yeah, this seems prime territory for being conquered, not conquering from.
 
IMO, Paraguay could have done something similar before the War of the Triple Alliance, if it had avoided war for another few decades.
 
Thus wondering if "a" power could have come from there, not necessarily one ruling all of India, just having something amount to this sort of thing instead of how OTL we see the Mughals rotting internally in the North (I anticipate correction by our Indian experts in 10, 9, 8 . . .) and the Europeans taking the place from the South.

Mysore could have pulled it off, I think. From what I understand, around the end of the 18th century under Tippu Sultan they had excellent military organization, technology that was not at all inferior to Europeans', and they conquered a substantial portion of southern India while defeating several British armies. If there had been so further Anglo-Mysore wars after the Mysore victory in 1784, maybe Mysore would have remained independent indefinitely.
 
Mysore could have pulled it off, I think. From what I understand, around the end of the 18th century under Tippu Sultan they had excellent military organization, technology that was not at all inferior to Europeans', and they conquered a substantial portion of southern India while defeating several British armies. If there had been so further Anglo-Mysore wars after the Mysore victory in 1784, maybe Mysore would have remained independent indefinitely.

Maybe. I don't know much about India, but this would be the sort of "did anything exist that could go somewhere?" that I was wondering about.
 
Mysore could have pulled it off, I think. From what I understand, around the end of the 18th century under Tippu Sultan they had excellent military organization, technology that was not at all inferior to Europeans', and they conquered a substantial portion of southern India while defeating several British armies. If there had been so further Anglo-Mysore wars after the Mysore victory in 1784, maybe Mysore would have remained independent indefinitely.

As I've argued before, what needs to happen is for the balance of power to be preserved in South India for a generation or so more.

IOTL, it was upset by the French revolution- France lost the ability to play power games in South India leaving the British free to act as regional hegemon.

Lets look at why European trained armies were able to generally beat South Indian ones. This hadn't been the case just fifty years before where the dutch were stalemated in the Dutch-Travancori war. But the late 18th century, Indian armies were fielding artillery corps as large and sophisticated as anything in Europe. Where they lagged behind was in the area of drilled infantry- Indian kings tended to rely more on the shock and awe of artillery but drilled Company troops could advance reliably under fire and this was what tipped the balance often enough.

Now by the late 18th C, Indian kings were beginning to adopt European infantry theory, hiring advisors to drill their royal guards and the like. However, these sort of reforms hadn't been put into place en masse. This was fine so long as the Anglo-French balance of power was maintained in South India but once France became preoccupied with its trouble in Europe, French support for Indian clients dried up, leaving the British free to sweep across South India. Mysore was conquered and the Wodeyars placed back on the throne, Travancore submitted as a vassal and so did Hyderabad.

But given a generation more of power games in South India it's quite likely that Hyderabad, Mysore and Travancore, at least would have been able to preserve their independence.

The North is actually much more likely to fall due to the utter chaos that was going on up there. The Mughals were only nominally there and the Mahrattas were overextended and disintegrating.
 
India's problem was the lack of central authority. It wasn't until the British Raj that India was ever truly united. Plus, many of the trade routs from China went through Transoxania and Iran, missing the heart of India by a wide margin, meaning less ideas, technologhy and wealth.

India's abundance of goods and resources and lack of centralization made it a prime target of direct colonization. Perhaps if India had been centralized under a court more progressive than the Mughals, maybe a bit more to the south, maybe they would have had a chance. However, their location was rather central, and this didn't help their case much...

I'm not sure why India needs to be united- everyone underestimates just how big it is. A state like Hyderabad at it's greatest extent was almost the size of France. And yet somehow everyone gets blinkered by the fact that modern India is a united country and assumes that anything smaller was somehow unviable. That's like saying that Europe can't amount to anything unless the Roman Empire is reestablished.
 
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