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Why Did the Industrial Revolution Not Start in India?

Due to abundant labor, its social structure, and the inertia of an economic system, there was little incentive to initiate mechanization and the Industrial Revolution in India.

An illustration depicting the Industrial Revolution in Birmingham, England.

Historians often ask why the Industrial Revolution began in Europe and not elsewhere.

The classical framing of this question is the Needham Problem. Writing in 1969, the British historian of science, Joseph Needham, asked: “Why did modern science, the mathematization of hypotheses about Nature, with all its implications for advanced technology, take its meteoric rise only in the West…[and] had not developed in Chinese civilization?” After all, Needham noted, “between the first century BC and the fifteenth century AD, Chinese civilization was much more efficient than occidental in applying human natural knowledge to practical human needs.”

The Industrial Revolution refers to the transformation from agrarian, handicraft economies to machine- and factory-based industrial economies. It began in the 18th century and was the harbinger of the modern world, enabling Western dominance over most of the rest of the world, either through outright colonization, as in much of India and Africa, or by means of indirect control, as in China and Iran. The Industrial Revolution built on the preceding Scientific Revolution in Europe, which emphasized the acquisition of knowledge through reason and empirical research.

Needham sought to answer the question of why the Industrial Revolution did not begin outside Europe by examining the evolution of science in China.

But the issue ought not to be seen as merely a dichotomy between Western and Chinese civilization. In fact, India and the Islamic world would arguably have been better candidates than China for the emergence of industrial civilization. As in Europe, large swathes of India and the Islamic world engaged in long-distance trade, patronized universities, and were divided into competing kingdoms fighting against each other and against pastoralist peoples from the neighboring steppes and deserts. The Islamic world and Europe, especially, had to compensate for a lack of abundant labor. Incessant warfare led to the adaptation of gunpowder, while trade spread innovations such as the compass and paper beyond the region.

In India, there are two periods that stand out as optimal times for an industrial revolution to occur there. The first is in the 6ht century CE, when the Gupta Empire had disintegrated into a plethora of kingdoms and a shared elite culture across polities emerged. India thus experienced both political competition and was home to a pan-India culture. An exchange of ideas happened at a number of universities, such as Nalanda. These conditions were similar to those in early modern Europe. Some of India’s greatest advances in the arts, philosophy, and mathematics occurred in the centuries following the end of the Gupta Empire, with figures like mathematician Brahmagupta and philosopher Shankara living during this period.

A second period would have been in the Deccan peninsula during the early modern era. The topography and location of this region favored the persistence of several rival kingdoms seeking to gain an advantage over each other. They all had access to ocean-going trade and had a history of trade guilds, which allowed the easy flow of goods and ideas. In the early 16th century, the Deccan sultanates were some of the earliest innovators in cannon technology and military architecture. In the 18th century, the Kingdom of Mysore invented sophisticated rockets and other weaponry, whilst the Marathas established ordnance factories where skilled metalworkers created cannon and firearms adapted to local Indian conditions.

While it should be noted that the engine behind 18th-century Deccani manufacturing were skilled craftsmen rather than mechanization, the region had many of the right ingredients to commence industrialization around the same time as in Europe. The British conquest halted these initial local moves in that direction.

However, there were many other reasons the Industrial Revolution began in northwest Europe — and not elsewhere, such as in India — in the 18th century.

Industrialization is not inevitable. It is not the default outcome of human civilization. It takes certain institutions and worldviews as prerequisites and particular economic and geopolitical conditions — many of which came together by chance — to spark the process.

A great many factors must align, not least intense international rivalry in the state’s vicinity. For example, a polity ought to have enough labor to man its factories, but not too much labor — as China did — so as to make investment in industry more expensive than utilizing manual labor. A polity would ideally be sedentary rather than nomadic, stable enough internally to guarantee the continuity of institutions such as universities, companies, and land ownership, and home to a flexible labor market: the masses of peasants in many states were not permitted to move freely and offer their services anywhere. The polity must be strong enough to guarantee the rule of law, but not so bureaucratic so as to stifle private enterprise and innovation.

The historian Kyle Harper, speaking about the Roman Empire, noted that: “there [were] tinkerers and engineers, but they [were not] talking to the mathematicians and the physicists. If you were from on high to design self-sustaining innovation, I think you would want to bring those elements into proximity.” Harper argues that industrialization took off in early modern Europe because states funded scientific research and married the findings to the work of engineers and builders. Both groups seeded each other’s minds with ideas.

This process requires a state — or well-endowed institutions, such as corporations and universities — to facilitate scientific discoveries and its practical applications. This is a time- and capital-intensive process that was undertaken — more often than not — to improve the finances and security of the state through gains in efficiency and production. The benefits had to have been more than the costs.

On top of that, the state must overcome tradition and inertia: not an easy task. For example, after the victory of the Vijayanagara Empire against the Sultanate of Bijapur in 1520 at the Battle of Raichur, the two sides drew different conclusions on the efficiency of gunpowder.

Writing about the emperor of Vijayanagara,........

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