Yggdrasil313 said:
I would be intrested in seeing how to both have the historical wealth and manpower.. yet not race ahead in tech, heck, should remain almost fully stagnated thruought the timeframe..
Untill some westerners comes around and shakes up the system, and begins taking vassals. Trade in and off itself should change only little?
I mean we have the COT -system, and assumedly westerners will be far ahead in that field, and so can outcompete all natives. Refusals to trade will lead to a war, and vassalisation.
It would be important however to see that no vassal can refuse trade.
And yeah, a east indian company would be nice.. perhaps somewhere along the line some of those vassals could become first auto annexed, then released as the company?
Which will gain the incomes, mostly untroubled by corruption, and start sending tribute back home.
Hopefully the tribute is big enough to keep the company from becoming a superteching monster..
Well, all of asia for some reason, despite wealth and threats, was at the time technologically behind Europe, which over human history, was not the norm - im not sure if this was to do with the wealth of the colinisation of the Americas, or perhaps the Renneciance, where Europe suddenly gained the sort of innovative boost that the Arabs, Indians and Chinese had at some point had.
Japan and the Kingdom of Mysore however are two states that attempted to overcome this - both acuiring European technology, and new innovations like rocket artillery - however in the case of Mysore, it was too little too late when already surrounded by British allies.
Sarmatia1871 said:
That wouldn't actually be accurate at all in the case of India - the EU3 period saw tremendous technological and economic development on the subcontinent, so that by the 1750s Bengal had banking systems as complex as anything in Europe and a thriving textile industry.
European involvement in India could possibly best be modelled by expeditionary forces, technological exchanges and trading concessions between Indian and European powers - with the possibility of native states selling off coastal provinces and cities to Europeans, or becoming their vassals if they become to economically dependant upon them.
(So, a bit like the colonisation system in Imperialism I, if anyone remembers it -
!)
Good points. Also, the British and other colonial powers didnt simply win by technology margin, but instead through innovative uses of 'divide and conquer':
- European power sends explorers to India
- European power sends traders to India
- European power gains friendships of multiple kingdoms
- They play them off against one another
- Indian states become more reliant on the Europeans
- Footholds gained (i.e. British allowed to put traders in Bengal and colinise it 1700s)
- Any Indian states that fight British designs are attacked by British allies (i.e. Mysore, Martha Confedracy, etc)
- When all of India is effectivey vassalised by British and allied states, only then is direct rule established (i.e. after the 1857 rebellion, the crown made India an official vassal - the British Indian Empire)
In short, we are talking about the British conquest of India as if it was like the coloinisation of the Americas (quite obiously not, as it was vastly populated and home to powerfull civilization), or on the other hand, as if it was like the annexation of Scotland or Eire (not that either, as it was on the other side of the world) - but the reality is more complex - the British established the Indian Empire over a period of 150 years, by slowly playing off kingdoms against each other which otherwise would have been far too powerfull for a country to conquer (at least from halfway across the world) - very little of it involved actual direct British conquest - it was more like 'diplomatic annex'. British troops were only ever used really to defend the direct holdings of the East India Company (like Bengal) and to put down the Indian mutiny - the rest of the work was done by Indian troops fighting for allied Rajas, and later, by Indian troops under the employ of the East India Company and British Raj.
Ironically, the British Raj couldnt have worked without the help of Indians - hundreds of thousands of Indian civil servants doing the daily administration, hundreds of thousands of Indian soldiers securing it. It took a lot of effort for the British to bring down the Elephant - and why go to such effort over India specifically? Because it was rich - the "jewel in the crown", source of the Empire's superpower wealth, and everyone since the Greeks had heard of that fabled wealth.
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