A possibly controversial question
I've been re-reading Jared Diamond's
Guns, Germs and Steel, and finding it very thought-provoking; it's a good book to come back to after a time, and if you haven't read it (and his more recent book,
Collapse) I recommend it highly.
But here's a question that popped into my head while reading it: (This will probably make a bit more sense to those who have read the book) Why did England successfully invade and colonize India, and not the other way round? I'm curious both about the proximate causes (my lack of Indian history is showing through) and the deeper reasons, if any can be traced back. Diamond's analysis doesn't seem to carry over unmodified to this case; India certainly had no shortage of intensive agriculture, nor a late start in developing it, and at times in its history was a large empire. Had the two countries been neighbors, the outcome might have been very different; similarly if they had come into contact a thousand years earlier. Nor was the battle completely one-sided; the Sikhs twice managed to field a very impressive army and pose a real challenge to British domination. Yet despite all of this, the British managed to basically set up shop and run a country many times their size, and hold that empire for over a century; so there must have been some major fundamental asymmetry.
Thoughts?
