How come no empire since antiquity managed to unify all of India until brits came? Seems like every empire that tried came close but eventually collapsed before they could get the job done
How come no empire since antiquity managed to unify all of India until brits came?
Mauryans came close with a stable empire. Tughluqs were an utter meme, constantly on the verge of collapse - these maps of the Tughluqs or Khiljis holding that much land are utter cope when you consider that they got trapped in forever wars in the Deccan and eventually just gave up and collapsed in peace.
But anyways, to answer your question: look at a topographic map of India. The populated regions of the Indo-Gangetic plain, the Gujarati-Marathi coast, the Bengali-Oriya coast, the Telugu coast and inner plateau, and the Tamil-Malayali coast and inner plateau are all split up by massive mountains or dense jungle. good luck marching a preindustrial army through that from a single point of origin - especially in the south where Tamil hill warriors trained to ambush you in the Ghats will slaughter you like a pig if you step off the established road where they can still pick you off as you march. South of the Vindhyas, India is hell for armies from the outside while being hard to escape for non-thassalocratic local armies. Hence, it took even the British with their first ever port in Madras until 1818 to conquer the Deccan and Southern India WITH local sepoys as the vast majority of the army while they had already conquered basically all of the richest parts of the Gangetic plain by the 1770s or so.
Same goes for every medieval Muslim ruler - Aurangzeb got mired in a 27 year forever war against the Marathas which nobody ever mentions today, but which lasted for another 31 years and killed probably around 5-7 million people.
This, basically.
I read somewhere that the Indian peninsula is the Spain of Asia. The Iberian Peninsula is STILL not united - there's Portugal right there.
Who united Iberia? That's right - the Romans. And maybe the Habsburgs 60 years in the 1500s, but that didn't take.
Spain also has problems with mountains, deserts, and (on the north and west) forests. Sieges don't work on the coast because the locals just go fishin' and their boats are better than the imperial landlubbers'.
Honestly, I would rather extend that and say that "Tamilakam" is the Iberia of South Asia. By which, I mean that you can draw parallels between Iberian populations and those of the modern states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala in India and the modern nation of Sri Lanka which has a significant Tamil minority in the north (or at least, it did before the ethnic cleansing).
You have Castile (Tamil Nadu) as the largest historic military and economic power, but in its modern cultural form it is actually the combination of multiple smaller independent historical polities that fought with each other just as much as (Chola Nadu, Pandya Nadu, Tondai/Pallava Nadu). Then you have Catalonia (Kerala), which is wealthier than the rest of Spain but culturally a black hole rapidly losing touch with its own history due to increased globalization while b***hing and moaning about the rest of Spain being a backwards shithole. Then you have the Portuguese (Sri Lankan Tamils) who are basically just like Spain culturally but are utterly unintelligible when trying to communicate. Finally, you have Morocco (Sinhalese) who are extremely different culturally even though they're in close proximity. Of course, not a perfect match - but it's surprisingly close.
>I read somewhere that the Indian peninsula is the Spain of Asia. The Iberian Peninsula is STILL not united - there's Portugal right there.
imo India is closer to Italy.
The Himalayas are the Alps. The Ganges is the river Po. The Marathas was India's Rome moment. Tamil-Malabar coast is Sicily and Naples looking to the sea, Bengal is Venice looking to the East
Mauryan Empire is India's Roman Empire.
very true
and the influence India and Italy has with other countries >>
india is not equivalent to italy or spain
it's equivalent to all of western europe
No one was talking about size
Love to see some intelligent conversation on IQfy
Keep it up lads.
>Mauryans came close with a stable empire.
>Mauryan Empire is India's Roman Empire
Stupidest posts on IQfy. After the first three rulers which was a dew decades the Mauryan empire went into a state of rapid decline. The Guptas were the longest lasting large dynasty not this meme empire
Literally not an issue. The greeks in bactria/india easily beat the natives whenever and even reached pataliputra and sacked it
Just like the roman empire
>Just like the roman empire
Even the Western Roman Empire lasted 500 years. More if you include the Republic and/or the Eastern Roman Empire. You meme empire lasted only 138 years
>Maurya v Rome
Apples to apples, Rome became the dominant power around 150bc and lasted as the ordering hegemon until 550ad or so, a reign of 700 years. They reached their maximum territorial extent a few centuries later, but once they conquered Greece there was nobody left that could lay claim to any sort of influence over the Med at large.
Maurya was about 315-200bc for the similar stages, about 115 years.
You can quibble, but Rome's dominance lasted roughly 4-6 times longer than Maurya's. I don't know enough about Indian history to say what impact the Maurya had on their later development, but all of Western civilization still looks to Rome as the most important pre-modern influence and spent most of the 1000 years after its fall trying to lay claim to the title, even those peoples that hadn't been a part of it.
Is there a comparable legacy for the Maurya, or were they the imperial flash in the pan?
>Is there a comparable legacy for the Maurya, or were they the imperial flash in the pan?
They were literally discovered by Europeans
The moment the roman empire broke into the east and west, it ceased to be a united empire. Everyone in the area of the Mediterranean called themselves the roman empire. Even Turks. morons like you take that at face value and think that the roman empire lasted till 1453 just because Constantinople called itself roman
"Western" roman is not the roman empire
>thassalocratic
thalassocratic*
Damn...you can see Gandhis head looking at where he will be born...
I have no doubt Alex would conquer the entire India if his troops had the balls. Indian were pretty backwards militarily at his time. Their strength lies in numbers and if Alexander could ally with a few native ruler then that won't be a problem
Nah, India is just too big and with a shitty terrain and climate, with the logistics of that time it would be impossible
Nah, the army size wasn't the issue. IIRC, after accounting for local allies/mercenaries, he had literally like 100k men during the campaign going south down the Indus and Porus actually was a subject/ally after his war and actually fought alongside Alexander later. The problem was that the wars in India were harder for various reasons (Different army composition, monsoon season, etc.) and resulted in much higher casualties than most of the previous conquests. Though they would have adapted with time, Alex's army relied on a more-or-less irreplaceable core of Macedonian soldiers and officers who had been around since Philip's time, and campaigning through all of India with similar struggles would have eroded them away.. He had also punctured a lung and might have died soon anyway. The conquests up to that point were really only possible because they had no significant casualties whatsoever outside of bactria and transoxiana.
Even dismissing those issues, Tamil Nadu was and is a deathtrap and he probably wouldn't have had any more success there than any of the other great conquerors who tried it
well it's a real fricking mystery how people with fast ships and fricking telegraphs were able to unite a huge continent easier than medieval (or earlier) primitives
>Maurya empire
>rapid peak and rapid decline
>Pajeets ITT: IT WAS JUST LIKE ROME
>since antiquity
It was never unified until after the second anglo-sikh war.
You're acting like a dynasty being replaced by another one completely resets everything about a political entity and its culture, institutions, etc unless the polity happens to be in Europe.
The Qin dynasty in China lasted all of five minutes but was massively influential even if the Han dynasty is what really solidified what we know as "China". Alexander's empire also lasted all of five minutes but his successors spread Hellenic culture and institutions as far as India (Buddhist statuary is to this day directly descended from Greek sculpture).
Why should the Maurya be considered an insignificant blip? Just because modern Indians are the most easily mocked people in existence?
>Why should the Maurya be considered an insignificant blip
when shit has to be rediscovered by archeologists then yeah it's a blip. The Guptas are considered to be the classical India for a reason
>when shit has to be rediscovered by archaeologists
If that's your only criteria then almost everything non-archaeological that we know about pre-islamic Iran does not come from Iranian sources.
>they had literally zero impact on the world
>Buddhism doesn't matter because it went extinct in India
>also they only ruled over India for less than 40 years lmfao
>the qin dynasty literally doesn't matter
Your last point is completely irrelevant because I'm not claiming the Mauryan Empire was the most significant thing in Indian history. This isn't a binary.
>If that's your only criteria then almost everything non-archaeological that we know about pre-islamic Iran does not come from Iranian sources.
except nobody forgot the existence of those empires.
Because their enemies were highly literate societies, yeah. We only know about ancient India because those same cultures also wrote about India, despite Iranians and Indians obviously interacting for centuries before.
>Why should the Maurya be considered an insignificant blip?
Because they had literally zero impact on the world, let alone India. Hell, even the religion they promoted, Buddhism, went extinct in India soon after the Mauryan Empire collapsed. Also, they only ruled over most of India for less than 40 years lmfao.
Other rulers like the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, the British, or hell even the Portuguese had a much greater impact.
"India" is actually a fake country. It is not a country like Germany, France, Korea, or Japan. It is more of a loosely bound cultural-geographic area. A better analogy would be to think of India as Europe, Southeast Asia, or the Middle East. You should know that the Indian subcontinent is incredibly diverse and (other than their brown skin) the various tribes and ethnic groups have next to nothing in common.
India only became a nation thanks to the British, who unified hundreds of warring tribes, kingdoms, principalities, and ethnic groups into one polity under a common governance and administrative structure.
Prior to the British there was no concept of an "Indian nation", the natives of the subcontinent saw themselves as belonging to their ethnic group, village, and caste - no more. For example, an 18th century Punjabi Sikh would not consider himself part of an "Indian nation"; the idea that he shares the same national identity as a Tamil Hindu or a Bengali Muslim or an Assamese Christian would be laughable to him.
It was also the British (as well as elite British-educated Hindus) who took all the different strands of pagan folk religions and village cults throughout India and combined it into "Hinduism" - there was no concept of "Hinduism" prior to the British, religion in India was very localized and centered around village cults (think religion in modern-day China). Even the words "Hindu" and "Hinduism" comes from the British, you won't find these words in any ancient Indian texts or religious scriptures like the Vedas.
Sure, there were empires which at one point or another controlled most of the Indian subcontinent, like the (short-lived) Mauryans or the Delhi Sultanates or the Mughals, but this didn't lead to the creation of a national identity anymore than the Mongol Empire's rule over Asia created a pan-Asian identity.
>It is not a country like Germany, France, Korea, or Japan. It is more of a loosely bound cultural-geographic area
Black person, how exactly do you think any of those other countries were formed?
Recency bias duh.
All of those countries have (at least since the medieval era) one dominant ethnic group, one dominant religion, one dominant language, one dominant culture.
India doesn't have that. A Punjabi Sikh and a Tamil Hindu are further apart from each other than a Spaniard is from a Russian.
ah the classic "india doesnt exist" cope
when one says "Indian", there's only one people they refer to. It doesn't matter if the guy's a tamilian or a punjabi, the minute he speaks virtually every person on the planet can tell an indian is speaking
this same argument could be made against china but since china is completely unified now there's no point.
Except China has been one nation since the time of Rome. One language, one culture, one religion.
India only came to exist as a nation in 1947 thanks to us generous Anglos. Prior to that it was a British colony. Prior to that it was a bunch of warring states and ethnic groups. Prior to that it was the Mughals (foreign). Prior to that it was the Delhi Sultanates (also foreign). Prior to that it was a bunch of warring states and ethnicities. You get the idea.
>One language, one culture, one religion
>China before the last century
historylet
"one country" encompassing a stretch of land the size of saudi arabia
the region we now call china was split for most of its existence, just like india
yeah, so why do people like to pretend that india isn't just india?
>the region we now call china was split for most of its existence, just like india
Split politically, yes - but unified in ethnicity, language, culture, religion, and heritage.
Whereas India on the other hand WAS split on the basis of ethnicity, language, culture, religion, and heritage for most of its history.
This. A chink from Harbin (far north China) and a chink from Guangzhou (far south China) will speak the same language, follow the same religion, do the same cultural rites, hold similar set of values, etc.
Whereas a Pajeet from say, Haryana, would be radically different from a Pajeet in Tamil Nadu in virtually all of those aspects.
That's a modern feature, take any time before the start of the 20th century and you would have been dead wrong. Even today, local "dialects" of Mandarin can be utterly unintelligible to each other - hence why the government tries to push a neutral Putonghua on everybody for the last 70 years nonstop. India didn't feel the need to do that, so it didn't frick over its vernacular cultures like China decided to.
>one language
no
>one culture
This is entirely relative, and you could claim it for any geographically contiguous piece of Earth.
Also communists make it look like that in the present.
>one religion
Again with communism. This was not historically the case, and you can say the same for Europe, which was "one religion" under Christ for most of the past 1700 years despite being dozens of different countries.
The concept of a national identity is always one of cultural construction, political consolidation, and relativism in assigning a clear line of ingroup/outgroup despite such lines never existing in practice, or ignoring lesser or greater lines that could just as easily be chosen.
>the minute he speaks virtually every person on the planet can tell an indian is speaking
Yes, that ugly Indian accent is hard to miss.
It's hard to talk about Indian history since the concept of historiography didn't even exist in ancient or early medieval India. Hindus and Buddhists held to a cyclical belief in the nature of time (samsara) so they paid no attention to recording histories and writing chronicles of kings, emperors, battles, campaigns, peasant revolts, revolutions, civil wars, etc.
It was only with the Muslim conquests of India that historiography was introduced into the subcontinent. The Muslims, who believed in linear time like the other Abrahamic and Western religions, already had a rich historiographic tradition going back to the days of the compilation of the Sira and the Hadith. Historiography ('ilm at-tariix) was seen as one of the core sciences in the Islamic world.
This is why we know so much about dynasties like the Delhi Sultanates or the Mughals but next to nothing about the Guptas or the Mauryas.
>cyclical belief
>Linear time belief
sounds like cope. It's more the Greeks and those influenced by the Greeks who wrote histories. The only other civilization that had a historical tradition without coming into contact with the Greeks is China
>It's more the Greeks and those influenced by the Greeks who wrote histories.
Nope, Persians were also in contact with the Greeks, as were Medes, Celts, Scythians, and a host of other nations but they never adopted the science of historiography.
Islam only developed its own historiographic tradition initially due to religious reasons - the need to compile the acts and deeds of Muhammad, then later his companions, then later the Hadith.
All I've seen of Chinese history leads me to believe it's a mixture of royal court documents and magical fantasy myths. I would love to be corrected, though, someone tell me I'm a moron and explain why please.
The Greeks wrote *history*, which is far different and far more revelatory than an endless stream of name+place+date+action tables.
I'm not aware of this outside the West until recently (and Islam eventually), but also much of those histories are trapped behind linguistic walls.
The overwhelming majority of Chinese historical texts are untranslated but you must not have seen much at all to think it's just the equivalent of chronicles and fairy tales.
Sima Qian admits he doesnt know much about history before the 9th century BC. Thats when he starts dating
ehh, royal court documents are useful, in at least getting the basics down, like "which king followed whom".
See: the Song ducky's records of their Shang ancestors, or the "Yin" as everyone remembered them. Anyang was excavated and proved that the Song did well remembering their ancestors. (Also proved that everyone else was right that the Shang were a bunch of slaving, human-sacrificing tyrants. Zhou >>> Qin > Shang.)
Because was nothing worth conquering over there. Just a horde of 75 IQ short and scrawny browncels. No natural beauty, no resources, no grand cities, no monuments - just an ugly hot and humid jungle swamp.
Also, native Indian military technology was seriously primitive compared to its contemporaries. Literally just a horde of unarmored half-naked 'jeets charging at each other with bamboo clubs. No wonder they got dominated and conquered repeatedly by foreign powers.
What drives you to post garbage bait like this constantly? Did your grandma got scammed by an Indian or something?
Unironically, Britain should have held on to India and kept them enslaved to this day. Think of all the benefits:
>no more Pajeets mass immigrating to the West
>no more scam calls from Pajeets
>no more Pajeets stealing IPs from the West
>Pajeets would forcibly undergo basic potty training, for their own good
>a much cleaner and far more developed India, under strict British rule
>white female tourists would be much safer in India, as British authorities would castrate any Pajeet who even dared to look in their direction
>the hottest Pajeetas could be exported as sex slaves for white men
I can't argue against this, except for one thing. I look forward to getting a call from "Graham" or "Victoria" in a Welsh-sounding accent to tell me that my Microsoft providings have been compromised. I always enjoy our chats, and sometimes I sing to them. I live alone, as my wife died before I could meet her.
>How come no empire since antiquity managed to unify all of Europe until the muslims came?
could have gone down that way too