The industrial revolution and subsequent mechanization of industry and militaries needed a staging and testing ground. India and other countries of East Asia offered the best solution. For now, we provide one elementary picture of the course of things. We urge the readers of GreatGameIndia to construct others. One of the starting points of the industrial revolution was the mechanization of weaving. This resulted in a vast supply of cloth, which the European markets were unable to absorb. So the British and Dutch East India companies shipped them to India and started selling the cloth to the Indians. To control this monopoly, and the large profits, the British limited, and often prohibited, the production of cloth by domestic workers in India. And in order to sustain the massive demand for raw cotton, they formulated various treaties with the local rulers and forced the Indian farmers to grow only cotton. The increased production required more transport which resulted in the invention of the steam engine, which may be a second stage of the industrial revolution. The steam engines in turn required coal to run. India again provided vast tracks of forest lands and coal mines to sustain the demands of vast amounts of coal for the steam engines. The disgruntled and displaced farmers organized resistance on small scales to this plunder by the British. The British therefore had to equip their army with more accurate and deadly weapons to deal with the revolting population in India. This stage of the industrial revolution saw the mechanization of warfare replacing the traditional swords with self-loading rifles and machine guns. Once the military superiority over the Indian rulers was established, the British rulers started a large scale production of opium in the fertile land in the Gangetic belt between Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The steep rise in production of opium was then transported to China and used to create a large scale addiction of the Chinese population, to subjugate the Chinese Empire. The huge profits derived from the sale of opium were then used to destabilize many small European Kingdoms to achieve the ultimate objective of the owners of the East India Company – gaining an upper hand in geo-politics in theaters across the world.
The average Indian citizen is left with the impression that the religious wars of Europe are a relic of the past. This erroneous assumption is perhaps critical in preventing him from understanding the political reality of today. The fact is that while the wars of Europe provided motive for the exploitation of India in the past, they continue to do so even today. We hope this magazine will provide an insight into the sophistication and complexity of the manner in which these are carried out. The events of 11 September 2001 had a cataclysmic effect on several aspects of geo-politics. Through a complex series of linkages, which we shall discuss in the later issues, it has driven several key economic powers to bankruptcy. However, the geo-political players had not been sitting idle waiting for this to happen. From 1995 to 1998 NASA had launched a series of space explorations (using the space shuttle Columbia) that mapped the Earth in general, and India in particular, using three dimensional satellite imagery. One of the key objectives of this mission was the prediction of natural resource distributions under the earth.
Read this extensively researched report on the impact of geopolitics on the unique Indian traditional markets only in the Jul – Sept 2015 Inaugural Issue of GreatGameIndia – India’s only quarterly magazine on Geopolitics & International Affairs.
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