Covid-19’s deepest impact will not be felt in the US or Europe, but in India — I have two rules of thumb when I think about global history. They’re fairly simple rules. The first is that human societies are fundamentally similar because they are made of humans. You can understand aspects of one society through the lens of the other. When I look at pictures of…

Musings on the Kamasutra, causality and the properties of light — In my last post, The Physics of History?, I made the case that all of history is essentially a side-act to the much grander process of energy and matter moving from less random to more random configurations. …

A tale of war, colonisation, and rather dubious legality — In Parts I & II of this series, I discussed the fractious geopolitical history of the Himalayas. Part III. Crouching Dragon, Hidden Elephant How on earth did the modern Republic of India get embroiled in conflict in the Himalayas? After all, subcontinental culture, while it expresses a spiritual and romantic interest in the mountains, never got…

A tale of war, colonisation, and rather dubious legality — Part I: Dramatis Personae Far from being eternally peaceful pilgrimage sites, the Himalayas have seen centuries of brutal conflict, religious divides, wily entrepreneurship, and intellectual and cultural flourishing on par with any place in the world. …

The Deeper Causes of Imperial Collapse in Classical India — How does one explain the collapse of polities that have been around for hundreds of years? When Edward Gibbon tried to answer this in relation to the Roman Empire in his astounding 18th century History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he put it in starkly anthropocentric…

What social evolution tells us about the rise and fall of Indian monarchies — When, in 1971, the privy purses of over 500 potentates were abolished by Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of the Republic of India, few bothered to shed a tear. After all, the princes had not exactly built up a great reputation, being famous globally for little more than their expensive cars…

Why most ancient Indian states tended to be kingdoms, and how republics made a comeback — By the 7th century BCE, the warring tribes and clans in Punjab, mentioned in the Rig Veda, had penetrated deep into the Gangetic Plains. Over the last few hundred years, the thick jungles had been cleared with iron tools and fire. The tribal janapadas turned into large, competing mahajanapadas .The…

Mathematical Insights on the cyclical flow of history — The concept of cyclical time, of eras, of patterns repeating themselves, is an integral part of many Indian religious traditions, from Buddhism to Hinduism. But this observation is not unique to the Indian subcontinent. …

What explains the Great Divergence between Indian and foreign military powers? — In the 10th and 11th centuries, Europe was very much the backwater of the civilised world. In the Middle East, the Islamic Golden Age of scientific innovation was reaching a crescendo with advances in everything from algebra to the properties of light. …