Question, how do (if they have any) India’s cycles work?
Edit: And if they did have cycles, did Islamic conquest derail them?
They were, in their own way, derailed much earlier than that. As I wrote, somewhat tangentially, when we discussed Alexander recently:
The obvious model for comparison [when it comes to an ATL triumph of Alexander] would be the Maurya monarchy in India, which was founded around the same time, and whose originator -- Chandragupta -- was essentially the Alexander of India. Considering Alexander's place in the macro-historical model, this also answers the what-if of the "Napoleon victory scenario", because that one occupied that same place in history as well. It's an empire that remakes its world-system, but which is established too early to be able to properly "collapse" into a true universal state.
India is an example of what happens when an Alexander, or a Napoleon, triumphs. It is the only known example of this happening. That it
can happen is no surprise: macro-history shows us the most likely course of events, the reasonably plausible sequences of developments that will -- all things being equal -- happen in the great majority of instances. But outliers exist. There are "long shot" outcomes that will very rarely happen... but still do sometimes happen!
Now, Chandragupta is said to have physically witnessed Alexander in India, when he was a young fellow. It's conceivable that so clear and so conveniently
observable an example gave him an advantage: an unmatched free lesson in what correct things to do, and what pitfalls to avoid. Perhaps that's why he pulled off what Alexander and Napoleon did not: he triumphed. He outcompeted his enemies. And that is not what usually happens. This kind of man, in all other known cases, either lost to his accumulated enemies or otherwise perished before stabilising his conquests. As did Napoleon, as did Alexander, as did Fuchai of Wu (the Chinese instance of this "type"). This means that in winning, Chandragupta pulled Indian history onto a path less travelled.
To provide some context: Indian history is not the history of the Indus Valley civilisation. That culture is to India, perhaps, what the Minoans were to Greece. A "previous inhabitant" of a part of the broader region, who left a cultural legacy (and to some extent a genetic one), but whose civilisational life did truly terminate; and who was supplanted by the new inhabitants. (In both cases, the new inhabitants were Indo-European invaders.)
The persons involved have been lost to time, except in the vaguest of mythologised references, so little can be said about the founder-king (i.e. the "Charlemagne") of India; except that the ancient structuring of society (that goes back to the Vedic days) very expressly prioritises the priestly class-- which might lead us to suspect that it was probably a priest-king of some sort. That the idea of an idealised "unified realm" of these Indo-Europeans very much existed is not in doubt, however. The name of it is
Aryavarta. That is: "Land of the Aryans".
Like Post-Carolingian Europe (...and like the petty realms of the Hellenic Dark Age; and like the competing fiefs of deeply ancient China after the mythologised first Son of Heaven...), Aryavarta fell apart into multiple kingdoms that competed in their own world-system. One that didn't fully extend into South India, by the way. The heartland of the Aryans was always the Gangetic plain. (And this is still the sacred artery of Indian culture, the almost literal life blood of the civilisation.)
India had its own counterpart to the Reformation. You know of its fruits, and of its foremost figure. Siddharta Gautama, who is called the Buddha. (Jainism, lesser-known, is another offshoot of the same development.) And as with any such evolution of religious and intellectual thought, there was a reaction: the final closure of the Vedic legacy-- the "closing of the Vedas", and the formalisation of the leading ideas and doctrines that (at least on the fundamental level) still define Hinduism as we know it now.
And then, in the wake of this great change, came new states. New, more ambitious realms, with more ambitious rulers. There came intellectual schools, new philosophies. Note that just as Alexander was the literal student of Aristotle (and thus, in a very meaningful way, a product of the Sokratic revolution in Greek thinking), and just as Napoleon was a product of the Enlightenment philosophies, Chandragupta Maurya was the student of the great Indian polymath of that age; Chanakya.
So, up until that point, Indian history fits the expected model quite perfectly. Things happened just as we might expect them to happen. But then... a step to the side. Into the unknown. We can easily extrapolate what might have happened, if Chandragupta had failed. The Maurya Empire would be stillborn, but there would be no return to the old regime of states like the more modest Nanda Empire that came before. The ambition of kings would be even greater now, with the example of Chandragupta before them. And the warring states of India would compete fiercely-- as did those of China, as did those of the Hellenistic world, as did the competing states in China. Three centuries of war, during which the new philosophies of the age would develop into greater extremes. And ultimately... one great winner. Perhaps a state arising from (to the Aryans!) "semi-barbarian" Southern India would have arisen to subjugate them all, and establish the Caesar of India almost concurrently with the lifetime of the actual Caesar in Rome.
But that did not happen.
Instead, India -- having been steered off the beaten path -- ended up in a cycle that isn't entirely unlike what happened in China after the Mongols. There's still a discernable pattern, but it's a holding pattern. Competing states, giving way to a hegemon, which collapses, giving way to competing states again, which again produce a hegemonic power... and with stunning regularity! The Indian "holding pattern" is different from the Chinese one, but it very much seems (comparing also to post-Mongol Russia) that
any true derailment of a civilisation ends up putting it into some kind of holding pattern.
What is interesting is that the states of Southern India were, by this time, integrated into the cultural whole. Chandragupta and his unmatched grandson Ashoka never managed to militarily subdue those regions, but the cultural evolution of the Indian subcontinent was towards unity. Indeed, the realms of Southern India soon became true contenders in the hegemonic contest.
This established (and culturally fruitful but politically recursive) pattern of Indian history was not, in fact, derailed by the Muslims, but co-opted by it. The Delthi Sultanate simply become the latest in the cycle of hegemonic powers, before weakening into a shell of its former self by the time they got to the 1390s, thus producing another period of inter-state competition. But thereafter with Muslim rulers as another gaggle of contenders in the mix. And not an unskilled faction, either, because two centuries later, the Mughals had made themselves the great hegemons in the North, whereas the South could not coalesce against them. Which in turn lasted until the early 1700s, when Marathas supplanted them very rapidly... only to quickly fall into an ineffective confederation, thus promising another period of division...
But then
the Fire Nation attacked Britain showed up.
And you know how that turns out. All previous contenders were kicked aside, and Britain unified the subcontinent under its aegis. A process completed by the mid-19th century. Any period of contention between the Indian states was very effectively cut short, and the British Raj was more effective a hegemonic structure than any predecessor had been. After a century of unity under this foreign rule, independence resulted in a new break-up... of sorts. The outlying Muslim regions split off. But really, they cannot be said to have ever truly been culturally unified with India as a civilisation. And the subcontinent itself remained united. That legacy
lasted.
Viewed in this way, we must consider the possibility that -- contrary to all leftist anti-colonial diatribes -- Britain actually
unfucked India. Britain, just by being there, appears to have
broken the holding pattern. India may now resume its historical development, albeit unknown in what specific way it will do so.
My personal expectation is that we're coming up on a cultural re-invention of India, and one that is rather markedly "Hindu" in its manifestations. The "new India" -- the unified India -- that Britain has left behind must complete its own re-making, and I think they will do this by... well, "cleansing" themselves of the ultimately foreign Muslim element. I don't particularly expect virulent anti-Buddhism, but Hinduism will be taking the lead.
Whether the resulting cultural sphere politically falls apart into warring states again, or produces a Universal Empire as if picking up where it left off so long ago, or even goes all the way back and births its own "second Charlemagne-type" to
fully begin again as wholly new incarnation of itself... I cannot say. There is no precedent for this. But from 200 BC to AD 1850 -- a whopping
two millennia of time -- India was moving in a circle, historically speaking. Always moving, and in a way always dynamic, but never getting to a new place. Always treading the same ground again, just in new sandals.
But now, that is over. India is
going places again.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
One thing I think the Macro-historical analysis you're pushing is lacking in is accounting for geography, which has massive influences on civilizations and the people living there. We know people adapt over time to the geography they find themselves in, and likewise geography influences people's culture.
In China's case, it makes perfect sense that they're fall back together while Rome would not, and that lies in Geography. Rome's empire, as expansive as it was, also featured many major natural geographic barriers and divisions that made a unifying central Empire an unusual feature of that region's civilizations. The Alps, Carpathians, and Pyrenees are all major mountains that divide Europe, and then you have the Bosporus Strait dividing Europe from Asia minor, the harsher deserts dividing the Middle East's inhabitable regions and the Sini acting as a major choke point between Asia and Africa. Add in the major rivers of Europe that provide multiple route to the sea and, well, the Mediterranean world is just naturally heavily divided in a way that makes conquest and central control very difficult and tends to lead to multiple competing core regions that end up close to equal. We see that throughout the history of the region: Egypt vs Babylon vs Assyria. Greece vs Persia. Rome vs All Comers.
Meanwhile the geography of China lends itself much more to centralized civilization there with no real competing regions for competing peer civilizations. It's much easier to unify the core of China from a geographical perspective and once you have that core, there's no actual peer powers, just outlying civilizations that while they can be annoying and China cannot actually conquer them, also cannot actually threaten the Chinese core regions due to the massive disparity of population and wealth. The Qing and Yuan do represent outside conquest, but are also noted as situations where in effect the Chinese civilization in effect absorbed the conquerors. Try as they might the Mongols and Manchu could not and did not change the Han Chinese civilization, rather they had to adopt Han ways of ruling and organizing in order to rule China. It is quite telling the one time an actual threat to Chinese Civilizational dominance arose in the region was when China was in a broken up period... and it took a LONG series of negatives and near perfect play by the Japanese to even threaten it (and even then it's doubtful the Japanese could have actually pacified and conquered China in the long term).
This wealth and power is also why the Chinese ended up with an isolationist mindset. There was no nearby trade worthwhile aside maybe certain spices from Indonesia... and those as often didn't come in via Chinese trade but via Vietnam. Meanwhile the Eurasian Steppe was long the home of hostile raiders (the Mongols were the most successful but they were hardly the first or, as you noted concerning the Machu the last) meaning that to the Chinese those lands were off limits and worthless anyway, a danger to be kept away via fortifications rather than exploited, and of course what is now western China is a mountainous desert and wasteland that form a major natural barrier even to this day.
Meanwhile the only peer civilization region to China that is geographically proximate is India... and between India and China stand the worlds tallest mountains which basically form a nigh impenetrable barrier between the two civilizational cores that meant there was no competition between them and limited cultural exchange. Oh, and the jungles of SE Asia limited the long way round between them.
Basically, from a geographical standpoint China's civilizational core is almost as securely isolated as one can be while not being on a different continent or on an island, and because of that geography it leads to different mindsets and civilizational development.
I very much agree with your observations here! It's not true, however, that macro-history ignores such factors. On the contrary, Spengler devotes extended sections to the influence of geography (and other material circumstances) on the character of any given culture, and Toynbee was even more attentive to this matter. Neither have I, minor latter-day observer that I am, neglected to highlight this matter-- including repeatedly in this thread. In fact, I've said much the same that you say here, although typically as one of multiple points in any given post; so your observations here add some detail that I surely neglected to mention at times.