Pax Indica
The Golden Ages

I want to tell you about the afternoon I first sat with a spreadsheet of numbers that made no sense to me. It was a table of world GDP estimates, stretching from the year 1 CE to the present, put together by the economic historian Angus Maddison, and in that table, for nearly seventeen centuries in a row, one single column sat at the very top. Not Rome. Not China, though China ran close behind for stretches of it. India. Not for a decade, not for a good century, but for the overwhelming majority of the last two thousand years, right up until the year 1700, before the story I had grown up believing even properly begins.

I remember reading the figure and doing what I suspect you are doing right now, quietly distrusting it. Thirty two percent of the entire world’s economic output in the year 1 CE. A quarter of it, still, in the year 1000. Twenty four percent as late as 1700, on the eve of the century that would change everything. Source → I had to sit with that for a while, because it does not match the story I was handed in school, where India’s history before the British always felt like a preamble, a long, dim corridor leading toward the moment the “real” story, the story of empires and railways and independence, finally begins. That corridor, it turns out, was not dim at all. It was the best lit room in the house, and everyone else in the world knew it long before I did.

This is my attempt to walk you through it properly, the way I eventually walked myself through it, one thread at a time. Not as a triumphant list of achievements, because I want to be honest with you about the parts of this story that are more complicated than the headline number suggests. But as an actual explanation, grounded in real sources, of why for the better part of two millennia, gold, silk, scholars, and desperate refugees all found their way toward the same coastline, and why the world eventually went looking for a sea route here specifically, and nowhere else.

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Let me give you the shape of the number properly, because it deserves more than a single headline figure. According to Maddison’s estimates, published in his study Contours of the World Economy, India’s share of global GDP at purchasing power parity stood at roughly thirty two percent in the year 1 CE, and remained above twenty five percent for most of the following millennium. Source → By the late seventeenth century, under the last powerful decades of the Mughal empire, India, by some estimates, still produced close to a quarter of everything the entire world made in a year, at a moment when Aurangzeb’s treasury alone was reporting an annual revenue exceeding one hundred million pounds sterling. Source →

I want to pause here and be the kind of narrator who does not let a good story run ahead of the honest one. A number this large deserves scrutiny, and scholars who have looked closely at Maddison’s underlying methodology, including the economist Deepak Lal writing for the Cato Institute, point out something important, that India’s enormous share of world GDP in the year 1 CE was driven substantially by India’s equally enormous share of the world’s population at that time, roughly a third of all humans alive. Source → Per capita, in other words, an ordinary person in India in the year 1 CE was not dramatically richer than the world average, and in some estimates sat slightly below it. This is not a footnote I include to diminish the story. I include it because I think the real story is actually more interesting than the simplified version, and I would rather tell you the true one.

What I find genuinely remarkable is not that India was large. Many places were large. What I find remarkable is that this scale translated, decade after decade, dynasty after dynasty, into a level of manufacturing sophistication, in textiles, in metallurgy, in shipbuilding, that made Indian goods worth crossing oceans for. By the late seventeenth century, before the Industrial Revolution had even begun in earnest anywhere, India was arguably the largest manufacturing power on the planet, producing goods, particularly cotton textiles, that Europe simply could not yet match on its own. Source →

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Chapter 01

If you asked me to point to a single golden age, I would have to disappoint you, because there were several, separated by centuries, each with its own particular character, and I think it does the history a disservice to flatten them into one glowing, undifferentiated past.

The Mauryan foundation

The first peak I would show you sits in the fourth and third centuries BCE, under the Mauryan empire, when a unified administrative system stretching across most of the subcontinent, first under Chandragupta Maurya and then under Ashoka, created the kind of internal stability that allowed trade, agriculture, and taxation to function at a genuinely continental scale for the first time. This was the world Kautilya’s Arthashastra describes, an empire thinking systematically about statecraft, revenue, and administration in a way few contemporary civilisations attempted with the same rigour.

The Gupta classical age

The second peak, and the one most often called India’s classical golden age in the strictest sense, arrives under the Gupta dynasty from roughly the fourth to sixth centuries CE. This is the period when Aryabhata was working out early concepts in algebra and astronomy, when Kalidasa was writing the Sanskrit literature still studied today, and when Kumaragupta I founded Nalanda, the institution I will spend the next section on, because I think it deserves it. Chinese pilgrims travelling through India during and just after this period described a land of general prosperity, functioning courts, and remarkably light-handed governance for its time.

The Mughal peak

The third peak, and the one the raw economic numbers most emphatically support, arrives under the Mughal empire, particularly through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is the India that produced roughly a quarter of the entire world’s economic output, the India whose textiles clothed markets from East Africa to Southeast Asia, and whose court, under emperors like Akbar and later Aurangzeb, presided over an administrative and taxation system so effective that European trading companies arriving on Indian shores were, quite frankly, astonished by what they found already in place.

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Chapter 02

I have to tell you about Nalanda properly, because I think it is the single clearest piece of evidence that India’s centrality was never only about gold and textiles. Founded around 427 CE under the Gupta emperor Kumaragupta I, on land that had originally been a mango grove gifted to the Buddha centuries earlier, Nalanda grew into what is now widely described as one of the earliest residential universities on Earth. Source →

Picture what I picture when I imagine it. A walled campus of monasteries and lecture halls in what is now rural Bihar, housing, according to the seventh century Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, more than ten thousand students and close to two thousand teachers at its peak, all of them living, studying, and debating within the same walls. Source → The admissions process alone tells you something about the standards involved. Xuanzang recorded that out of every ten candidates who presented themselves for entry, only two or three were accepted, after facing rigorous oral examination by the gatekeeper scholars. Source → This was not a school people wandered into. It was a destination people spent years travelling toward, on foot, across mountain passes and deserts, on the strength of its reputation alone.

I find the two Chinese monks most associated with Nalanda, Xuanzang and Yijing, particularly moving to read about, because their accounts survive in extraordinary detail. Xuanzang studied at Nalanda for five years under the master Silabhadra, working through Yoga philosophy, logic, Sanskrit grammar, and more, before returning to China carrying six hundred and fifty seven Buddhist texts, seventy four of which he personally translated. Source → Yijing, who arrived roughly a generation later and stayed even longer, brought back four hundred Sanskrit texts of his own. Between just these two men, an entire library’s worth of Indian scholarship was carried physically across the Himalayas and rendered into Chinese, reshaping East Asian Buddhism for centuries afterward.

And Nalanda was never alone. Takshashila, further to the northwest, in what is now Pakistan, had already been drawing students from Central Asia, Persia, and even Greece for centuries before Nalanda’s founding, teaching subjects that ranged from medicine to military science to statecraft, the very tradition that Kautilya himself is traditionally associated with. Source → By the time you add Vikramshila and the other great monastic universities that grew up across Bihar and Bengal in Nalanda’s shadow, what emerges is not one exceptional institution, but an entire regional ecosystem of higher learning that had no real parallel anywhere else on Earth at the time.

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Chapter 03

Before I take you to the refugees, I want to show you something smaller than a university and larger, in the end, than almost anything else in this story. I want to show you a symbol shaped like an oval, meaning nothing, that started in Indian mathematical texts and ended up underneath every calculation the modern world now runs on.

Indian mathematicians, building on centuries of earlier work and refined explicitly in the writings of Brahmagupta in the seventh century CE, were the first to treat zero not merely as an absence, a blank space on a counting board, but as a genuine number in its own right, one that could be added, subtracted, and reasoned about using its own formal rules. Source → Paired with India’s positional decimal system, the same nine digits and a zero that you are reading right now, this was a genuinely different way of representing quantity than anything the Roman, Greek, or Babylonian traditions had produced, and it made complex arithmetic dramatically simpler to perform.

I find the next leg of this journey almost as interesting as the invention itself, because it shows exactly how ideas moved along the same trade networks I have already described. In the early ninth century, the Persian mathematician Al-Khwarizmi, working at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, studied Brahmagupta’s texts directly and wrote a treatise whose Latin title translates roughly to “Al-Khwarizmi Concerning the Hindu Art of Reckoning,” explicitly crediting the system’s origin to Indian scholars. Source → The Arabic word for zero, sifr, meaning empty, is a direct translation of the Sanskrit shunya, and that single Arabic word is the distant ancestor of both the English word cipher and the English word zero itself. Source →

I like sitting with the sheer distance this idea travelled. A number invented to describe nothing, worked out by mathematicians somewhere in the Indian subcontinent, carried west by scholars in Baghdad, translated into Latin by monks in Spain and Sicily, and finally handed to European merchants by an Italian who never stopped calling it, correctly, an Indian invention. Every ledger, every piece of software, every bank balance you have ever seen written down owes its basic grammar to that one act of intellectual generosity, sent quietly westward along the same roads that carried silk and pepper.

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Chapter 04

Here is the part of this story I think gets told the least, and it is the part I find most moving personally. For most of the last two thousand years, when I look at who was actually moving toward the Indian subcontinent, I do not find only conquerors and traders. I find refugees, people fleeing persecution elsewhere in the world, who looked at the map and decided that India was where safety lay.

The Parsis of Sanjan

The story I keep coming back to is the Parsi migration. Following the Arab conquest of Sassanid Persia in the seventh century, and the sustained religious persecution of Zoroastrians that followed under successive Islamic rulers, waves of Zoroastrian refugees began making their way across the Arabian Sea to the western coast of India, arriving in Gujarat sometime between the eighth and tenth centuries CE. Source → The traditional account, preserved in a sixteenth century epic poem called the Qissa-i Sanjan, tells of a local Hindu king, Jadi Rana, who agreed to shelter the new arrivals on the condition that they explain their faith, adopt the Gujarati language, have their women wear the local sari, and surrender their weapons. Source → There is a lovely detail in the legend, that the king sent the refugees a bowl filled to the brim with milk, signalling his kingdom was already full, and the Zoroastrian elder responded by stirring a spoonful of sugar into it without spilling a drop, promising that his people would sweeten the land without displacing anyone already there.

I think about that image often, because it is such a precise metaphor for what actually happened. The Parsi community that grew from those first arrivals never tried to dominate or convert. It became, instead, one of the most economically influential minority communities in Indian history, producing industrialists like Jamsetji Tata, whose descendants built one of India’s largest industrial houses centuries later, and reformers who shaped Bombay’s very physical landscape through their philanthropy. Source → Today, a majority of the world’s remaining Zoroastrian population lives in India, the descendants of people who fled here because nowhere else offered them the space to survive.

The Jews of Kerala and the Christians of Malabar

The Parsis were not the first, and they were not the last. Along India’s southwestern coast, Jewish communities trace their arrival to India back even further, some traditions holding that Jewish traders and refugees settled around Cochin as early as the first centuries of the Common Era, well before the Parsi migration, building synagogues that still stand today and blending seamlessly enough into local life that they came to speak Malayalam as their first language. Christian communities along the same Malabar coast trace their own origins to a similarly ancient arrival, associated in tradition with the apostle Thomas himself, making India home to one of the oldest continuous Christian populations anywhere outside the Middle East.

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Chapter 05

I want to take you back to the first century CE, to a Roman senator and natural historian named Pliny the Elder, sitting somewhere in the imperial capital, deeply irritated about a trade deficit. In his Natural History, Pliny complains bitterly about the volume of Roman gold flowing eastward to India in exchange for pepper, gemstones, and fine textiles, goods Roman elites apparently could not resist buying no matter the cost. His complaint survives as some of the clearest ancient testimony we have to just how central Indian ports like Muziris and Barygaza already were to the global economy of his era, drawing Roman currency across an entire ocean in exchange for luxuries the Roman world simply could not produce for itself.

This reputation, of a land whose wealth seemed almost bottomless, only deepened over the following centuries. By the time Islamic and later European traders were writing about India, the phrase that kept recurring, translated loosely across many languages, amounted to the same idea, sone ki chidiya, the golden bird, a land so wealthy that merchants from Arabia, Persia, China, and eventually Europe organised entire trading expeditions around the simple fact of reaching it. Textiles from Bengal and Gujarat, spices from the Malabar coast, gemstones from across the subcontinent, all of it moved outward along the same maritime and overland networks I have written about elsewhere on this site, with India functioning not as one stop among many, but as the essential hub the entire system was organised around.

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Chapter 06

I have told the story elsewhere on this site of how the fall of Constantinople in 1453 severed Europe’s secure overland access to Asian trade, and how that single event sent Portuguese and Spanish ships hunting for a sea route east, a search that produced Bartolomeu Dias rounding Africa in 1488, Columbus stumbling onto the Americas in 1492 while trying to sail west to the same destination, and finally Vasco da Gama landing at Calicut in 1498, the first European to reach India by sea. I will not repeat that whole story here, but I do want to underline the piece of it most relevant to everything I have just told you.

None of those voyages were undertaken in search of an unknown, mysterious land. They were undertaken in search of a specific, famous, extraordinarily wealthy destination that European merchants, priests, and monarchs had been hearing about for over a thousand years, through Roman accounts, through Arab traders, through the Silk Route’s overland whispers. When da Gama’s small fleet finally reached Calicut, the reputation is precisely what he was chasing. The golden bird was not a myth Europe discovered by accident. It was a reputation, built over seventeen centuries of trade, that finally pulled an entire continent’s worth of ambition across an ocean to go and see it for themselves.

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I promised you at the start that I would not let this become a triumphant list, so let me hold to that. The golden age framing, as seductive as it is, carries real risks when it hardens into political mythology rather than history. Scholars like Deepak Lal have pushed back specifically against the version of this story that claims per capita prosperity, not merely aggregate output, was dramatically higher under early Indian rule than under everything that followed, pointing out that Maddison’s own figures show per capita income growing only slowly across most of the two millennia in question, Hindu, Muslim, and British periods alike, with the most dramatic gains actually arriving only after independence. Source →

I also want to be honest that the causes of India’s eventual relative decline, from twenty four percent of world GDP in 1700 to barely four percent by 1950, are genuinely contested among historians, and I do not think the honest version of this story lets any single explanation, whether that is colonial extraction, internal political fragmentation after Aurangzeb’s death, or the simple fact that the rest of the world industrialised while India’s economy did not, carry the entire weight alone. The real explanation almost certainly involves all three, in proportions historians still argue about today.

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What stays with me, after all this reading, is not the GDP percentages, even though they are what first pulled me in. It is the pattern underneath them. A civilisation that built institutions like Nalanda not to hoard knowledge but to host it, drawing ten thousand strangers a generation across mountain ranges to study under its teachers. A civilisation that, again and again, when the rest of the world produced people running from persecution, became the place they ran toward, and largely let them stay as themselves. A civilisation whose reputation for wealth was strong enough, honest enough, and old enough that it eventually reordered the maritime ambitions of an entire continent an ocean away.

I do not think Pax Indica needs the exaggerated version of its own history to be worth telling. I think the real version, gold flowing in on the honest strength of goods the world actually wanted, scholars walking for months because the teaching here was worth the walk, refugees choosing this coastline because it was, more often than most places in the ancient and medieval world, willing to let them stay, is already the more remarkable story.