It wasn't universally due to lack of interest in guns (although in the Qing case, they actually did pull back on the use of firearms due to how poorly both the Ming Dynasty and Dzungar Mongols fared with the matchlock weapons of that era against strategic deployment of Qing horseback archery). India had an enormous arms manufacturing industry that included usage of rocket artillery, Timur absolutely loved using cannons, Ottoman matchlocks were considered the best in the world and even exported to China from the 1500s onward.

It wasn't the lack of arms or interest in arms, it was the lack of development of the sciences which had to flow through the patronage of those in authority. Britain had Newton and Newton co-invented calculus. The invention of the steam engine motivated creation of better machinery and higher precision manufacturing that by the Victorian Era could not be matched by Chinese or Indian workshops. The wealthy gentleman scientist and natural philosopher culture that developed the galvanic pile, the pressure cooker, astronomical telescopes, and the microscope was not something that could develop organically in these Eastern countries due to the political makeup of these empires (largely driven by descendants of nomadic warlords)

> The invention of the steam engine motivated creation of better machinery

https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus... See this for why the steam engine was invented where it was.

> The invention of the steam engine motivated creation of better machinery and higher precision manufacturing that by the Victorian Era could not be matched by Chinese or Indian workshops

By the Victorian Era India, at least, had substantially de-industrialized due to colonial policy.

> The wealthy gentleman scientist and natural philosopher culture that developed the galvanic pile, the pressure cooker, astronomical telescopes, and the microscope was not something that could develop organically in these Eastern countries

Why did they have to develop them organically? Europeans didn't invent gunpowder or algebra or the counting system.

I think Bill Bryson writes about this much better than I can, but in short, European political fragmentation and nascent capitalism meant that educated polymaths could offer their services to different landed aristocratic or royal patrons. Brahe and Kepler fall into those categories. So does Gauss and Euler. The creation of the Royal Society in 1660 created the venue for exploring Natural Philosophy... what ultimately became "science". It was in this atmosphere that Newton was able to publish the Principia (1687)

It's hard for us to understand this today, but science as we know it did not really exist back then in either England or anywhere else.

The invention of gunpowder in China came about from searching for an elixer of immortality. The original book on Al-Jabr was written for practical purposes in the 9th century, around the time when the foremost scholars of the Islamic Age (See Al Ghazali) would argue that ascribing the origin of the universe to a chain of cause and effect rather than the direct action of God was a form of atheism and therefore apostasy.

Europe wasn't really any better in this regards even in the 17th century. Isaac Newton himself spent the vast majority of his career working on alchemy and searching for the Philosopher Stone which he believed was harbored in the Book of Revelations.

It took decades, and the generation after Isaac Newton to begin to adopt the philosophy that many natural phenomena could be ascribed to mechanical laws (like the physics of Newton), and it's from that philosophical foundation that led to the invention of "science"

That they lost control to some guys that had to travel around entire Africa to get there shows how incompetent and backwards thinking they were. It would be impossible to conquer 100m happy and productive people with just 1000 people even if the 1000 had a bit better guns, especially since the 100m happy and productive people easily could just reproduce the new modern guns.

That India and China were so easy to conquer for Europeans shows the rot in those societies, both in refusing to adopting the superior European technology and by continuing to oppress their own people to such a degree that their people didn't really care much about a foreign power replacing their old tyrants.

> That India and China were so easy to conquer for Europeans shows the rot in those societies

Agree. But that's exactly my point: they were prosperous pre-colonization. The point at which this thread started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50004651 argues that these places were incapable of creating prosperity and needed Europeans to teach them. That is simply incorrect and kind of racist.

They faltered at the wrong point in history and got colonized (or in China's case, merely bossed around - if that's inaccurate, sorry I'm not strong on Chinese history). As a result they lost out on a century of industrial, economic, cultural, and social growth and reform that happened in Europe.

You only have to look at Japan - never colonized, adopted Western technology and ideas organically, is economically advanced today - to see the counterfactual.

Technically India and China were both conquered by Central Asian Warlord societies before Europeans arrived. In India's case by the descendants of Timur, and in China's case due to severe political and environmental issues at the end of the Ming Dynasty. These warlords arguably had even fewer resources and greater militarism than later European conquerors

That was centuries before European colonization began. They recovered, and by the 18th century, were the most prosperous, productive regions of the world. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50009485

Well my point was in a way, the warlords were still in charge, even though they adopted the cultures of the peoples they conquered.

Although in a sense, Great Britain itself is not dissimilar in that it was conquered by Normans (descendants of quasinomadic Vikings)

I see your point, yeah they would manage without others going in and bossing them around. They had everything in place to transition to a modern society unlike some of the less developed parts of the world, so Europeans meddling with them didn't really help.

They would likely follow a similar path as Russia or Japan, Russia is pretty far from western Europe already so ideas took longer to get there so they modernized much later, and we can see how that turned out. Russia being so oppressive and rotten were very vulnerable to any sort of modern ideology and fell to communism, that sort of transition was inevitable for these countries, Russia tried to delay it and it was forced upon them, Japan saw the writing on the wall and made the transition deliberately etc.