[I have edited a few parts of this post after publication, mostly based on feedback by historian Anton Howes. Addenda are between brackets.]

History is gigantic along multiple dimensions, so it’s hardly surprising that there are countless combinations of time and place that you or I have never considered. Occasionally, though, I come across a blindspot that is perplexing: an event that seems significant, but that almost no one seems to be thinking about.

The proto-industrialized period of Bengal is one such blindspot. I’m guessing that, unless you come from South Asia or are a really big history nerd, you probably have no idea what I even mean by “the proto-industrialized period of Bengal.”

We’ll clarify everything later in the post, but for now, you should know that:

• Bengal is a region of the Indian subcontinent, shared today between India and Bangladesh.

• Proto-industrialization is an economic phenomenon in which a pre-industrial society produces a lot of crafts, such as textiles, which it sells to external markets. It is often considered to be a precursor to industrialization.

• The proto-industrialized period of Bengal refers to the time before British colonization, roughly from 1600 to 1750. Bengal was then a part of the Mughal Empire, and it had a prosperous craft-based economy.

This was a period of great wealth: Bengal was responsible for most of India’s GDP, which was itself about 25% of the world’s economy. The Mughal emperors called it “the Paradise of Nations.”

Yet, despite this high level of economic development, Bengal didn’t industrialize. The only country that ever did without copying another was Great Britain, starting around 1760. This was a momentous event that changed history forever, which is why we call it the Industrial Revolution.

Why didn’t that happen in Bengal instead?

This seems like an important question for people who, like me, are interested in the history of progress. But to my knowledge, very little popular content has been written about proto-industrialized Bengal. Sure, if you dig enough, you’ll find some scholarly articles and specialized books. But digestible introductions are almost nonexistent outside of Wikipedia. The subreddit r/AskHistorians, for instance, has at least four relevant questions about pre-colonization Bengal (here, here, here, and most recently here), but none of them has received a single answer yet.

(If you go back eight years in the r/AskHistorians archives, there was some discussion of how Bengal went from rich to poor, which is topical, but more about what came after the proto-industrialized period, i.e. British colonization. We’ll cover the involvement of Britain later in the post.)

I’m on record for saying that there should be a good blog post about Bengali proto-industrialization. What you’re reading … is probably not that blog post. I am merely an amateur historian, and this post is the result of only a few weeks of research. I’ve only scratched the surface.

Still, if you’re like me, the history of the Indian subcontinent in general is a giant blindspot, and even an amateur introduction to Bengali history will be helpful. If it inspires people to think about industrialization and progress beyond the way they happened in Europe, that’ll be a success. (And if you spot any errors, let me know and I’ll fix them!)

The rest of this post contains four parts: (I) some context about Bengal, (II) a description of the proto-industrialized period, (III) the European colonization and subsequent deindustrialization, and (IV) a conclusion with some speculative thoughts. It’s a bit long, but there are a lot of pictures.

Readers from South Asia will forgive me for saying that most other people are confused by the word “Bengal.” I certainly used to be. Is Bengal a country? A region? A people? A bay? A cat breed? A subspecies of tiger? All of the above?

The answer is something like “a geopolitical, cultural and historical region of the Indian subcontinent, in and around the Ganges delta, just north of the Bay of Bengal.”

Basically, it’s the homeland of the Bengali people, who speak the Bengali language. At certain points in history, the Bengali people formed independent countries, such as the Pala Empire a thousand years ago, or the Bengal Sultanate from 1352 to 1576. At other points, the Bengali people were incorporated into larger foreign-controlled countries, such as the Mughal Empire and the British Empire.

Today, to confuse everyone, Bengal is both an independent country and part of a larger country. This is the result of the Partition of India, a complicated event that happened in 1947, when British India became independent. The colony was split into two countries: the Hindu-majority Dominion of India, and the Muslim-majority Dominion of Pakistan. Bengal had people of both religions, so it was partitioned into West and East Bengal.

West Bengal was the Hindu region, and eventually became a state in the Republic of India, with its capital at Kolkata (or Calcutta). East Bengal was Muslim, and was a province of Pakistan, which was awkward because most of Pakistan was far away, on the other side of India. The Pakistani Bengalis wanted self-determination, and so there was a war between the two Pakistans, including a genocide inflicted on the East by the West, and then the People’s Republic of Bangladesh was created in 1971-72, with its capital at Dhaka (or Dacca).

And so today there’s an independent Bengali country, mostly Muslim, called Bangladesh (which literally means “Bengali country” in Bengali); and a non-independent Bengali country, mostly Hindu, called West Bengal. They have their cultural differences, of course, but in a sense they’re still the same people. And they’re a big people: worldwide, there are about 300 million Bengalis. Their language is the seventh-most spoken in the world. Kind of absurd that I know so little about them.

The reason there are so many Bengalis is that Bengal is a naturally rich region. The Ganges delta is the largest river delta in the world, and it’s a wonderful place to practice agriculture. It looks like this:

A fertile land means a large population, and a large population, to a first approximation, means wealth. Bengal was an important place from antiquity onwards; it traded far and wide, including with the Arabs, which led to the spread of Islam. It tended to become the richest part of whatever Indian dynasty incorporated it into its empire.

This happened in 1576 with the Mughals, a Muslim dynasty of Central Asian origin who ruled most of India from the northwest, in Agra and Delhi. Bengal was the largest, most populated, and wealthiest subah (province) of the Mughal Empire.

The Mughals ruled Bengal directly until 1717, and then nominally during a period of quasi-independence under the Nawabs (governors) of Bengal. That lasted until 1757, when the British began the process of taking over. The period from about 1600 to 1750 was, in many ways, the golden age of Bengal. It was the Paradise of Nations. It was beginning to industrialize. It was the center of the world.

What did that look like?

A simplified model of society evolution goes: hunter-gatherers → subsistence farmers → industrial laborers. If you’re reading this, you’re almost certainly living in a society that has reached the industrial stage. But the vast majority of complex societies in history were stuck at the agrarian stage for thousands of years.

Agrarian and industrial societies look very different. In an agrarian society, most people are busy growing their own food, and typically give their surplus (as tax) to a small elite of nobles and priests, whose lifestyle is supported by a small middle class of merchants and craftsmen. In an industrial society, techniques for harnessing energy and manufacturing goods allow agricultural and material production to skyrocket, leading to a proportionally small class of farmers and a large class of industrial laborers, replacing craftsmen.

The proto-industrial society is a transition stage between the two. Most of the society is still agrarian, but farmers become able to focus less on growing food and more on cash crops that can be sold for profit. At the same time, craftsmen rise in importance: despite the lack of industrialization hallmarks such as machine tools or fossil fuels, the production of crafts — textiles, pottery, ships, metalwork, etc. — begins taking a larger place in the local economy. Notably, many of these crafts are intended for export, bringing further wealth into the proto-industrialized region.

Proto-industrialization is a relatively recent concept and a point of debate for economic historians,

but it seems to have happened in many regions of Europe in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution. It has also been identified in China during the Song dynasty (960-1279) and, of course, in Mughal India.

A big reason why I wrote this post is that I couldn’t find a clear picture of what proto-industrialization may have looked like outside of Europe. The sources that focus on economic history tend just throw numbers at you, which is fine, but doesn’t really create a coherent view of the place.

Still, numbers are important, so let me throw them at you in turn:

• Bengal as a whole had about 30 million people in 1769 (before the great famine of 1770), more than either Great Britain or France.

• Dhaka, the Bengali capital, had more than a million inhabitants in the 1600s and 1700s, making it one of the largest cities worldwide. [ADDENDUM: This is an enormous figure with no clear source, so we should probably be skeptical. Perhaps there were a million people, but spread out over a large area.]

• Dhaka also had no less than 80,000 skilled textile weavers.

• There was a large shipbuilding industry; the total tonnage of ships built in Bengal was 223,250 tons per year, compared to 23,061 for the North American colonies in 1769-71.

• A large proportion (40%) of Dutch imports from Asia came singlehandedly from Bengal, including 50% of textiles and 80% of silk.

• Until 1750, India as a whole produced about 25% of the world’s industrial output (that number was only 2% in 1900)

  and had a larger GDP than either China or Europe.

So, the numbers show that Bengal had a large population and a strong economy. But what exactly did it produce?

The most important goods were textiles: cotton, jute, and silk, to which we can add indigo dye. The raw materials were grown locally and then transformed into usable fabric by weavers. Cotton in particular was processed in a number of ways. The most famous cotton textile was muslin, a very light cloth that became hugely popular in Europe. It was reportedly made in a complex 16-step process that is now lost.

Beyond textiles, Bengal also grew several other cash crops. Opium, sugarcane, tobacco, and pepper were some of the big ones. It also, of course, grew food, notably a lot of rice (some of which was exported). During the Mughal period, trade with foreigners additionally brought many agricultural improvements to the region, such as grafting techniques for mangoes and oranges, and the introduction of the potato, maize, and other New World crops.

The mineral resources produced by Bengal notably included saltpeter, a key ingredient of gunpowder. The region also exported steel and other metalwork. Forests were plentiful — the Mughals cleared much of the Ganges delta forests to make space for agriculture — and presumably provided wood for burning and for the prosperous shipbuilding industry.

Supporting all of this were a number of technological innovations. The Bengalis invented the flush deck for ships, a design that was later copied by the British. In farming, they adopted the seed drill (from China) before the Europeans did. They also made use of the Indian-invented cotton gin with a worm gear and crank handle to spin threads more effectively.

Okay, so now we have an idea of what Bengali production was. But what about the wider society? What did life feel like?

Politically, Bengal was under the rule of a Mughal viceroy (who would later become the autonomous and hereditary Nawab). The next highest social class consisted of an aristocracy established by the Mughals, called the jagirdars or zamindars. They held much of the land and managed the plantation economy that grew all the cotton, indigo, rice, etc., in a way not altogether different from plantation owners in the southern US. Most farmers were tenants on zamindar land, paying rent to the aristocracy, who then paid part of it as tax to the imperial government. Of course, the peasants at the bottom were usually ruthlessly exploited.

This class structure was a contributor to the proto-industrialization of Bengal. The zamindars had a financial incentive to force their tenants to grow cash crops, which were more profitable than staple foods when sold to the cities and external markets.

At the same time, the bottom class people had an incentive to supplement their farming income by working in the proto-industries. If your family was having trouble growing cotton (or whatever) for the local zamindar, you could go weave fabric (or whatever) in a workshop for a bit, in exchange for a wage.

There seems to be some debate on how high exactly the standards of living were. Some historians believe that they were probably comparable to those in Europe, though there isn’t much data.

Weavers, at least, had some control over their work terms and had better conditions than European weavers.

Of course, there must have been a difference between, say, a highly skilled artisan and an unskilled day laborer. And then, at the top, there were the people who had fabulous lifestyles as aristocrats, merchants, and bankers.

Religiously, Mughal Bengal was, like today, a majority Muslim and minority Hindu place. I’ve read in a few places that the ideas in Islamic economics may have played a major role in proto-industrialization, but I haven’t been able to understand how exactly. The sources points to the Fatawa al-Alamgir, a comprehensive law document (a Sharia) published by Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in the late 17th century, which established the legal system of Muslim India. It seems likely that the Fatawa greatly influenced the economy of the Bengal Subah, but I don’t know through what mechanisms.

Geographically, the Mughal period saw an expansion of the available land, thanks to agrarian reforms and clearances of forested areas in the Ganges delta. This had major impacts on the structure of the population. Besides, the large number of waterways on the Bengal territory was also a factor that helped it industrialize, since that made it easy to move resources and crafted goods around to process and sell them.

Bengal was also relatively urbanized. We already saw that Dhaka was a very large city for its time. It was the capital of Bengal starting in 1608, as well as the center of the muslin proto-industry. Under the rule of governor Shaista Khan (whose portrait we saw above) in the 1660s-80s, Dhaka developed greatly. It got, among other things, this fine mosque:

which today looks like this:

Dhaka also boasted this incomplete but beautiful fort:

To get an impression of Dhaka in its period of growth, here is a description from 1666 by a French traveller, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (look up his Wikipedia page for a cool portrait in an “oriental costume”). Emphasis mine in all quotes:

Dacca is a large town, which is only of extent as regards length, each person being anxious to have his house close to the Ganges. . . . [F]rom the last brick bridge, which I have mentioned above, up to Dacca, there is a succession of houses, separated one from the other, and inhabited for the most part by the carpenters who build galleys and other vessels. These houses are, properly speaking, only miserable huts made of bamboo, and mud which is spread over them. Those of Dacca are scarcely better built, and that which is the residence of the Governor is an enclosure of high walls, in the middle of which is a poor house merely built of wood. He ordinarily resides under tents, which he pitches in a large court in this enclosure.

The Dutch, finding that their goods were not sufficiently safe in the common houses of Dacca, have built a very fine house, and the English have also got one which is fairly good. The church of the Rev. Augustin Fathers is all of brick, and the workmanship of it is rather beautiful.

Beyond the fact that Mr. Tavernier apparently hated wooden houses compared to brickwork, it’s interesting to note the importance he gives to the shipbuilders. Meanwhile, another European traveler from that era, Thomas Bowrey, was more appreciative of the city:

The City of Dhaka is a very large, spacious one, but stands on low, marshy, swampy ground, and the water of that ground is very brackish, which is the only inconvenience. It has, however, some very fine conveniences that compensate, having a very fine and large river that runs close by the city walls, navigable by ships of 500 or 600 tonnes burden. . . .

It is an admirable city for its greatness, for its magnificent buildings, and the multitude of its inhabitants. A very great and potent, permanent, and paid army is based here, in a constant state of readiness. Also, many large, strong, and stately elephants, trained for battle, which are kept close to the palace.

It’s clear that Dhaka was large, economically productive, involved with ships, and politically important. And there were other big cities. Chittagong, on the eastern coast near Burma, was also a shipbuilding hub. And Murshidabad, north of Calcutta, was a center of silk production and finance, as well as the capital during the Nawab era.

Asking what a society “looked like” is necessarily vague, but I think we’re beginning to see something. Mughal Bengal was a well-developed region with fertile land and a large population. It grew many different crops, from staple foods like rice to luxuries like cotton and silk. It had an efficient aristocracy that pushed for economic improvement by (of course) exploiting laborers. And it had large cities, ships, and waterways, meaning it had access to markets within India and abroad.

And so we can summarize the causes of Bengali proto-industrialization like this:

• High agricultural productivity suppo