The Imperial Histories of India and China:
Comparison Essay
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Effect of Geography on China and India
China and India are among Asian countries which is the largest continent globally with its countries covering an estimated 30% of land area on earth. Notably, the two countries have been affected differently due to their geography.
According to India’s imperial history, the productive power and livelihood patterns were distinct in the different regions. A district such as Bombay was the most industrialized region in the contemporary trop[ical world while in the central Indian uplands. Chanda district would have no industry with only 15% of its land being cultivated. These two districts belonged to British India despite being in very different geographical zones, the coastal-deltaic and the forested uplands, apart from the two zones, the country had high mountains, floodplains, savannahs, rainforests and a tropical desert. Notably, this geographical diversity made the cost of transportation very high across space, considering that one of the largest railway networks in the globe came up in India but stopped at the leading Asian seaport in Bombay, Chanda district in the interior did not get the wheeled traffic until in the nineteenth century. Throughout Indian history, the deltas of Eastern and Southern India in conjunction with the Ganges and Indus floodplains were more engaged in agricultural production, long-distance trade and forming the powerful imperial states. The regions had greater cropping intensity, irrigation potentia;s and more revenue was generated in each region. This is in comparison to the arid areas with deserts, forests and dry uplands in the interior. Therefore, the main commercial towns developed in the former region demonstrating an availability of greater volumes of agricultural surplus since even the trade expenses were lower.
On the other hand, the China of the imperial period consisted of the drainage basins of the Yellow River and the Yangzi. The region consisted of flat terrain land that was also wet enough for agriculture, this defined the historical limits of the country’s heartland. The different geographic features of these include being very hilly that it was not amenable to cultivation. The scarcity caused the development of highly concentrated populations that lived in isolation from each other for a long duration until the advent of the railroad and airplanes. The small arable land underwent compartmentalization to having a series of core areas such as the alluvial plains, coastlands and interior basins that were separated nbu the high mountain chains or the elevated plateaus. These created the divisions within the chinese heartland into different regions.
The primary regional divisions availed the geographic underpinning of the warring states in the fifth century. The loess highlands west region if the Hangu Pass created the core of Qin’s state that expanded to encompass the Min River basin of Sichuan. On the other hand, the Yellow river valley that was the alluvial flood plain got dominated by the Qi state. The central loess highlands and western parts if the alluvial plain that were located between the two power stated were divided among the Jin’s successor stated, generally, China’s division into distinct regions with their distinctive characters that were mainly the physical structure if the land led to the cultural realm in the country that was in the form of states and the perceived traits if its people.
Methodology of Political Legitimacy and unity in China and India
India and China do have long histories which are also completely different. For a long duration, China has been a stable and centrally state with very limited durations of instability and lacking one authority. On the other hand, India has experienced a completely different political system. The durations when one king or a political authority ruled on a major part oif the Indian territory is countable. China had a deep desire to unify the country which became its driving force of nationalism. It did not suffer any foreign rule over a major section of its territory. Foreign concessions in ports and other interior towns were present but the chinese would find that humiliating, however, the country did not undergo any classic imperial rule until 1932 after the invasion of the Japaneseinto manchuria and in 1937 where they occupied massive tracts of Eastern and Central China. Nonetheless, the country’s attitude towards foreigners was much more hostile than how India reacted to the foreigners. China’s driving force was to remove the foreigners and specifically reverse any concessions. On the other hand, India’s hostility to foreign thingswould melt like snow during the spring season after independence except for foreign private capital. In the early days of India’s independence, the country sought foreign capital from the public instead from private sources. It also sourced the foreign capital from several countries instead of the old colonial masters.
In India, not even the British had complete authority to rule across the world. Kings ruled over a major section of North India-Maurya and Gupta dynasties for the duration before and after the BC/AD division. After the Akbar’s maturity in 1570 and the Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, the Mughals ruled much of India. The empire did extend to Kabul but it did not take in all of South India. The British then ruled the majority of India specifically two-thirds in the years between 1857 and 1947. The remaining third of the region was ruled by native princes . notably, the British rule gave India its defined territorial extent by fixing the boundaries and giving the structure of provinces and central government that had an administrative “steel frame.” It also provided India with theur language that has facilitated the country’s communication including in its access to global markets. The legal system of property rights and the Western orientation to the elite. Notably,the country’s ondependence came to deal with the economic ruin that the British rule brought in including deindustrialization, treasures’ drain, deskilling and diversting agriculture and commercial crops from food crops among others. India acquired railroads and modern industry in the 1850s, which was a century earlier than China.
The politics and economics of India and China were shaped by their respective historical legacies. India found it challenging to achieve unity in diversity and allowinh the different languages and religions in the polirtical structure. Indeed found it difficult to articulate even one vision of its nationhood. China’s unification assisted it to mobilize maximal resources for the country’s development.
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