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Under the Banyan Tree - History lessons with William Dalrymple
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Fred and Herald are joined by the esteemed historian William Dalrymple for a fascinating discussion on India's role in economic history, from trade dominance in ancient times to mathematical breakthroughs and the birth of the modern number system.
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Transcript
Introduction to HSBC Global Viewpoint Podcast
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Speaker
Welcome to HSBC Global Viewpoint, the podcast series that brings together business leaders and industry experts to explore the latest global insights, trends, and opportunities.
00:00:13
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Make sure you're subscribed to stay up to date with new episodes. Thanks for listening, and now onto today's show.
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Special Episode at HSBC's Global Investment Summit
00:00:45
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Hello everyone, it's Fred Newman here and welcome to a special episode of Under the Banyan Tree. The conversation you're about to hear was recorded in late March at HSBC's Global Investment Summit here in Hong Kong.
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Harold and I had the pleasure of sitting down with renowned historian William Dalrymple for a fascinating discussion on India's economic history. From trade dominance in ancient times to mathematical breakthroughs and the birth of the modern number system, we're here this week to put Asian markets and economics in historical context.
India's Historical Economic Influence
00:01:16
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Sit back and enjoy. From HFPC Global Research, this is Under the Banyan Tree.
00:01:34
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Well, let's kick things off with an introduction worthy of the occasion. Our special guest this week is a multi-award winning author and historian and fellow podcaster. He's the recipient of no less than six honorary doctorates and has lectured at some of the world's most prestigious universities from Oxford to Princeton.
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He's also been awarded the highly coveted President's Medal by the British Academy and has been named one of the world's top 50 thinkers by prospects. The list goes on, but unfortunately, we got this room only for an hour.
00:02:02
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So, William Dalrymple, welcome to Under the Banyan Train. having me.
Revisiting India's Economic Perception
00:02:05
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Yeah, wonderful to have you here, William, and a historian of your stature following really South Asia in particular.
00:02:13
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um We wanted to put a little bit of context around really the resurgence of India as an economic powerhouse in its own right. Now, in many ways, modern investors are looking at India and saying, wow, the growth rate's very impressive.
00:02:26
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But in but many ways, it's a return of India to its rightful place in the global economy. Could you put some context on How important was India really over previous decades?
00:02:37
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So you're absolutely right. ah My generation grew up coming across India, if at all, as the economic basket case. And we always thought of it as a poor country, as part of the benighted, inverted commas, third world.
00:02:53
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That idea is a completely contemporary idea and would have mystified anyone from almost any period of of history before the 18th century. In antiquity, India was the Roman Empire's leading trading partner at a time when Rome incidentally had no conception of the existence of China.
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And Pliny talks about it as the drain of all the precious metals in the world. His contemporary Strabo talks about fleets leaving annually from Roman Egypt down the Red Sea ah of 250 vessels at a time, setting off with the monsoon winds.
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And then because of the speed of being able to travel with the monsoon winds, You could get there and back in just four weeks. And so in a single year, you could very happily do an expedition to India and come back again ah in the space of a single calendar year.
00:03:43
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So through antiquity, people regarded India not as a poor region, but as one of the richest regions in the world. Then,
India's Wealth in the Mughal Period
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um to take another snapshot, and I mean, you could do this for almost any period of history, but most obviously, I suppose, the Mughal period.
00:03:58
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At the time when the East India Company is founded, which is the year 1599, the year that Shakespeare is writing in the same city, Hamlet and Macbeth, which is not a bad year's work for most people, the East India Company went to India because it was the richest area of the world.
00:04:19
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Harold will know very well that ah that the the big cap competitors were, of course, the Dutch at this point. And it was the fact that the Dutch had managed to trade with such profit. The VOC had had had pulled in such incredible sums of money into Holland.
00:04:33
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The VOC being the Dutch East India Company. The Dutch East India Company. The first listed company on the planet, yes. Exactly. And the Brits wanted to get in on the action. And so they went to, again, the place that they thought of as the richest place in the world. And the reason that India at that stage in its career was rich is it was the textile centre, a million looms in Bengal alone.
00:04:52
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And after tangling with the Dutch in the East Indies, they relocate to India and make a fortune. The East India Company becomes
Significance of Indian Ocean Trade
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the most powerful company in history because India is the richest. So it's the equivalent of Silicon Valley today, I suppose,
00:05:06
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the richest area in the world in the early 18th century. that is That is India. So we we spoke about the Western world and say the Romans trading with with India, but it had a big influence actually also on China and on Southeast Asia. I mean, I look at Indonesia, it's it's a Muslim country, an Islamic country, but actually you scratch the surface, Hinduism and Buddhism everywhere.
00:05:27
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Absolutely. So I think, again, just like my generation grew up with the idea of India being a ah third world basket case in inverted commas, which is a completely false idea. So our generation, when they grow a little bit older, where they thought at all, if they did, about East West trade, thought about the Silk Road.
00:05:45
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And this idea, which has come to dominate all discourse of East West exchange, in fact, It was only invented in the 19th century by a German historian, or geographer actually, called Baron von Richthofen, 1877.
00:06:00
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It only enters the English language in 1936, and it was only when I was at university, really, you were getting the first shows in the Met in New York and so on, publicising this new idea.
India's Cultural and Intellectual Influence
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And since then it's become to be a nostrum, it's become historical fact.
00:06:12
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But while I think it genuinely is a major and important thing from the time of the Mongols on, because the Mongols do smash a hole through the middle of Asia, creating a single ah state from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea where free trade can take place.
00:06:27
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It is a huge mistake to see it as something that existed in antiquity. There's absolutely no evidence that China and Rome were in contact at all, while India and Rome, as we've seen, ah were were each other's number one trading partner.
00:06:39
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So I think what we've forgotten is that India, not China, was the centre of the ancient economic world system and that it was travelled by boat, not over land, that propelled that trade.
00:06:52
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so And you can look at this at almost any period in history. India is hugely dominant, not just in trade, but in ideas. Most obviously Buddhism, which spreads in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th century AD. Not just Southeast Asia, where today we think of you know monks wandering around in Burma and in Thailand, but also places that we don't particularly associate with Buddhism, such as China, Mongolia, Siberia, Korea, and so on. Japan.
00:07:21
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And so we we talk about India. You we highlight the centrality of India in the world economy and in centuries past and antiquity and so forth. But how how unified is India? is it Is one entity? Was it an empire? or what What counts for that that inherent strength?
00:07:37
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So there is almost no period of history. before the East India Company when all of India is united. You have brief moments, but from antiquity, India is thought of both internally and externally as a single cultural and geographical zone.
00:07:54
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Well, um there there's there's the economic centricity of India in the past. There's a cultural centricity. We owe our modern civilization to a large part to Indian civilization, if you will.
00:08:06
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um i would I wouldn't go as far as that. i think Again, Well, it's got to be very careful how well express these things. India has a major contribution to world civilization, but of course, like there there are many other contributors. Many others, yeah. so So it is a source of many of our cultural achievements as as as mankind.
00:08:24
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um I know you're a historian, but if you speculate a little bit to this idea of India being more an idea rather than a state, a centralized state, is that something in in modern times that that you think is something that sort of is is is still being reflected in some of the challenges that persist today that you never had a centralizing bureaucratic force like China, for example, had or other empires in the past?
00:08:50
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China, I think, again, spends a lot of its time, more than we acknowledge, disunited. And and periods of Chinese history, such as the warring states, are not it always exceptions. There are long periods of Chinese history when China also is at least more than one kingdom.
00:09:06
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And for a lot of this period that we're talking about, China is two kingdoms, north and south. But India is definitely more fragmented for most of history than China is. There is long periods of Chinese history when China is governed from Xi'an or Luoyang.
00:09:23
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And the Machiavelli, if you like, of ah of ancient India, Kautilya, conceives a series of what he calls mandalas, in other words, little spheres of influence abutting each other, ah like little hexagons, if you like, nestling into a single, into that space of of of the peninsula of India.
00:09:41
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And that he advises rulers to always, you know, form alliances with the one beyond the next one. A lot of ancient Indian thought exists. It predicates the fact that India is not united, but it is also predicated on the fact that it is one civilization. But
Colonial Impact on India's Bureaucratic State
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it is only under the British that you get this centralized bureaucratic state.
00:10:03
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And that, in in a sense, is I think, you know, I'm not a great fan of British colonialism and i spent 20 years writing books about the damage it's done. But that is the gift of... ah British cloneness than the fact that you have one nation state governed by one army and one civil service. And and while but the British did an enormous amount of damage, for example, to the Indian economy, that is the lasting legacy. And it lives is on that legacy with the civil service exam and and the tradition of but bureaucratic tradition that the the British bequested? I've lived in India 40 years now, and I've seen a big change in that time in that when I arrived in the mid 1980s, it was not at all impossible that India could fragment as Pakistan had done. Pakistan famously in 1971 splits into Pakistan and Bangladesh.
00:10:51
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When I arrived in India, there was still very active Sikh separatist groups, Khalistan in the Punjab. There were, in living memory, strong Tamil separatists ah and various other groups. and and And, you know, it would have been perfectly easy to imagine a future at that point.
00:11:07
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And indeed, my tutors at Cambridge, when I was studying this, in a sense, encouraged that idea that India was not a natural nation state and that it might easily fragment.
00:11:18
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Quite the opposite has taken place. We've seen now a very clear sense of Indian identity and the only place that, in a sense, even nominally exists. really seriously is has a a major insurgency, which which is wanting separation. Does cricket help in that?
00:11:35
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Cricket helps a great deal. Film helps a great deal. Television helps a great deal. But I don't think anyone seriously doubts that India now has has the boundaries that it has today.
00:11:47
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And
India's Mathematical Contributions
00:11:48
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outside of Kashmir and a few tiny pockets in the northeast, everyone is more or less happy to be part of this rising power.
00:12:06
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So William, when we talk about numbers and mathematics and trade, and we're in finance, we very often talk about the Arab ah numbers, but they're actually Indian, right? Well, i would say there are actually three main bodies of thought which come out of India at this period. We talked about Buddhism.
00:12:21
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We shouldn't neglect Hinduism, which from the sixth century onwards also arrives in Southeast Asia. And the great empires of the early Middle Ages, if you like, the Angkor, the Khmer empires,
00:12:34
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um But also many other kingdoms in that region but all adopt Hindu kingship. ah Stories become deeply embedded in every aspect of that region's ah cultural life in in dance, in storytelling, in shadow puppetry.
00:12:49
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um And that's the second thing. But but you're right. the In a sense, the greatest gift, I think, of India to the world is the gift of what effectively now is the nearest thing the human race has to a universal language. And that's our number system. Now, as you said, in the West, we call it...
00:13:08
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Arabic numbers because we got it from the Arabs. But the Arabs got it from the Indians. It's not just the symbols and the conventions, it's the invention of the zero concept, isn't it? Correct.
00:13:18
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All these things come from India and they come specifically from the Indian quest to understand the world through understanding the stars. So from the earliest Vedas, which hugely disputed when they were written, but let's say two and a half thousand BC, from that period onwards, the performance of successful rituals depends on astrological calculations. And therefore, in order, in other words, for your prayers to be heard and your offerings to be accepted, you have to get your sums right.
00:13:48
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So in India, from the very beginning, there is a group of people, the Brahmins, the upper priestly caste, who specialize in mathematics and astronomy. They they bundle it all into one science called Jyotisa in Sanskrit.
00:14:03
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And you have a series of remarkable mathematicians in early India who should, if the world was a just place, be every bit as famous as Pythagoras or Archimedes.
00:14:15
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I mean, almost any child in America or Europe could tell you about Archimedes in his bath shouting Eureka, but not one who is not from an Indian background will tell you about Arya Bhatta, who, for example, exactly calculated the circumference of the earth and the distance of the earth from the moon and worked out a version of Pi, which was which was very accurate.
00:14:37
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Plus, he gets a thousand years before Galileo, the fact that the earth is spinning on its own axis. Yeah. Very quickly, on on the zero, I believe that one of the earliest zeros is actually discovered in Southeast Asia. It's questionable it's Cambodia or it's in Sumatra.
00:14:51
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One of the inscriptions, the oldest written zero on on a stone in in this particular case. um I would follow the Cambodia line of attack. K-127, I think, is is generally accepted to be. I think it's 680, 82 or something like that. But in Saka years, that has a zero in it. Exactly.
00:15:09
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There's an inscription around that time in Sumatra, Kota Kapu, it's called. whereby there's a zero written there as well. du Does your Sumatran zero, is it a dot or is it a circle? That's a circle.
00:15:20
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There is another one. That's just the only circle then. It's a circle. There's only a debate on what exactly the year was when it was written. But it might well be that the oldest surviving zero, the whole Buddhist idea of nothingness in a sense, is actually visible there.
00:15:35
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What I think um I should say, because people don't know it, is how how does the zero leave zero? Southeast Asia or what I call the Indosphere, this area of Indian influence where Indian mathematics has spread to us today. Because it's interesting story and I just just give it very briefly.
00:15:51
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When it the the rise of Islam takes place in the seventh century, Afghanistan is taken by the Arabs. They get right up to Balkh in Afghanistan. and In Balkh, there happens to be another of these great Buddhist university monasteries called Naubaha.
00:16:05
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The abbots of Naubaha, they have the name Pramukh, which just means boss in Sanskrit. convert to Islam. One of the sons is sent to Syria to be part of the Umayyad court, where they Arabize their name to Barmak.
00:16:19
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And the Barmakids, the this same family under a new name, become the great viziers of Baghdad. And because they are from the Indosphere, and the the grandfather had studied advanced Indian mathematics in Kashmir,
00:16:33
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They summon from India the great works not only of Aryabhata, who we're talking about, but also Brahmagupta, who's the guy generally credited with defining zero. And these two works come in, i think it's 786 to Baghdad.
00:16:47
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seven eight six to baghdad Two generations later, they're translated very well into very simple Arabic prose by a guy who comes from what is now Uzbekistan, and he's called Al-Qurizmi.
00:17:02
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Algorithm. Well, exactly. His name gives us the word algorithm, and the book that he writes, which is ah has a mouthful of ah of a title called the The Book of Hindu Calculation by Completion and Balancing, because it's such a mouthful, gets known by a nickname, Al-Jabbar.
00:17:16
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ha Algebra. Algebra. And then there's one last sort of link or two more links, I suppose, in the chain that spreads across the Islamic world, but it doesn't cross into Western Europe. We're still using clumsy Latin numbers, XVCCM and so on. all right up yeah Right up until the 12th century.
00:17:33
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And it's only when Pisa founds a trading colony in Algeria as late as the eleven twenty s that the son of of the trader is brought up in Algeria. He goes to the local school. He learns Arabic, but he also learns what everyone is learning, al-Qarizmi.
00:17:51
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This guy goes back to Pisa, finds that his friends are still doing MCV, tried doing long multiplication of CCXMV divided by MCVVX. And so he says, guys, it's very easy.
00:18:03
Speaker
Here's my book called The Libra Abaki, and that is Fibonacci. Yes, I which was just going to go there. Fibonacci. That book by Fibonacci is adapted by the great Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca. He writes three mathematical presences in Tuscany while he's doing these gorgeous pictures of of the resurrection and so on in San Sepulcro and And at his death, his friend takes them up to Milan, where he gives them to his flatmate, who is Leonardo da Vinci. ah
00:18:34
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So in just six steps, you get from Leonardo to Fibonacci to Al-Khwarizmi and back to ancient India with Brahmagupta and Aryabhata. And I add one more stat because Fibonacci's bands we now use them in trading, ah stock market trading. We look at bands in which stocks trade and the traders use them and they refer to Fibonacci as if it's some technical thing but there you go. You wonder whether the family should have copyrighted it. It
Reflections on India's Economic Re-emergence
00:19:02
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would have done very well on the back of that, yes.
00:19:04
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So rounding it all off, actually, we shouldn't be surprised that India is, i would say, not emerging again, but researching again, given the rich history and dominant position that it had in in Asia and actually the the whole Western world. Exactly right. and Throughout the whole of history, from the Roman period, through the early medieval period, through the early modern period, India is competing with only China as the richest region of the of the world. And sometimes it's India that's richer under the Mughals, and another time under the Ming, it's the Chinese. It goes backwards and forwards, like rather like Oxford and Cambridge competing for the top of the university league.
00:19:44
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But there is no period in history before the modern period where... when India and China are not creating about 60, 70% of world GDP and the rest of the world is just filling in the gap.
00:19:59
Speaker
William, thank you so much for taking the time to join us here today. It was really a treat. And, you know, we're fans your work. it's wrong when they say nothing grows under the Banyard tree. This is a very thriving ecosystem we have here. But nobody better on the Banyard tree than than, you know, great William Dalrymple.
00:20:18
Speaker
So thank you for joining us. And, well, folks, I know Harold and I would love to keep this conversation going all day, but that's all we've got time for. We hope you've enjoyed this special episode Under the Banyan Tree as much as we have. But for now, I'm afraid it's thank you and goodbye from Hong Kong.
00:20:34
Speaker
Normal service resumes next week with the two of us back in the studio. Thanks again for joining us for this special edition of the show. And we'll talk to you again very soon.
00:21:15
Speaker
Thank you for joining us at HSBC Global Viewpoint. We hope you enjoyed the discussion. Make sure you're subscribed to stay up to date with new episodes.