@mg_007_pete_stark continuation abt me ranting abt the colonialism in India, so pls ignore it if you aren't interested in this-
And when steam engine came into existence, the British needed lots of coal, tracks for the railway, the forests in India were reduced exponentially if we comapre wt we had before and after colonisation
During WWI and WWII, the GB folks took Indian sepahi(in hindi, GB dudes called soldiers as Sepoy, at least get the pronunciation right guys) to fight their wars
Racism was hugely seen everywhere
And what's less known and discussed by the world economies is how Indian Math and Science were way ahead of their time, I think my ancestors from five centuries ago knew Math and Science better than I did.
If you read chinese novels, you'd come across the term 'traditional chinese medicine' right, India too has its own traditional medicine called Ayurveda, which is equally powerful, but today, many prefer alopathy aka the English Medicine, Homeopathy etc, cause they're less bitter, and are the Western-approved. And we've had our fair share of Ancient Mathematicians and the quite recent ones like Aryabhatta and Srinivasa Ramanujan
We had schools called Gurukuls where the students were taught for a specific amount of time, they didn't have things like fees and all that, they had to give their Guru aka the teacher a guru dakshina(something to convey their gratitude for all the knowledge they received). Learnign was more practical than theoretical. And quite a millenium ago, there existed civilisations like the Harrapan Civilisation, and Mohenjo Daro, these civilisations were so dman advanced that they had draiange systems, public bath houses, currency(instead of the barter system) back then, no one knows how those civilisations collapsed and why, but archaeologists have uncovered a lot abt them.