Much damage was done by colonialism, no question, but rapid growth from the status quo is hardly the only possible course of history, here; had the British not

Much damage was done by colonialism, no question, but rapid growth from the status quo is hardly the only possible course of history, here; had the British not arrived and the French and Russians (who badly wanted to be there) also resisted stepping in. The article assumes openness to change, but it's not clear that the Indian states under Islamic rulers would have been all that much more open to change than other Islamic states elsewhere at the time. In China at this time, governments tended to purchase newly constructed early railways in order to remove them, and heavily resisted building any in the first place because graves were inevitably disturbed. They weren't big on things that had to go in straight lines. Firm traditionalism is common for societies, historically. Gandhi was especially opposed to technology, but the market structures necessary for modern growth were consistently opposed by Congress governments in the decades after independence, even without him, slowing Indian industrial growth considerably. A history without British dominance (and pillage) might have been a kinder history, since the existing (usually imported) predator class squeezed less hard, and less efficiently; but it would have been far from ideal.