India missed the Industrial Revolution. That sentence is almost too simple for the history it tries to contain. Britain industrialised first, followed by parts of Europe, the United States and eventually Japan. India, by contrast, entered the modern age largely as a colonised, agrarian economy. The consequences were enormous. Industrialisation did not merely produce factories. It produced railways, machines, modern armies, engineering knowledge, financial institutions, mass employment and eventually technological power. The countries that mastered industrial production acquired capabilities that went far beyond manufacturing. Britain’s ability to project power across the world was not based only on political organisation or…