I think that&#x27;s almost certainly true, but again I&#x27;d go back to the example of Russia, where the elite continued to put their wealth principally into competitive status symbols rather than industrialization for almost two centuries after the industrial revolution started. Elites siphoning off wealth for their luxury, rather than investing in society or the economy, has been the rule, not the exception, for the majority of human history, and the Mughals certainly had been doing that in India for centuries before the British arrived. Empiricism and scientific enquiry also got going centuries before industrialization, I admit I don&#x27;t know much about Indian intellectual life in the 17th century, but did they really have an equivalent of the Royal Society, or of Newton?