But the wages question is a little different because it makes it sound like only Europeans were smart enough to pay high wages. But here's one last thing to consider. India was the world's largest producer of cotton textiles, despite paying basically the lowest wages in the world. Indian agriculture was so productive that laborers could be supported at a very low cost. And that, coupled with a large population, meant that Indian textile manufacturing could be very productive without using machines, so they didn't need to industrialize. But more importantly from our perspective, there's a strong argument to be made that Indian cotton production helped spur British industrialization. It was cotton textiles that drove the early Industrial Revolution, and the main reason that Britain was so eager to produce cottons was that demand was incredibly high.