In 1580, three Jesuit priests arrived at the court of Emperor Akbar expecting to convert a curious monarch. Instead, they found themselves in theological debates with Hindu scholars, Jain monks, Zoroastrian priests, and Muslim clerics—all invited guests of an empire that had decided religious warfare was simply bad business.

What they witnessed wasn't mere tolerance. It was a system—a deliberate administrative architecture that made diversity profitable. European visitors wrote home with admiration and confusion. Here was the richest empire on Earth, governing more people than all of Europe combined, and it had solved problems their own societies couldn't even discuss without bloodshed.

Akbar's Din-i-Ilahi—literally "Divine Faith"—wasn't an attempt to create a new religion. It was something stranger: an acknowledgment that all religions contained pieces of truth, and that a ruler's job was synthesis, not enforcement. He abolished the jizya tax on non-Muslims. He married Hindu princesses without requiring conversion. He appointed Hindus to the highest administrative posts.

This wasn't secular indifference. Akbar genuinely believed he was discovering universal spiritual truths. He spent nights in his Ibadat Khana—House of Worship—listening to representatives of every faith argue their cases. The Jesuits thought they were winning when Akbar kissed their Bible. They didn't understand he'd done the same with the Quran, the Vedas, and Zoroastrian texts.

European visitors couldn't process what they saw. Their own continent was drowning in the Wars of Religion—Catholics and Protestants slaughtering each other over theological distinctions most peasants couldn't articulate. The idea that religious diversity could be managed rather than eliminated seemed either impossibly naive or dangerously cynical. They wrote detailed accounts of Akbar's court, then went home to societies that continued burning heretics.

Takeaway

Sometimes what looks like wisdom in one context looks like madness in another—not because the idea is wrong, but because the system receiving it has no place to put it.

The mansabdari system assigned every official a numerical rank determining their salary, military obligations, and status. Your number could go up or down based on performance. When you died, your rank died with you—your children inherited nothing automatically. They had to earn their own positions.

This was revolutionary. In Europe, nobility was blood. A duke's incompetent son remained a duke. Titles, lands, and privileges passed through generations regardless of merit. The entire social order depended on the fiction that aristocratic blood carried inherent virtue. Questioning this meant questioning the legitimacy of kings.

Mughal emperors faced no such constraints. They needed competent administrators to run an empire of 150 million people across wildly diverse terrain. The mansabdari system let them promote talented Hindus, capable Persian immigrants, even converted slaves—whoever could do the job. European observers noted with amazement that generals and governors were evaluated annually. The Mughal state was, in modern terms, running performance reviews while European monarchs were still debating whether peasants had souls.

Takeaway

Systems that reward performance over inheritance tend to find talent wherever it exists—but they threaten everyone whose power depends on being born to the right parents.

By 1700, Mughal India produced roughly 25% of global GDP. This wasn't accident or geography—it was policy. Religious tolerance wasn't just morally convenient; it was economically essential. Hindu merchant networks, Jain banking houses, Muslim textile producers, and Parsi traders all operated under imperial protection. Persecute one group, and you didn't just lose their labor—you disrupted entire supply chains.

The textile industry illustrates this perfectly. Cotton was grown by Hindu farmers, processed by Muslim weavers, financed by Jain bankers, and traded by merchants of every faith. The famous Mughal textiles that Europeans desperately wanted—the muslins so fine they were called "woven air"—required this entire ecosystem functioning smoothly. Religious violence would have been an act of economic sabotage.

European trading companies understood this. The East India Company's early success came from inserting itself into existing Mughal commercial networks, not replacing them. But their home governments couldn't replicate the model. England was expelling Catholics, France was revoking protections for Protestants, and Spain had long since driven out Jews and Muslims. They wanted Mughal wealth without Mughal diversity. It took them centuries to realize the two were connected.

Takeaway

Prosperity often depends on systems too complex to be seen from above—and religious or ethnic 'purity' tends to destroy exactly the networks that create wealth.

The Mughals weren't utopians. Their empire had brutal conquests, palace intrigues, and eventual decline. But for two centuries, they demonstrated something Europeans insisted was impossible: that managing religious diversity could create stability and wealth rather than chaos and weakness.

Europe eventually learned—after the Thirty Years' War killed eight million people, after the Enlightenment made tolerance intellectually respectable, after secular governance became the price of industrial coordination. The Mughals had simply gotten there first, through different reasoning, for different purposes. Some innovations aren't refused because they're wrong. They're refused because accepting them would require admitting too much else was wrong.