Two of the world's oldest civilizations are China and India. For centuries characterized by stagnant economies and low quality of life, today Southeast Asia, India, and China are experiencing rapidly growing economies and neoliberal economic reforms that are rapidly integrating the nations into the global marketplace. Due to religion, trade, geography, warfare, and other aspects of society, classical China and India played a major role in shaping the societies or social structures of other nations like Malaysia and the Philippine Islands. Classical China and classical India can also be viewed as an influence in modern China and India, with factors like agriculture continuing to play a major role in the burgeoning economies of each nation. This analysis will discuss how factors like geography, social organization, government, and religion in classical India and China helped shaped other nations, as well as modern India and China themselves. This paper will argue that different social structures developed in classical China and classical India deriving from government, geography, agriculture, warfare, trade, religion, and other aspects of society that influence the shape of these nations then and now as well as those of others.
A major factor instrumental in shaping and informing classical civilizations was geography. Civilizations emerged in coastal South India in the first millennium BC. Port cities developed, reflecting increasing trade with other regions of the world, like western Asia. Invasion from abroad helped to change the Indian social system by introducing new cultures, religious and political systems, and peoples. The long and complex history of India during the pre-Christian era and into the more recent present has been characterized by frequent and often violent conflicts between the many different religious groups and sects, most of which claim regional or geographic bases. In the fertile plai...