Monopoly · On Progress

You Live Better Than Akbar Did

He ruled a hundred million people and owned the richest treasury on earth. He still had a worse life than you had last Tuesday.

Akbar ruled roughly a hundred million people. He owned the treasury of the wealthiest empire on the planet. If he wanted a thing — any thing — a thousand men moved until he had it.

And in the summer of 1600, he sat in Agra and sweated.

Agra touches 45 degrees. Akbar's entire cooling technology was wet khus screens hung across doorways, thick stone walls, a few water channels, and servants waving punkhas by hand until their arms gave out. That was the ceiling. That was the best that infinite money could buy in 1600.

You have a remote control.

Think about what that actually means. A window AC costs less than a phone. A middle-class family in Ghaziabad presses a button and gets a comfort that the most powerful man in South Asia could not purchase at any price, with any army, from any merchant on earth. He didn't lack the money. The thing simply did not exist. Wealth cannot buy what has not been invented.

He buried his own children

This is the part that should stop you.

Akbar had unlimited wealth and the finest physicians alive, and he still buried several of his own children in infancy. Not because he was careless. Because in 1600, nobody — emperor or beggar — had antibiotics, vaccines, or the germ theory of disease.

A chemist in any Indian town will hand you, for fifty rupees, a course of medicine that would have saved a Mughal prince. The emperor of India could not buy it. You can buy it on the way home. The floor of modern life sits above the ceiling of imperial life.

He could not read

Akbar — patron of one of history's great libraries, convenor of scholars from every faith — almost certainly could not read a word. Books had to be read aloud to him. He owned thousands of manuscripts and could not personally open a single one.

A fifteen-year-old in a small Indian town carries, in her pocket, every book Akbar owned, plus every book written since, plus a machine that will explain any of them to her in her own language, for free, at two in the morning.

The world was slow and dark

His top speed was a horse. To see someone in Kabul was a months-long expedition with an armed escort. You can be in another country before dinner and video-call your mother from the train, for nothing.

And when the sun went down, the emperor of India sat in the dark. Oil lamps and candles, and then sleep. Electric light quietly handed every one of us four or five extra usable hours a day — hours no emperor in history ever had.

Akbar did not lack money. He lacked the twentieth century.

We are meant to be rich

This is the thing I keep coming back to: quality of life has never stopped moving. Not in a straight line, not evenly, but relentlessly. Every generation quietly inherits comforts the last one's kings could not command.

The average Indian today is not "poor compared to Akbar." The average Indian today is materially richer than Akbar on almost every axis that decides how a day actually feels — cool air, clean water, medicine that works, food from four continents, distance collapsed to hours, knowledge at zero cost, light after dark.

We were meant to be rich. We are getting rich. Most of us just haven't noticed, because we measure ourselves sideways — against the neighbour, the cousin, the man on the internet with a better car — instead of backwards, against every human being who came before us.

And here is the part that matters for anyone building something.

Willis Carrier was an ordinary salaried engineer in Buffalo. In 1902 he built a machine to stop ink from smudging in a printing shop. He was not trying to change India. He had no army, no treasury, no throne.

He has done more for the daily life of the average Indian than Akbar's entire empire ever did.

That is the whole lesson. Emperors redistribute. Builders create. One of them gets the statues; the other one gets your Tuesday afternoon at 24 degrees. If you are building anything — a product, a brand, a category — you are on the side of the man who actually moved the world.

Kumar Ujjwal · Monopoly