Ch 4The Age of Industrialisation

Chapter 4: The Age of Industrialisation

Industrialisation is often equated with the growth of factory industry, but the history of industrialisation is more complicated. This chapter looks at industrialisation in Britain, the first industrial nation, and then at India, where the pattern of change was shaped by colonial rule.

1. Before the Industrial Revolution: Proto-industrialisation

• Even before factories appeared, there was large-scale industrial production for an international market that was not based on factories. Historians call this phase proto-industrialisation.
• In the 17th and 18th centuries, merchants from towns moved to the countryside, supplying money to peasants and artisans and persuading them to produce for an international market. Merchants could not expand production within towns because urban craft and trade guilds were powerful — they controlled production, regulated prices, trained craftspeople and restricted the entry of new people.
• For poor peasants and cottagers whose common lands were disappearing, this was a welcome source of income supplementing shrinking cultivation; the family could remain in the countryside and use all its members' labour.
• A close relationship developed between town and countryside: the finishing centre for cloth was London — it came to be known as a finishing centre. Each merchant controlled hundreds of workers scattered in villages.

2. The Coming Up of the Factory

• The earliest factories in England came up by the 1730s; they multiplied only in the late 18th century. The first symbol of the new era was cotton — its production boomed (raw cotton imports rose from 2.5 million pounds in 1760 to 22 million pounds in 1787).
• A series of inventions increased the efficiency of each step (carding, twisting, spinning, rolling). Richard Arkwright created the cotton mill — costly machines could now be set up in one place, and all processes brought under one roof and management, allowing careful supervision and quality control.

3. The Pace of Industrial Change

• Cotton and metals were the most dynamic industries: cotton led in the first phase (up to the 1840s); afterwards iron and steel led, boosted by railway expansion in England (from the 1840s) and in the colonies (from the 1860s).
• New industries could not easily displace traditional ones — even at the end of the 19th century, less than 20 per cent of the workforce was in technologically advanced sectors. Textiles was dynamic, yet a large part of its output came from domestic units, not factories.
• Ordinary and small innovations were the basis of growth in many non-mechanised sectors — food processing, building, pottery, glasswork, tanning, furniture, production of implements.
• Technological change was slow: new machines were expensive, often broke down, repair was costly, and they were not as effective as claimed. James Watt improved the steam engine (patented 1781) and Mathew Boulton manufactured the model, yet for years there were few buyers — by 1800 only 321 steam engines were in use in England.

4. Hand Labour and Steam Power

• In Victorian Britain there was no shortage of human labour, so wages were low and industrialists had no problem of labour shortage — they had no desire to introduce machines that required large capital investment.
• In many industries the demand for labour was seasonal (gas works, breweries, book-binding, printing before Christmas, ship repair in winter), so industrialists preferred hand labour that could be hired for the season.
• Machines produced uniform, standardised goods; but the market often demanded goods with intricate designs and specific shapes — in mid-19th-century Britain, 500 varieties of hammers and 45 kinds of axes were produced, which required human skill, not mechanical technology.
• The upper classes — aristocrats and the bourgeoisie — preferred handmade products, which symbolised refinement and class; machine-made goods were for export to the colonies.
• Life of workers: the abundance of labour meant jobs were hard to get; many job-seekers had to wait weeks, spending nights under bridges or in night refuges. Work was seasonal, so many returned to the countryside after busy seasons. Wages rose somewhat in the early 19th century, but real value was eroded by wartime price rises; till the mid-19th century the unemployed were up to 10 per cent of the urban population. Workers feared new technology — when the Spinning Jenny was introduced in the woollen industry, women who survived on hand spinning attacked the machines.
• After the 1840s, building activity (roads widened, railway stations, railway lines, tunnels, drainage, rivers embanked) intensified in cities, opening up greater employment opportunities.

5. Industrialisation in the Colonies: The Age of Indian Textiles

• Before the age of machine industries, silk and cotton goods from India dominated the international market. Armenian and Persian merchants took goods overland; a vibrant sea trade operated through the pre-colonial ports of Surat (Gujarat, to the Gulf and Red Sea), Masulipatam (Coromandel) and Hooghly (Bengal).
• A variety of Indian merchants and bankers financed this trade — supply merchants linked the port towns to the inland weaving villages.
• By the 1750s this network broke down. The European companies gained power, and the old ports of Surat and Hooghly decayed while Bombay and Calcutta — ports controlled by the Europeans — grew. Trade through the new ports was in European ships.
• After the East India Company established political power, it developed a system of management to eliminate competition, control costs and ensure regular supply: it appointed paid servants called gomasthas to supervise weavers, collect supplies and examine cloth quality; it gave weavers advances (loans) to secure their produce — weavers who took advances could not sell to other buyers.
• Clashes occurred: unlike the old supply merchants who lived in the weaving villages, gomasthas were outsiders who acted arrogantly, marching with sepoys and punishing weavers for delays. In many places weavers deserted villages and migrated; in Carnatic and Bengal, weavers refused loans, closed workshops and took to agricultural labour.
• Manchester comes to India: as cotton industries developed in England, industrialists pressurised the government to impose import duties on Indian cotton textiles in Britain and persuaded the East India Company to sell British manufactures in Indian markets. Indian textile exports declined; Manchester goods flooded India. By the 1860s, weavers faced a new problem — they could not get sufficient raw cotton of good quality because, during the American Civil War, Britain turned to India for raw cotton, and its price shot up. By the end of the 19th century, factories in India began production, glutting the market with machine-goods.

6. Factories Come Up in India

• The first cotton mill in Bombay came up in 1854; the first jute mill in Bengal in 1855 (another in 1862); the Elgin Mill in Kanpur in the 1860s; the first spinning and weaving mill of Madras in 1874.
• Early entrepreneurs accumulated capital through trade, often with China: Dwarkanath Tagore (Bengal), Dinshaw Petit and Jamsetjee Nusserwanjee Tata (Parsis of Bombay, capital from exports to China and raw cotton shipments to England), Seth Hukumchand (a Marwari who set up the first Indian jute mill in Calcutta in 1917). Colonial control limited Indians largely to the export of raw materials and food grains; European Managing Agencies (Bird Heiglers & Co., Andrew Yule, Jardine Skinner & Co.) controlled a large sector of Indian industry.
• Workers: most came from the districts around the mills — peasants and artisans who found no work in villages. In 1911, over 50 per cent of workers in Bombay's cotton industry came from Ratnagiri district. Getting a job was difficult; industrialists employed a jobber (an old trusted worker) to recruit — he became a person with power, demanding money and gifts for his favour.
• Peculiarities of industrial growth: European agencies were interested in products for export (tea, coffee plantations, mining, indigo, jute), not in competing with Manchester goods in India. Indian mills initially produced coarse yarn (thread) rather than fabric, exported to China. When the Swadeshi movement gathered momentum, nationalists mobilised people to boycott foreign cloth; industrial groups pressed for tariff protection. From 1906 yarn exports to China declined (Chinese and Japanese mills competed), so Indian industrialists shifted from yarn to cloth production.
• The First World War was a turning point: British mills became busy with war production, Manchester imports into India declined, and Indian mills suddenly had a vast home market. Indian factories were also called upon to supply war needs — jute bags, uniforms, tents, leather boots, saddles. New factories were set up, workers worked longer hours; after the war Manchester could never recapture its old position in the Indian market.
• Small-scale industries predominate: even in 1911, large industries were mostly in Bengal and Bombay and formed a small segment; most workers were in small workshops and household units. Handicrafts production actually expanded in the 20th century — handloom cloth production almost trebled between 1900 and 1940 — helped by technological small changes like the fly shuttle (by 1941, over 35 per cent of handlooms had it). Certain weavers (producing fine saris with woven borders, or Madras lungis and handkerchiefs) could better withstand mill competition.

7. Market for Goods: Advertisements

• Advertisements helped create new consumers and shape a new consumer culture. Manchester labels on cloth bundles carried the mark "MADE IN MANCHESTER" and beautiful images — often of Indian gods and goddesses (Krishna, Saraswati) — to make the foreign product appear familiar and divine-approved.
• Manufacturers printed calendars (used even by people who could not read) hung in tea shops, homes and offices, with figures of gods and important personages advertising the products.
• When Indian manufacturers advertised, the nationalist message was clear: if you care for the nation, buy Indian (swadeshi) products — advertisements became a vehicle of the nationalist message.

Timeline of Important Dates and Events