The Age of Industrialisation — Notes

This chapter is assessed only in school periodic assessment, not in the CBSE board paper.

Even before factories, England and Europe produced goods on a large scale for an international market. This phase is called proto-industrialisation.

• Why merchants went to the countryside: world trade and colonies raised demand, but in towns, crafts and trade guilds (associations of producers that trained craftspeople, controlled production, prices and competition, and kept out newcomers, often with monopoly rights from rulers) blocked expansion.
• Why peasants agreed: with common lands enclosed and plots too small, poor peasants needed extra income; they could work at home, use family labour and keep farming.
• How it worked: town merchants gave advances and raw material; rural households spun and wove; cloth was finished in towns and exported. Production was scattered, but merchants controlled the network, tying town and countryside together.

The earliest factories in England appeared around the 1730s and multiplied from the late eighteenth century. Cotton was the first symbol of the new era. A series of inventions speeded up each stage of production, and Richard Arkwright created the cotton mill, where costly machines and all processes were brought under one roof and one management, allowing supervision, quality control and regulation of labour.

Change was slower than "revolution" suggests:

• cotton led until the 1840s; then iron and steel grew with the railways (in England from the 1840s, in the colonies from the 1860s);
• most workers stayed in traditional industries (food processing, building, pottery, glass, tanning, furniture), which changed through small innovations;
• new machines were expensive, unreliable and costly to repair: James Watt improved Newcomen's steam engine and patented it in 1781, and his partner Matthew Boulton manufactured it, but it spread slowly.

Why hand labour persisted in Victorian Britain: there was no shortage of labour, so wages were low and industrialists avoided machines needing large capital; seasonal trades (gasworks, breweries, bookbinders, Christmas goods, ship repair in winter) hired hands for the peak; many products needed varied designs and shapes that machines could not make; and the upper classes preferred handmade goods as a mark of refinement. In America, where labour was scarce, industrialists mechanised more eagerly.

Workers' lives: finding a job depended on networks of friends and kin; many waited for weeks, sleeping under bridges or in night shelters; seasonal work meant long periods without income; prices rose, so wages bought less. Fear of unemployment made workers hostile to new technology: when the spinning jenny (James Hargreaves, 1764) came into the woollen industry, women who lived by hand-spinning attacked the machines. From the 1840s, city building (roads, railway stations, tunnels, drains) created more work.

The age of Indian textiles: before machine industry, Indian silk and cotton goods dominated international trade. Cloth went overland from Punjab to Afghanistan, Persia and Central Asia, and by sea from Surat (to the Gulf and Red Sea) and from Masulipatnam and Hooghly (to Southeast Asia). A network of Indian supply merchants, brokers and export merchants financed and ran the trade.

Breakdown (from the 1750s): European companies won concessions and then monopoly rights; Surat and Hooghly declined; Bombay and Calcutta grew, with trade in European ships.

The Company and the weavers: after gaining political power (1760s), the Company removed old traders and brokers, appointed gomasthas (paid servants who supervised weavers and checked cloth) and used a system of advances that tied weavers to sell only to it, at low prices. Weavers clashed with gomasthas; many deserted villages, some revolted, others refused advances and became agricultural labourers.

Manchester comes to India: British duties shut out Indian cloth, and cheap Manchester cloth flooded India, so weavers lost both export and local markets. In the 1860s, the American Civil War raised raw cotton exports from India and its price, starving weavers of supplies. By the late nineteenth century, Indian mills added competition.

Early factories: the first cotton mill in Bombay (1854); the first jute mill in Bengal (1855); mills in Kanpur (Elgin Mill) and Ahmedabad in the 1860s; the first spinning and weaving mill of Madras (1874); Tata steel at Jamshedpur (1912).

Entrepreneurs: many made money in the China trade: Dwarkanath Tagore (Bengal), Parsis of Bombay such as Dinshaw Petit and Jamsetji Tata (also raw cotton exports to England), Seth Hukumchand (first Indian jute mill in Calcutta, 1917). Colonial rule restricted Indian merchants to exporting raw materials, and European managing agencies (Bird Heiglers, Andrew Yule, Jardine Skinner) controlled large sectors, especially tea, coffee, mining, indigo and jute for export.

Workers: mostly from nearby districts, moving between village and mill; recruited through jobbers, who helped them but demanded money and gifts and gained power over them.

Peculiarities: early mills produced coarse yarn for handlooms and for China; the swadeshi movement (from 1905) and the fall of yarn exports to China (from 1906) pushed mills to make cloth; the First World War cut Manchester imports and brought war orders, and Manchester never recovered its position. Yet small-scale and household units remained most of industry, and handloom output expanded, helped by the fly shuttle.

New products needed new buyers. Advertisements made products seem desirable and necessary and created new needs.

• Labels on Manchester cloth said "Made in Manchester" to promise quality, and often carried images of Indian gods and goddesses, giving the product a sense of divine approval and familiarity.
• Calendars carried advertisements into homes, tea shops and offices, reaching even people who could not read.
• Images of emperors and nawabs lent products royal prestige.
• Indian manufacturers made advertising a vehicle for swadeshi: buying Indian-made goods was presented as serving the nation.