Introduction:
In 1900, a popular music publisher E.T. Paull produced a music book that had a picture on the cover page announcing the ‘Dawn of the Century’.
At the centre of the picture is a goddess-like figure, the angel of progress, bearing the flag of the new century. She is gently perched on a wheel with wings, symbolising time.
Her flight is taking her into the future.
Floating about, behind her, are the signs of progress: railway, camera, machines, printing press and factory.
This glorification of machines and technology is even more marked in a picture which appeared on the pages of a trade magazine over a hundred years ago.
It shows two magicians.
The one at the top is Aladdin from the Orient who built a beautiful palace with his magic lamp.
The one at the bottom is the modern mechanic, who with his modern tools weaves a new magic: builds bridges, ships, towers and high rise buildings.
Aladdin is shown as representing the East and the past, the mechanic stands for the West and modernity.
Before the industrial revolution:
Histories of industrialisation very often begin with the setting up of the first factories.
Even before factories began to dot the landscape in England and Europe, there was large-scale industrial production for an international market.
This was not based on factories.
Many historians now refer to this phase of industrialisation as proto-industrialisation.
With the expansion of world trade and the acquisition of colonies in different parts of the world, the demand for goods began growing.
But merchants could not expand production within towns.
This was because here urban crafts and trade guilds (associations of producers that trained craftspeople, maintained control over production, regulated competition and prices, and restricted the entry of new people into the trade) were powerful.
Rulers granted different guilds the monopoly right to produce and trade in specific products.
It was therefore difficult for new merchants to set up business in towns. So they turned to the countryside.
This was a time when open fields were disappearing and commons were being enclosed.
Cottagers and poor peasants had to now look for alternative sources of income.
So when merchants came around and offered advances to produce goods for them, peasant households eagerly agreed.
Income from proto-industrial production supplemented their shrinking income from cultivation.
It also allowed them a fuller use of their family labour resources.
Within this system a close relationship developed between the town and the countryside.
Merchants were based in towns, purchased wool from a wool stapler, carried it to the spinners; the yarn (thread) that was spun was taken in subsequent stages of production to weavers, fullers, and then to dyers.
The finishing was done in London before the export merchant sold the cloth in the international market.
London in fact came to be known as a finishing centre.
A. The coming up of the factory:
The earliest factories in England came up by the 1730s.
But it was only in the late eighteenth century that the number of factories multiplied.
The first symbol of the new era was cotton.
Its production boomed in the late nineteenth century.
It was linked to a number of changes within the process of production.
A series of inventions in the eighteenth century increased the efficacy of each step of the production process (Carding, twisting and spinning and rolling).
Then Richard Arkwright created the cotton mill.
Now the costly new machines could be purchased, set up and maintained in the mill.
All the processes were brought together under one roof and management.
This allowed a more careful supervision over the production process, a watch over quality, and the regulation of labour.
In the early nineteenth century, factories increasingly became an intimate part of the English landscape.
B. The pace of industrial change:
First:
The most dynamic industries in Britain were clearly cotton and metals.
Growing at a rapid pace, cotton was the leading sector in the first phase of Industrialisation up to the 1840s.
After that the iron and steel industry led the way.
Second:
The new industries could not easily displace traditional industries.
Even at the end of the nineteenth century, less than 20 per cent of the total workforce was employed in technologically advanced industrial sectors.
Third:
The pace of change in the traditional industries was not set by steam-powered cotton or metal industries, it were the ordinary and small innovations which were the basis of growth.
Fourth:
Technological changes occurred slowly.
They did not spread dramatically across the industrial landscape.
New technology was expensive and merchants and industrialists were cautious about using it.
The machines often broke down and repair was costly.
They were not as effective as their inventors and manufacturers claimed
Consider the case of the steam engine.
James Watt improved the steam engine produced by Newcomen and patented the new engine in 1781.
His industrialist friend Mathew Boulton manufactured the new model But for years he could find no buyers.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were no more than 321 steam engines all over England.
So even the most powerful new technology that enhanced the productivity of labour manifold was slow to be accepted by industrialists.
Hand Labour and Steam Power:
Industrialists initially were not much interested in mechanisation.
In Victorian Britain there was no shortage of human labour.
Poor peasants and vagrants moved to the cities in large numbers in search of jobs, waiting for work.
So industrialists had no problem of labour shortage or high wage costs.
They did not want to introduce machines that got rid of human labour and required large capital investment.
In many industries the demand for labour was seasonal.
In all such industries where production fluctuated with the season, industrialists usually preferred hand labour, employing workers for the season.
Machines were oriented to producing uniforms, standardised goods for a mass market.
But the demand in the market was often for goods with intricate designs and specific shapes.
In Victorian Britain, the upper classes – the aristocrats and the bourgeoisie preferred things produced by hand.
Handmade products came to symbolise refinement and class.
They were better finished, individually produced, and carefully designed.
Machine-made goods were for export to the colonies.
In countries with labour shortage, industrialists were keen on using mechanical power so that the need for human labour can be minimised.
This was the case in nineteenth-century America.
Britain, however, had no problem hiring human hands.
A. Life of the workers:
The abundance of labour in the market affected the lives of workers.
As news of possible jobs travelled to the countryside, hundreds tramped to the cities.
But everyone was not lucky enough to get an instant job.
Many job seekers had to wait weeks, spending nights under bridges or in night shelters.
Some stayed in Night Refuges that were set up by private individuals; others went to the Casual Wards maintained by the Poor Law authorities.
Seasonality of work in many industries meant prolonged periods without work.
After the busy season was over, the poor were on the streets again.
Some either returned to the countryside or looked for odd jobs, which till the mid-nineteenth century were difficult to find.
Wages increased somewhat in the early nineteenth century.
But they tell us little about the welfare of the workers.
At the best of times till the mid nineteenth century, about 10 per cent of the urban population was extremely poor.
In periods of economic slump, like the 1830s, the proportion of unemployed went up to anything between 35 and 75 per cent in different regions.
The fear of unemployment made workers hostile to the introduction of new technology.
When the Spinning Jenny was introduced in the woollen industry, women who survived on hand spinning began attacking the new machines
Industrialisation in the colonies:
A. The age of Indian textiles:
Since ancient period silk and cotton goods from India dominated the International market in textiles.
Coarser cottons were produced in many countries, but the finer varieties often came from India.
A vibrant trade operated through the north-west frontier, through mountain passes and across deserts as well as the main pre-colonial ports.
Surat connected India to the Gulf and Red Sea Ports; Masulipatam and Hoogly in Bengal had trade links with Southeast Asian ports.
A variety of Indian merchants and bankers were involved in this network of export trade-financing production, carrying goods and supplying exporters.
Decline of the old Ports and the rise of new one:
By the 1750s the network, controlled by Indian merchants, was breaking down.
The European companies gradually gained power.
This resulted in a decline of the old ports of Surat and Hoogly through which local merchants had operated.
Exports from these ports fell dramatically, the credit that had financed the earlier trade began drying up, and the local bankers slowly went bankrupt.
In Surat, the gross value of trade dropped down to 3 million from 16 million.
While Surat and Hoogly decayed, Bombay and Calcutta grew.
This shift from the old ports to the new ones was an indicator of the growth of colonial power.
Trade through the new ports came to be controlled by European companies, and was carried in European ships.
B. What happened to weavers?
Before establishing political power in Bengal and Carnatic in the 1760s and 1770 5 the East India Company had found it difficult to ensure a regular supply of goods for export.
The French, Dutch Portuguese as well as the local traders competed in the market.
However, once the East India Company established political power, it could assert a monopoly right to trade.
It proceeded to develop a system of management and control that would eliminate competition, control costs, and ensure regular supplies of cotton and silk goods.
This it did through a series of steps:
First:
The Company tried to eliminate the existing traders and brokers connected with the cloth trade, and establish a more direct control over the weaver.
It appointed a paid servant called the gomastha to supervise weavers, collect supplies, and examine the quality of cloth.
Second:
It prevented Company weavers from dealing with other buyers.
One way of doing this was through the system of advances.
Once an order was placed, the weavers were given loans to purchase the raw material for their production.
Very often Gomastha and weavers clashed:
Many weavers had small plots of land which they had earlier cultivated along with weaving, and the produce from this took care of their family needs.
Now they had to lease out the land and devote all their time to weaving.
Weaving, in fact, required the labour of the entire family.
Earlier supply merchants had very often lived within the weaving villages, and had a close relationship with the weavers, looking after their needs and helping them in times of crisis.
The new gomasthas were outsiders, they acted arrogantly, marched into villages with sepoys and peons, and punished weavers for delays in supply- often beating and flogging them.
The weavers lost the space to bargain for prices and sell to different buyers: the price they received from the Company was miserably low and the loans they had accepted tied them to the Company.
In many places in Carnatic and Bengal, weavers deserted villages and migrated, setting up looms in other villages where they had some family relation.
Elsewhere, weavers along with the village traders revolted, began refusing loans, closing down their workshops and taking to agricultural labour.
C. Manchester comes to India:
In 1772, Henry Patullo, a Company official, had ventured to say that the demand for Indian textiles could never reduce, because of its quality.
Yet by the beginning of the nineteenth century we see the beginning of a long decline of textile exports from India.
Why did this happen? What were its implications? As cotton industries developed in England, industrial groups began worrying about imports from other countries.
They pressurised the government to impose import duties on cotton textiles, persuaded the East India Company to sell British manufactures in Indian markets as well.
Exports of British cotton goods increased dramatically in the early nineteenth century.
Problems faced by cotton weavers In India:
Their export market collapsed, and the local market shrank, being glutted with Manchester imports.
Produced by machines at lower costs, the imported cotton goods were so cheap that weavers could not easily compete with them.
By the 1860s, weavers faced a new problem.
They could not get sufficient supply of raw cotton of good quality.
As raw cotton exports from India increased, the price of raw cotton shot up.
Weavers in India were starved of supplies and forced to buy raw cotton exorbitant prices.
By the end of the nineteenth century, weavers and other craftspeople faced yet another problem.
Factories in India began production, flooding the market with machine- goods. How could weaving industries possibly survive?
Factories come up:
The first cotton mill in Bombay came up in 1854.
By 1862 four mills were at work. Around the same time jute mills came up in Bengal, the first being set up in 1855 and another one in 1862.
In north India, the Elgin Mill was started in Kanpur in the 1860s, and a year later the first cotton mill of Ahmedabad was set up.
By 1874, the first spinning and weaving mill of Madras began production.
A. The early entrepreneurs:
The history of many business groups goes back to trade with China.
From the late eighteenth century, the British in India began exporting opium to China and took tea from China to England.
Many Indians became junior players in this trade, providing finance, procuring supplies, and shipping consignments.
Having earned through trade, some of these businessmen had visions of developing industrial enterprises in India.
In industrial investment, setting up six joint-stock companies in the 1830s and 1840s.
In Bombay, Parsis like Dinshaw Petit and Jamsetjee Nusserwanjee Tata, Seth Hukumchand, a Marwari businessman set up the first Indian jute mill in Calcutta in 1917.
So did the father as well as grandfather of the famous industrialist G.D. Birla.
Capital was accumulated through other trade networks.
Some merchants from Madras traded with Burma while others had links with the Middle East and East Africa.
There were yet other commercial groups, which operated within India, carrying goods from one place to another, bank in money, transferring funds between cities, and financing traders.
When opportunities of investment in industries opened up, many of them set up factories.
Problems faced by early Indian entrepreneurs:
As colonial control over Indian trade tightened, the space within which Indian merchants could function became increasingly limited.
They were barred from trading with Europe in manufactured goods, and had to export mostly raw materials and food required by the British.
They were also gradually edged out of the shipping business.
Till the First World War, European Managing Agencies in fact controlled a large sector of Indian industries.
These Agencies mobilised capital, set up joint-stock companies and managed them.
In most instances Indian financiers provided the capital while the European Agencies made all investment and business decisions.
The European merchant-industrialists had their own chambers of commerce which Indian businessmen were not allowed to join.
Three of the biggest ones wire Bird Heiglers & Co. Andrew Yule, and Jardine Skinner & Co.
B. Where did the workers come from?
Factories needed workers. With the expansion of factories, this demand increased.
In most industrial regions workers came from the districts around.
Peasants and artisans who found no work in the village went to the industrial centres in search of work.
Over 50% workers in Bombay cotton industry came from Ratnagiri and from Kanpur.
Most often millworkers moved between the village and the city, returning to their village homes during harvests and festivals.
Over time, as news of employment spread, workers travelled great distances in the hope of work in the mills.
From the United Provinces, for instance, they went to work in the textile mills of Bombay and in the jute mills of Calcutta.
Jobber:
Getting jobs was always difficult; the numbers seeking work were always more than the jobs available. Entry into the mills was also restricted.
Industrialists usually employed a jobber to get new recruits.
Very often the jobber was an old and trusted worker.
He got people from his village, ensured them jobs, helped them settle in the city and provided them money in times of crisis.
The jobber therefore became a person with some authority and power.
He began demanding money and gifts for his favour and controlling the lives of workers.
The peculiarities of industrial growth:
European Managing Agencies, established tea and coffee plantations, acquiring land at cheap rates from the colonial government; and they invested in mining, indigo and jute.
Most of these were products required primarily for export trade and not for sale in India.
When Indian businessmen began setting up industries in the late nineteenth century, they avoided competing with Manchester goods in the Indian market.
The early cotton mills in India produced coarse cotton yarn (thread) rather than fabric.
The yarn produced in Indian spinning mills was used by handloom weavers in India or exported to China.
By the first decade of the twentieth century, changes affected the pattern of industrialisation.
As the swadeshi movement gathered momentum, nationalists mobilised people to boycott foreign cloth.
Industrial groups pressurised the government to increase tariff protection and grant other concessions. From 1906, industrialists in India began shifting from yam to cloth production.
Cotton piece goods production in India doubled between 1900 and 1912.
Impact of First World War on British & Indian Industries:
Yet, till the First World War, industrial growth was slow.
But as the British mills got busy with war production to meet the needs of the army.
Manchester imports into India declined; Indian mills had a vast home market to supply.
As the war prolonged, Indian factories were called upon to supply war needs.
New factories were set up and old ones ran multiple shifts.
Many new workers were employed and everyone was made to work longer hours.
Over the war years industrial production boomed.
After the war, Manchester could never recapture its old position in the Indian market.
Cotton production collapsed and exports of cotton cloth from Britain fell dramatically.
Within the colonies, local industrialists gradually consolidated their position, substituting foreign manufactures and capturing the home market
A. Small-scale industries predominate:
While factory industries grew steadily after the war, large industries formed only a small segment of the economy.
Most of them were located in Bengal and Bombay.
Over the rest of the country, small-scale production continued to predominate.
Only a small proportion of the total industrial labour force worked in registered factories.
The rest worked in small workshops and household units, often located in alleys and by lanes, invisible to the passer-by.
In some instances, handicrafts production actually expanded in the twentieth century.
As in the case of the handloom sector, while cheap machine-made thread wiped out the spinning industry in the nineteenth century, the weavers survived, despite problems.
In the twentieth century, handloom cloth production expanded steadily: almost trebling between 1900 and 1940.
B. How did this happen?
Technological changes helped handicrafts people to improve production without excessively pushing up costs.
Now weavers were using looms with a fly shuttle, it increased productivity per worker, speeded up production and reduced labour demand.
There were several other small innovations that helped weavers improve their productivity and compete with the mill sector.
Certain groups of weavers were in a better position than others to survive the competition with mill industries.
The coarser cloth was bought by the poor and its demand fluctuated violently.
In times of bad harvests and famines, when the rural poor had little to eat, and their cash income disappeared, they could not possibly buy cloth this affected the weavers who produced coarse cloth.
The demand for the finer varieties bought by the well-to-do was more stable.
The rich could buy these even when the poor starved.
Famines did not affect the sale of Banarasi or Baluchari saris.
Moreover, as you have seen, mills could not imitate specialised weaves.
Saris with woven borders, or the famous lungis and handkerchiefs of Madras, could not be easily displaced by mill production.
Some weavers and other craftspeople lived hard lives and worked long hours.
Very often the entire household – including all the women and children – had to work at various stages of the production process.
Their life and labour was integral to the process of industrialisation.
Market for goods:
When new products are produced people have to be persuaded to buy them.
They have to feel like using the product.
How was this done?
One way in which new consumers are created is through advertisements.
Advertisements make products appear desirable and necessary.
From the very beginning of the industrial age, advertisements have played a part expanding the markets for products, and in shaping a new consumer culture.
When Manchester industrialists began selling cloth in India, they put label on the cloth bundles.
The label was needed to make the place of manufacture and the name of the company familiar to the buyer.
The label was also to be a mark of quality.
When buyers saw ‘MADE IN MANCHESTER’ written in bold on the label, they were expected to feel confident about buying the cloth.
Labels not only carried words and texts also carried images and were very often beautifully illustrated.
Images of Indian gods and goddesses regularly appeared on these labels.
It was as if the association with gods gave divine approval to the goods being sold.
The imprinted Indian image was intended to make the manufacture from a foreign land appear somewhat familiar to Indian people.
By the late nineteenth century, manufacturers were printing calendars to popularise their magazines, calendars were used even by people who could not read.
They were hung in tea shops and in poor people’s homes just as much as in offices and middle-class apartments.
Like the images of gods, figures of important personages, of emperors and nawabs, adomed advertisement and calendars.
The message: if you respect the royal figure, then respect this product; when the product was being used by kings, or produced under royal command, its quality could not be questioned.
When Indian manufacturers advertised, the nationalist message was clear and loud. If you care for the nation then buy products that Indians produce.
Conclusion:
Clearly, the age of industries has meant major technological changes, growth of factories, and the making of a new industrial labour force.
However, as you have seen, hand technology and small-scale production remained an important part of the industrial landscape.
