JAC Board Class 10 Social Science Notes History Chapter 4 The Age of Industrialisation
→ The first on Britain, the first industrial nation, and then India, where the pattern of industrial change was conditioned by colonial rule.
→ Before the Industrial Revolution:
- 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.
- In the seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, urban crafts and trade guilds maintained a strong hold over production, regulated competition and prices, trained craftspeople, and restricted the entry of new people into the trade. They were given the monopoly rights to trade and produce by the rulers.
- Therefore, merchants from the towns in Europe began moving to the countryside, supplying money to peasants and artisans, persuading them to produce for an international market.
- Income from proto-industrial production supplemented their shrinking income from cultivation. It also allowed them a fuller use of their family labour resources.
- This system helped to build a close relation-ship between the town and the countryside. Merchants were based in towns but the work was done mostly in the countryside.
- London came to be known as a finishing centre before the export merchant sold the cloth in the international market.
→ The Coming Up of the Factory:
- The earliest factories in England came up by the 1730s, which multiplied in the late eighteenth century.
- The first symbol of the new era was cotton. Its production boomed in the late nineteenth century. In 1760, Britain was importing 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton to feed its cotton industry. By 1787, the import rose to 22 million pounds. This increase was because of series of inventions in the eighteenth century, which increased the efficacy of each step of the production process, such as carding, twisting and spinning, and rolling.
- This enhanced the output per worker, enabling each worker to produce more, and they made possible the production of stronger threads and yam.
- Richard Arkwright created the cotton mill.
- Cloth production was spread all over the countryside and carried out within village households.
→ The Pace of Industrial Change:
- This section analyses how rapid was the process of industrialisation and if it meant only the growth of factory industries.
- Cotton was the leading sector in the first phase of industrialisation up to the 1840s. With the expansion of railways, in England from the 1840s and in the colonies from the 1860s, the demand for iron and steel increased rapidly.
- At the end of the nineteenth century, less than 20 per cent of the total workforce was employed in technologically advanced industrial sectors. Textiles was a dynamic sector, but a large portion of the output was produced within domestic units.
- Ordinary and small innovations were the basis of growth in many non-mechanised sectors, such as food processing, building, pottery, glass work, tanning, furniture making, and production of implements.
- Technological changes did not spread across the industrial landscape. It was expensive, and merchants and industrialists were cautious of using it, as repair was costly.
- 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. Out of 321 steam engines all over England, 80 were in cotton industries, nine in wool industries, and rest in mining, canal works and iron works.
- Historians came to increasingly recognise that the typical worker in the mid-nineteenth century was not a machine operator but the traditional craftsperson and labourer.
→ Hand Labour and Steam Power:
- In Victorian Britain, there was plenty of labour and the wages were low.
- Industrialists 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. Industrialists preferred hand labour, employing workers for the season.
- A range of products could be produced by hand only with intricate designs and specific shapes’.
- In Victorian Britain, the upper classes like the aristocrats and the bourgeoisie, preferred things produced by hand. It came to symbolise refinement and class.
- In countries with labour shortage, industrialists were keen on using mechanical power. This was the case in nineteenth- century America.
→ Life of the Workers:
- The abundance of labour and seasonality of work affected the lives of workers. Many workers had to wait for weeks, spend nights under bridges or in night shelters.
- Though wages increased in the early nineteenth century, but these average figures did not reflect the variations between trades and fluctuations from year to year. In the periods of economic slump in 1830s, the unemployment went up between 35 and 75 per cent in different regions.
- The fear of unemployment made workers hostile to the introduction of new technology. When Spinning Jenny was introduced in the woollen industry, women who survived on hand spinning attacked the new machines. The conflict continued for a long time.
- After the 1840s, many building and construction activities intensified in the cities, which improved the employment opportunities. Roads were widened, railway lines were extended, tunnels dug, drainage and sewers laid, and rivers embanked. The number of workers in the transport sector doubled in the 1840s, and again doubled in subsequent 30 years.
→ Industrialisation in the Colonies:
This section studies how a colony industrialises. It researches not only on factory industries but also the non- mechanised sector.
→ The Age of Indian Textiles
- Before the age of machine industries, silk and cotton goods from India dominated the international market in textiles. While many countries produced coarser cottons, India produced the finer varieties.
- Armenian and Persian merchants took the goods from Punjab to Afghanistan, eastern Persia and Central Asia.
- A vibrant sea trade operated through the main pre-colonial ports. Surat on the Gujarat coast connected India to the Gulf and Red Sea Ports. Masulipatam on the Coromandel Coast and Hoogly in Bengal had trade links with Southeast Asian ports.
- A variety of Indian merchants and bankers were associated with the network of export trade.
- The network however broke down by 1750s. The European countries got the monopoly rights to trade through various strategies, which resulted in the decline of old ports of Surat and Hoogly. Bombay and Calcutta ports grew. Trade through the new ports was controlled by European companies and was carried out in European ships.
→ What Happened to Weavers?
- The French, Dutch, Portuguese and the local traders competed in the market to secure woven cloth. The East India Company found it difficult to get regular supply of goods for their export before establishing political power in Bengal and Carnatic in the 1760s and 1770s.
- Once the East India Company established political power, it could assert the monopoly right to trade. It used a system of management and control that would dominate competition, control costs, and ensure regular supplies of cotton and silk goods.
- The Company appointed a paid servant, called gomastha, to supervise weavers, collect supplies and examine the quality of cloth. They started the system of advances, wherein once an order was made, the weavers were given loans to purchase raw materials for their production. This tied the weaverSrto the Company and they could not trade their cloth with any other buyers but hand over the cloth only to the gomastha.
- Earlier the supply merchants had often lived within the weaving villages, and had a close relationship with the weavers. However, the gomasthas were outsiders, with no long-term social link with the village. They did not understand the problems of the weavers, acted arrogantly, marched into the villages with sepoys and beat and flogged the weavers. The weavers lost their rights to bargain for prices and sell to different buyers.
- In many places in Carnatic and Bengal, weavers deserted villages and migrated, setting up looms in other villages where they had some family relation. In other places, weavers along with village traders revolted against the Company and its officials.
→ Manchester Comes to India
- As cotton industries developed in England, industrial groups began to pressurise the government to impose import duties on cotton textiles and persuaded East India Company to sell British manufactures in Indian markets.
- Exports of British cotton goods increased dramatically in the early nineteenth century. Cotton weavers in India faced two problems at the same time: their export market collapsed and the local market shrank, being glutted with Manchester imports. They could not compete with the machine-made imported cotton goods, which were cheaper.
- By the 1860s, the weavers faced a new problem. They could not get enough supply of good quality raw cotton. With the American Civil War, cotton supplies from US were cut off and Britain turned to India for supplies. The price of raw cotton shot up when raw cotton exports from India increased. Weavers in India were forced to buy raw cotton at exorbitant prices.
- Later, by the end of the nineteenth century, factories in India flooded the market with machine goods, which affected the weavers and other craftspeople.
→ Factories Come Up:
The first cotton mill came up in Bombay in 1854. The first jute mill was set up in Bengal in 1855 and then in 1862. The Elgin Mill was started in Kanpur in the 1860s and a year later the first cotton mill of Ahmedabad was set up. The first spinning and weaving mill of Madras began production by 1874.
→ The Early Enterpreneurs:
- In Bengal, Dwarkanath Tagore made his fortune in China trade, before he turned to industrial investment and set up six joint- stock companies in the 1830s and 1840s. They provided finance, procuring supplies, and shipping consignments to the British.
- In Bombay, Parsis like Dinshaw Petit and Jamsetjee Nusserwanjee Tata who built huge industrial empires in India, accumulated their wealth partly from exports to China, and partly from raw cotton shipments to England.
- Seth Hukumchand, a Marwari businessman set up the first Indian jute mill in Calcutta in 1917.
- Father and grandfather of G.D. Birla also had their business.
- While some merchants from Madras traded with Burma, others had trade links with Middle East and East Africa.
- As colonial control tightened over India, they could trade with Europe in manufactured goods, and piostly had to export raw materials and food grains. They were also gradually etched out of the shipping business.
- The European Managing Agencies controlled a large sector of Indian industries till the First World War.’While Indian financers provided the capital, the European Agencies made all investment and business decisions. The European-merchant industrialists had their own chamber of commerce which Indian businessmen were not allowed to join.
→ Where Did the Workers Come From?
- In 1901, there were 584,000 workers in India, which increased to 2,436,000 by 1946.
- Peasants and artisans went to industrial , centres in search of work when there was no work in the village.
- The workers of Bombay cotton industries came from neighbouring district of Ratnagiri, while workers working in the mills of Kanpur came from the villages within the district of Kanpur.
- Workers went home during festivals and harvest season.
- There were workers from the United Provinces working in textile mills of Bombay and jute mills of Calcutta.
- As entry into the mills were restricted, industrialists employed a jobber to get new recruits. The jobber became a person with authority and power.
→ The Peculiarities of Industrial Growth
- European Managing Agencies established tea and coffee plantations. They acquired land at cheap rates from the colonial government, and invested in mining, indigo and jute.
- As the Swadeshi movement gained momentum, the industrial groups organised themselves to protect collective interests, pressurising the government to increase tariff protection and grant other concessions. Cotton piece-goods production in India doubled between 1900 and 1912.
- During the First World War, British mills got busy to meet the needs of the army. Manchester imports into India declined. Indian factories suddenly had a vast market to supply. New factories were set up and old ones ran multiple shifts.
- After the war, Manchester could not recapture its hold in the market and not able to face the competition with US, Germany and Japan. Cotton production collapsed and exports of cotton cloth from Britain fell dramatically.
- Within the colonies, local industrialists gradually consolidated their position, substituting foreign manufacturers and capturing the home market.
→ Small-scale Industries Predominate
- In the twentieth century, handloom cloth production expanded steadily; almost trebling between 1900 and 1940. This was partly because of technological changes.
- By the second decade of the twentieth century, weavers used looms with a fly shuttle, which increased productivity per worker, speeded up production and reduced labour demand.
- Certain weavers were in a better position than others to survive the competition with mill industries. Coarse cloth was brought by the poor and the demand fluctuated violently. While famines did not affect the sale of Banarasi or Baluchari saris, the rural poor were affected.
- Though the weavers and craftspeople did not prosper, had hard lives and long working hours but continued to expand production.
→ Market for Goods:
- People had to be convinced about purchasing the finished products. Advertisements played a part in expanding the markets for products and in shaping a new consumer culture.
- When Manchester industrialists started selling their cloth in India, they labelled in bold MADE IN MANCHESTER, which was done to make the customers confident about buying the cloth.
- Labels Qpt only consisted of words, but many products had images of Indian gods and goddesses, nawabs and emperors, important personalities in advertisements to draw the attention of consumers towards the products.