Comprehensive theory, key formulas, diagrams, and memory aids for The Age of Industrialisation.
The history of industrialisation is often associated with the growth of factory industries. When we talk of industrial workers, we mean factory workers. When we talk of industrial production, we mean factory production. However, it is essential to understand that industrialisation did not begin with the establishment of factories. There was a phase of large-scale industrial production for an international market that existed long before the first factories were built.
Historians refer to the phase of industrialisation before the factory system as proto-industrialisation. 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.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 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. 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 because urban crafts and trade guilds were very powerful. These were associations of producers that trained craftspeople, maintained control over production, regulated competition and prices, and restricted the entry of new people into the trade. Therefore, merchants turned to the countryside. Poor peasants and artisans, who had small plots of land that could not provide work for all members of the household, eagerly agreed to take advances from merchants. This allowed them to remain in the countryside and continue to cultivate their small plots while simultaneously producing goods for the merchants. The proto-industrial system was part of a network of commercial exchanges. It was controlled by merchants, and the goods were produced by a vast number of producers working within their family farms, not in factories.
The earliest factories in England came up by the 1730s. However, 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. A series of inventions in the eighteenth century increased the efficacy of each step of the production process (carding, twisting and spinning, and rolling). They enhanced the output per worker, enabling each worker to produce more, and they made possible the production of stronger threads and yarn. Richard Arkwright created the cotton mill. Within 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 labor, all of which had been difficult to do when production was in the countryside.
How rapid was the process of industrialisation? Does industrialisation mean only the growth of factory industries? First, the most dynamic industries in Britain were clearly cotton and metals. 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, spurred by the expansion of railways. Second, the new industries could not easily displace traditional industries. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, less than 20 percent 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, but they did not remain entirely stagnant either. Small innovations were the basis of growth in many non-mechanized sectors such as food processing, building, pottery, glass work, tanning, and furniture making. Fourth, technological changes occurred slowly. New technology was expensive and merchants and industrialists were cautious about using it. The machines often broke down and repair was costly.
In Victorian Britain, there was no shortage of human labor. Poor peasants and vagrants moved to the cities in large numbers in search of jobs, waiting for work. Industrialists had no problem of labor shortage or high wage costs. They did not want to introduce machines that got rid of human labor and required large capital investment. In many industries, the demand for labor was seasonal. Gas works and breweries were especially busy through the cold months, requiring more workers. Bookbinders and printers catered to the Christmas demand. In all such industries where production fluctuated with the season, industrialists usually preferred hand labor, employing workers only for the season. A range of products could only be produced with hand labor. Machines were oriented to producing uniform, standardized goods for a mass market. But the demand in the market was often for goods with intricate designs and specific shapes, which required human skill, not mechanical technology. The aristocrats and the bourgeoisie in Victorian Britain preferred things produced by hand because handmade products came to symbolize refinement and class.
The history of industrialisation in India involves both the decline of traditional hand-woven textiles and the gradual rise of factory production under colonial rule.
Before the age of machine industries, silk and cotton goods from India dominated the international market in textiles. While coarser cottons were produced in many countries, the finer varieties often came from India. 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; Masulipatnam on the Coromandel coast and Hooghly 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.
The consolidation of East India Company power after the 1760s did not initially lead to a decline in textile exports from India. British cotton industries had not yet expanded, and Indian fine textiles were in great demand in Europe. However, once the East India Company established political power, it asserted 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. 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. Once an order was placed, the weavers were given advances to purchase the raw material for their production. Those who took loans had to hand over the cloth they produced to the gomastha. They could not take it to any other trader. As loans flowed in, weavers eagerly took the advances, hoping to earn more. However, many weavers had small plots of land that they had earlier cultivated. Now they had to lease out the land and devote all their time to weaving, requiring the labor of the entire family. Soon, reports of clashes between weavers and gomasthas began to emerge. The gomasthas were outsiders, with no long-term social link with the village. They acted arrogantly, marched into villages with sepoys, and punished weavers for delays in supply. Weavers lost the space to bargain for prices and the prices they received from the Company were miserably low.
In the nineteenth century, industrial groups in Britain began worrying about imports from other countries. They pressured the government to impose import duties on cotton textiles so that Manchester goods could sell in Britain without facing any competition from outside. At the same time, industrialists 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. By 1850, cotton piece-goods constituted over 31 percent of the value of Indian imports. Machine-made cotton goods from Manchester 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. When the American Civil War broke out and cotton supplies from the US were cut off, Britain turned to India. As raw cotton exports from India increased, the price of raw cotton shot up, starving the local weavers of supplies. 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.
The first cotton mill in Bombay came up in 1854. By 1862, four mills were at work with 94,000 spindles and 2,150 looms. Around the same time, jute mills came up in Bengal, the first being set up in 1855. 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.
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 Bengal, Dwarkanath Tagore made his fortune in the China trade before turning to industrial investment. In Bombay, Parsis like Dinshaw Petit and Jamsetjee Nusserwanjee Tata built huge industrial empires in India. Seth Hukumchand, a Marwari businessman who set up the first Indian jute mill in Calcutta in 1917, also traded with China. 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 grains – raw cotton, opium, wheat, and indigo – required by the British.
Factories needed workers. In most industrial regions, workers came from the districts around. Peasants and artisans who found no work in the village went to the industrial centers in search of work. Over 50 percent of workers in the Bombay cotton industries in 1911 came from the neighboring district of Ratnagiri. Getting jobs was always difficult, even when mills multiplied. The numbers seeking work were always more than the jobs available. Employers usually employed a jobber to get new recruits. The jobber was an old and trusted worker who got people from his village, ensured them jobs, and helped them settle in the city. The jobber therefore became a person with some authority and power, often demanding money and gifts for his favor.
The age of industrialisation was not merely about the establishment of factories; it was a complex transition that reshaped economies and societies worldwide. Beginning with a proto-industrial phase where rural households produced goods for international markets, the shift to factory-based production brought unprecedented technological advancements but also displaced traditional livelihoods. In colonies like India, the impact of the Industrial Revolution was heavily skewed by British imperial policies. While Manchester goods decimated local weaving industries, early Indian entrepreneurs eventually laid the foundations for domestic industry, drawing a vast workforce from rural areas and initiating a new era of industrial capitalism in the subcontinent.