Chapter 4: The Age of Industrialisation Application Questions | history Class 10 CBSE

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Chapter 4: The Age of Industrialisation Application Questions | history Class 10 CBSE | ByteNotes.in

Application Question

Medium difficulty • Concept in a practical situation

Medium

Question 1

Applied Concept

A merchant in seventeenth-century England is considering whether to set up a production unit in a town or in a village. With reference to the chapter, advise him on the pros and cons of each option.

Setting up in a town means facing powerful guilds that control production, restrict entry of new merchants, regulate prices and hold monopoly rights granted by rulers — making it legally and practically difficult for a new merchant to compete.
Moving to the countryside allows the merchant to employ poor peasants and artisans who have lost their common lands and are eager for supplementary income; he can give them advances and get goods produced at lower cost with no guild interference.
However, rural production is harder to supervise for quality and regularity; production is dispersed across many households, and the merchant must manage a complex supply chain — from wool stapler to spinner to weaver to fuller to dyer — without any centralised control, which eventually made factory production more efficient.

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Application Question

Medium difficulty • Concept in a practical situation

Medium

Question 2

Applied Concept

You are a historian studying the Industrial Revolution in Britain. A student insists that by 1850 almost all production was done in factories. How would you correct this misconception using evidence from the chapter?

At the end of the nineteenth century, less than 20 per cent of the total workforce was employed in technologically advanced industrial sectors; the majority of workers were still traditional craftspeople and labourers, not machine operators.
At the start of the nineteenth century there were only 321 steam engines in all of England — a figure far too small to power a fully mechanised economy — and even cotton, the most dynamic sector, had large portions of output produced in domestic units outside factories.
Non-mechanised sectors like food processing, building, pottery, glasswork, tanning, furniture-making and production of implements continued to grow through small innovations rather than factory production; the typical mid-nineteenth-century British worker was a craftsperson, not a factory hand.

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Application Question

Medium difficulty • Concept in a practical situation

Medium

Question 3

Applied Concept

Imagine you are an Indian weaver in the 1850s. Write a brief account of the multiple pressures you face in trying to continue your craft.

Your export markets have been completely destroyed: piece-goods that were 33 per cent of India's exports in 1811–12 are now only 3 per cent as cheap Manchester cloth floods the market, making it impossible to sell your cloth abroad.
Domestically, your customers are buying machine-made British cloth that is cheaper and more widely available; the Commissioner of Patna reports that the manufacturing of cloth at Jahanabad has entirely ceased due to competition from Manchester goods.
You are also bound by East India Company advances; the gomastha — an outsider who treats you with contempt and uses sepoys to enforce his demands — pays you miserably low prices and prevents you from selling to any other buyer, trapping you in a cycle of debt and dependence.

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Application Question

Medium difficulty • Concept in a practical situation

Medium

Question 4

Applied Concept

With reference to the chapter, explain why an industrialist in nineteenth-century Britain would prefer to hire a large workforce of hand labourers rather than invest in a steam-powered machine for a seasonal industry like brewing.

In a seasonal industry like brewing, production peaked in winter and was slack in other months; hiring workers for the season and releasing them afterwards was far cheaper than running an expensive machine through the entire year including slack periods.
Steam engines were expensive to purchase, often unreliable and costly to repair; with wages kept low by an abundance of unemployed workers moving from the countryside, there was no financial compulsion to invest in risky mechanical technology.
Hand labour also offered flexibility — the employer could scale up or down according to seasonal demand without the fixed costs of maintaining machinery — while seasonal workers desperate for income accepted whatever wages and conditions were offered.

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Application Question

Medium difficulty • Concept in a practical situation

Medium

Question 5

Applied Concept

The port city of Surat was once a thriving centre of trade. Using evidence from the chapter, explain the factors that led to its decline in the eighteenth century.

European companies, particularly the East India Company, gradually secured monopoly trading rights from Indian courts, taking over the trade routes through which Indian merchants had operated and diverting commerce to Company-controlled ports.
The gross value of trade through Surat fell from Rs 16 million at the end of the seventeenth century to just Rs 3 million by the 1740s; the credit networks that financed Surat trade dried up as local bankers went bankrupt and old trading houses collapsed.
As Bombay grew under colonial control, trade that had flowed through Surat was redirected to the new colonial port; European ships and companies dominated this new port, leaving no place for the Indian merchants and brokers who had built Surat's commercial prosperity.

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Application Question

Medium difficulty • Concept in a practical situation

Medium

Question 6

Applied Concept

A factory owner in colonial India wants to hire workers for his new cotton mill. Based on the chapter, describe the process he would follow and the social dynamics involved.

The factory owner would employ a jobber — an old and trusted worker from the factory — to recruit new hands; the jobber would go to his own village and bring acquaintances, using his social network to fill vacancies rather than any formal hiring process.
Workers would need to travel great distances — for example, over 50 per cent of Bombay mill workers in 1911 came from Ratnagiri district — and the jobber would help new arrivals settle in the unfamiliar city, provide loans in emergencies and mediate between workers and management.
Over time, the jobber would accumulate power and begin demanding money and gifts in return for securing jobs; this transformed him from a helpful intermediary into an exploitative middleman who controlled workers' employment and livelihoods.

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Chapter 4: The Age of Industrialisation | Application Questions

A merchant in seventeenth-century England is considering whether to set up a production unit in a town or in a village. With reference to the chapter, advise him on the pros and cons of each option.

You are a historian studying the Industrial Revolution in Britain. A student insists that by 1850 almost all production was done in factories. How would you correct this misconception using evidence from the chapter?

Imagine you are an Indian weaver in the 1850s. Write a brief account of the multiple pressures you face in trying to continue your craft.

With reference to the chapter, explain why an industrialist in nineteenth-century Britain would prefer to hire a large workforce of hand labourers rather than invest in a steam-powered machine for a seasonal industry like brewing.

The port city of Surat was once a thriving centre of trade. Using evidence from the chapter, explain the factors that led to its decline in the eighteenth century.

A factory owner in colonial India wants to hire workers for his new cotton mill. Based on the chapter, describe the process he would follow and the social dynamics involved.

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