Chapter 4: The Age of Industrialisation | Summary

The earliest factories in England appeared by the 1730s, but their number multiplied only in the late eighteenth century. Cotton was the first symbol of the new era. Britain's import of raw cotton soared from 2.5 million pounds in 1760 to 22 million pounds by 1787. A series of inventions increased the efficiency of each step of production — carding, twisting, spinning and rolling — and enhanced output per worker. Richard Arkwright created the cotton mill, which brought all production processes under one roof.

The factory system allowed careful supervision of the production process, quality control and regulation of labour — all difficult to achieve when production was dispersed across the countryside. By the early nineteenth century, factories had become an intimate part of the English landscape. However, historians have noted that focusing entirely on the factory means ignoring the bylanes and workshops where production still continued, revealing how historical writing itself is shaped by what historians choose to notice and what they ignore.

The most dynamic industries in Britain were cotton and metals. Cotton led industrialisation up to the 1840s; iron and steel took over thereafter, driven by the expansion of railways. By 1873, Britain exported iron and steel worth £77 million — double the value of its cotton exports. Yet the pace of industrial change was not as rapid as popular imagination suggests. At the end of the nineteenth century, less than 20 per cent of the total workforce was employed in technologically advanced sectors. A large portion of textile output was produced outside factories in domestic units.

Technological change was slow and cautious. New machines were expensive and often broke down; repair was costly. The steam engine, patented by James Watt in 1781, had no more than 321 units across England at the start of the nineteenth century. Small innovations drove growth in non-mechanised sectors like food processing, building, pottery, glass work, tanning and furniture making. Historians now recognise that the typical worker in mid-nineteenth-century Britain was not a machine operator but a traditional craftsperson or labourer.

Victorian Britain had an abundance of cheap human labour. Poor peasants and vagrants moved to cities in search of work, keeping wages low. Industrialists therefore had little incentive to invest in machines. In many industries, demand for labour was seasonal — gas works and breweries were busiest in winter, while book-binders and printers needed extra hands before December. In such industries, employers preferred hand labour hired only for the season.

Hand labour was also preferred for producing intricate, customised goods that machines could not easily replicate. In mid-nineteenth-century Britain, 500 varieties of hammers and 45 kinds of axes were produced, requiring human skill. The upper classes preferred handmade products as symbols of refinement and class. Machine-made goods were largely for export to the colonies. In labour-scarce countries like nineteenth-century America, industrialists eagerly adopted mechanical power, but Britain's labour surplus made that unnecessary.

The abundance of labour in the market profoundly affected workers' lives. Getting a job depended heavily on networks of friendship and kinship. Job-seekers who lacked such connections waited weeks in the city, sleeping under bridges or in night shelters. Seasonality of work meant prolonged periods without income. While wages increased somewhat in the early nineteenth century, real wages fell during the Napoleonic Wars when prices rose sharply. At the best of times, about 10 per cent of the urban population were extremely poor; in slumps like the 1830s, unemployment could reach 35 to 75 per cent in different regions.

The fear of unemployment made workers hostile to new technology. When the Spinning Jenny was introduced in the woollen industry, women who depended on hand spinning attacked the machines. This conflict over the jenny continued for a long time. Building activity from the 1840s onwards opened new employment opportunities — roads were widened, railway stations constructed, tunnels dug and sewers laid. The number of workers in the transport industry doubled in the 1840s and doubled again in the following thirty years.

Before machine industries, India dominated the international textile market. Coarser cottons were produced in many countries but finer varieties often came from India. Armenian and Persian merchants carried Indian textiles through mountain passes to Afghanistan, Persia and Central Asia. Sea trade operated through ports like Surat on the Gujarat coast (linked to the Gulf and Red Sea), Masulipatam on the Coromandel coast and Hoogly in Bengal (linked to Southeast Asia). Indian merchants, bankers and supply merchants managed this vast export network.

By the 1750s this network was breaking down as European companies secured trading concessions and then monopoly rights from local courts. Surat and Hoogly declined while Bombay and Calcutta grew under European control. The gross value of trade through Surat fell from Rs 16 million in the late seventeenth century to Rs 3 million by the 1740s. Old trading houses collapsed, credit dried up and local bankers went bankrupt. The shift from old ports to new ones was a clear indicator of the growth of colonial power.

After the East India Company established political power, it sought to control cloth production directly. It appointed paid servants called gomasthas to supervise weavers, collect supplies and examine cloth quality. Weavers were given advances — loans to purchase raw materials — but those who accepted loans were bound to supply cloth only to the Company. Competition from other buyers was eliminated. Initially weavers eagerly accepted advances, hoping to earn more. Many had to lease out their small plots of land and devote all their time to weaving.

However, the new gomasthas were outsiders who acted arrogantly, arrived with sepoys and peons, and beat weavers for delays. Earlier supply merchants had lived within weaving villages and maintained close social relations with weavers; the gomasthas had no such ties. Weavers were paid miserably low prices and had no power to negotiate. In many places weavers deserted villages, migrated, revolted or took to agricultural labour. By the turn of the nineteenth century cotton weavers faced new competition from Manchester imports.

The decline of Indian textile exports was dramatic. In 1811–12, piece-goods accounted for 33 per cent of India's exports; by 1850–51 this fell to just 3 per cent. British cotton industries lobbied their government to impose import duties on foreign textiles and pressured the East India Company to open Indian markets to British goods. Exports of British cotton goods grew rapidly: by 1850, cotton piece-goods were over 31 per cent of Indian imports; by the 1870s this exceeded 50 per cent.

Indian weavers faced twin blows: their export markets collapsed while their domestic markets were flooded with cheap Manchester goods produced at lower costs. By the 1850s, weaving regions across India reported stories of decline and desolation. In the 1860s, the American Civil War cut off raw cotton supplies to Britain; Britain turned to India for raw cotton, causing prices to soar and leaving Indian weavers unable to afford raw materials. By the end of the nineteenth century, factories in India flooded markets with machine-made goods, adding yet another challenge.

The first cotton mill in Bombay opened in 1854 and began production two years later. By 1862 four mills were working with 94,000 spindles and 2,150 looms. Jute mills appeared in Bengal, with the first set up in 1855. The Elgin Mill came up in Kanpur in the 1860s and Ahmedabad's first cotton mill followed shortly after. By 1874 the first spinning and weaving mill of Madras was in production. These factories were set up by diverse groups of entrepreneurs who had accumulated capital through various trade networks.

Many early industrialists had made their fortunes in the China trade — exporting opium to China and importing tea to England. In Bengal, Dwarkanath Tagore set up six joint-stock companies after earning from China trade. In Bombay, Parsis like Dinshaw Petit and Jamsetjee Nusserwanjee Tata built industrial empires partly from China exports and raw cotton shipments to England. Seth Hukumchand, a Marwari businessman, set up the first Indian jute mill in Calcutta in 1917. European Managing Agencies — Bird Heiglers, Andrew Yule and Jardine Skinner — controlled large sectors of Indian industry, mobilising capital and making investment decisions while Indian financiers provided the funds.

Factory workers in India were recruited mainly from districts around industrial centres. In 1901 there were 584,000 workers in Indian factories; by 1946 this had grown to over 2,436,000. Over 50 per cent of workers in Bombay cotton industries in 1911 came from the neighbouring district of Ratnagiri. Kanpur mills drew workers from villages within the district. Workers often moved between village and city, returning home during harvests and festivals. Over time, as news of employment spread, workers came from greater distances.

Getting jobs was always difficult, even as mills multiplied. Industrialists employed a jobber — typically an old and trusted worker — to recruit new hands from their own village. The jobber helped workers settle in the city and provided money in crises. This gave jobbers considerable power, which they often abused by demanding money and gifts. Workers maintained emotional and physical ties with their villages; many returned home for harvests. Mill conditions were harsh — ten-hour shifts were common, occupational diseases like asthma were widespread, and workers had little security.

European Managing Agencies in India focused on products needed for export — tea, coffee, indigo, jute and mining. When Indian businessmen entered industry in the late nineteenth century, they avoided competing directly with Manchester. Early Indian cotton mills produced coarse yarn rather than cloth, since yarn was not a major British import. This yarn was used by handloom weavers in India or exported to China.

The swadeshi movement from 1906 changed this pattern. Nationalists mobilised people to boycott foreign cloth and industrial groups pressured the government for tariff protection. As yarn exports to China declined due to Chinese and Japanese mill competition, Indian industrialists shifted to cloth production. Cotton piece-goods production doubled between 1900 and 1912. The First World War proved transformative: Manchester imports declined as British mills switched to war production, and Indian factories were called upon to supply jute bags, army uniforms, tents and leather goods. After the war, Manchester never recaptured its old position in the Indian market.

Despite the growth of factory industries after the First World War, large-scale industries remained a small segment of the Indian economy. About 67 per cent of large industries in 1911 were in Bengal and Bombay. Across the rest of the country, small-scale production predominated. Only 5 per cent of the total industrial labour force worked in registered factories in 1911, rising to 10 per cent by 1931. Handicraft production actually expanded in the twentieth century in several sectors.

The handloom sector offers a telling example. While cheap machine-made thread wiped out the spinning industry in the nineteenth century, handloom weavers survived. Between 1900 and 1940, handloom cloth production almost trebled. Weavers adopted new technology like the fly shuttle, which increased productivity without greatly raising costs. By 1941, over 35 per cent of handlooms in India had fly shuttles; in states like Travancore, Madras, Mysore, Cochin and Bengal the proportion was 70 to 80 per cent. Weavers who produced finer varieties like Banarasi or Baluchari saris — goods mills could not imitate — survived better than those making coarse cloth.

When new products were produced, manufacturers needed to persuade people to buy them. Advertisements played a key role in expanding markets and shaping consumer culture from the very beginning of the industrial age. When Manchester industrialists sold cloth in India, they placed labels on cloth bundles stating 'MADE IN MANCHESTER' to signal quality and build buyer confidence. Labels also carried beautifully illustrated images — Indian gods and goddesses like Krishna, Saraswati and Lakshmi — to give divine approval to foreign goods and make them seem familiar to Indian buyers.

By the late nineteenth century, manufacturers printed calendars to advertise their products. Unlike newspapers, calendars reached even people who could not read — they were displayed in tea shops, poor homes and middle-class apartments alike, keeping the advertisement visible through the year. Images of emperors and nawabs were also used to associate products with royal prestige. Indian manufacturers used advertisements to convey nationalist messages during the swadeshi movement, urging people to buy Indian-made products. Advertisements thus became a vehicle for both commercial persuasion and nationalist sentiment.

The Age of Industrialisation was not the straightforward story of technological triumph that popular images suggest. In Britain, factory industries grew alongside hand-based production; less than 20 per cent of workers were in technologically advanced sectors even by the end of the nineteenth century. In colonial India, industrialisation was shaped by European trading interests, colonial trade policies and the destruction of existing craft networks. Weavers, craftspeople and small producers were not simply remnants of the past — they adapted, survived and continued to be integral to industrial life even as large factories grew.

For board examinations, this chapter is significant for understanding the contrasts between British and Indian industrialisation, the role of colonial policies in shaping Indian industry, the importance of proto-industrialisation and small-scale production, and the social dimensions of industrial change including workers' lives, the jobber system and the role of advertisements. Students should be able to analyse how industrialisation affected different groups — weavers, merchants, industrialists and labourers — in both Britain and India.