The Age of Industrialisation

This is the second chapter of Section II, Livelihoods, Economies and Societies, of India and the Contemporary World – II. NCERT questions the ‘triumphant’ picture of industrialisation as nothing but machines and progress. It looks first at Britain, the first industrial nation — the proto-industrial system, the coming of the factory, the slow pace of change, hand labour and steam power, and workers’ lives — and then at India, where colonial rule shaped industrial change: the age of Indian textiles, what happened to weavers, the arrival of Manchester goods, the first factories, entrepreneurs and workers, the peculiar pattern of industrial growth, the survival of handlooms, and advertising for a new market.

• Links within this book: jess303 (The Making of a Global World — India’s changing exports, the China opium trade and multilateral settlement: the money behind Indian entrepreneurs here); jess302 (Nationalism in India — industrialists and Civil Disobedience; swadeshi and boycott); jess301 (nationalism in Europe); the next chapter, jess305, covers print, whose machines also appear here. The geography book’s Manufacturing Industries (jess106) describes the cotton and jute industries today.
• Live pages to pair with: keec101 (the Indian economy on the eve of independence — de-industrialisation, no capital-goods base); kesy101 (sociology and society — industrialisation and urbanisation in Britain and India, with a box on the deindustrialisation debate); lehs301 (colonialism and the countryside — Company rule, revenue, cotton and the 1860s cotton boom); lehs302 and lehs303 (1857; Gandhi, swadeshi and Indian business); lesy205 (industrial society — jobbers, Bombay mills); kehs107 (Japan’s ‘latecomer’ industrialisation; China and opium); legy105 (secondary activities). Note: the current Class 11 world-history book (kehs101–107) no longer has a separate Industrial Revolution chapter — kehs106 is Displacing Indigenous Peoples — so this chapter is NCERT’s main account of it.
• UPSC: GS1 covers modern Indian history and world history from the 18th century, including the industrial revolution; GS3 covers the Indian economy. Prelims has asked about the impact of Britain’s Industrial Revolution on India (1980, 2020), why India industrialised only slowly under British rule (1980), industrial Britain’s need for markets (1988) and the first cotton mill (1994). Mains GS1 has asked why the industrial revolution began in England and what life was like during it (2015), how the decline of artisanal industry crippled the rural economy (2017) and how far the Industrial Revolution caused the decline of Indian handicrafts (2024).

• Proto-industrialisation (17th–18th c.): town merchants give advances to village households to produce for world markets — guilds blocked them in towns; enclosures squeezed cottagers.
• The factory: earliest in England by the 1730s; Arkwright’s cotton mill; raw cotton imports 2.5 → 22 million lb (1760–87); cotton leads to the 1840s, then iron and steel.
• Change was slow: under 20% of workers in advanced sectors even c.1900; Watt’s engine found few buyers; abundant cheap labour, seasonal demand and upper-class taste kept hand labour alive.
• Workers’ lives: kin networks for jobs, seasonal unemployment (35–75% in the 1830s slump in some regions), workhouses; women attacked the Spinning Jenny.
• India: Surat’s trade Rs 16 m → 3 m; gomasthas and advances tie weavers; piece-goods 33% → 3% of exports (1811–51); Manchester cloth over 50% of imports by the 1870s; Civil War makes raw cotton dear.
• Indian factories: Bombay mill 1854; China-trade capital (Tagore, Petit, Tata); managing agencies; jobbers; yarn → cloth after 1906; WWI boom; yet factories employ 5–10% of industrial workers; handloom output almost trebles 1900–40; labels and calendars sell goods.

NCERT opens with two images from around 1900. A music book cover, ‘Dawn of the Century’, shows an angel of progress carrying the flag of the new century on a winged wheel (time), surrounded by railways, a camera, machines, a printing press and a factory. A trade-magazine picture, ‘Two Magicians’, contrasts Aladdin — the East and the past, who built a palace with a magic lamp — with a modern mechanic — the West and modernity, whose tools build bridges, ships, towers and high-rise buildings. Such images give a triumphant account: industrialisation becomes simply a story of technological development, and the modern age a time of wonderful progress.

These associations have become part of popular imagination. NCERT asks: is industrialisation always based on rapid technological change? Can we go on glorifying the mechanisation of all work? What did industrialisation mean to people’s lives? To answer, it looks first at Britain and then at India, where the pattern of industrial change was conditioned by colonial rule.

We usually equate industrial production with factory production, and histories of industrialisation often begin with the first factories. NCERT points to a problem: even before factories dotted England and Europe, there was large-scale industrial production for an international market, not based on factories. Many historians call this phase proto-industrialisation.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, merchants from European towns moved into the countryside, supplying money to peasants and artisans and persuading them to produce for international markets. World trade and colonies were raising demand, but merchants could not expand production in towns, where guilds were powerful: these associations trained craftspeople, controlled production, regulated competition and prices, and restricted new entrants, and rulers granted them monopoly rights over specific products. In the countryside, meanwhile, open fields were disappearing and commons were being enclosed; cottagers and poor peasants who had gathered firewood, berries, vegetables, hay and straw from common land needed new income, and tiny plots could not employ the whole household. So when merchants offered advances, peasant households eagerly agreed: they could stay on their land, supplement shrinking farm incomes and use their family labour more fully.

A close relationship developed between town and countryside. A merchant clothier in England bought wool from a wool stapler and carried it to the spinners; the yarn went on to weavers, fullers and dyers; finishing was done in London — known as a finishing centre — before an export merchant sold the cloth abroad. The system was controlled by merchants, while goods were made by a vast number of producers on their family farms. With 20 to 25 workers at each stage, each clothier controlled hundreds of workers.

The earliest factories in England came up by the 1730s, but their number multiplied only in the late eighteenth century. The first symbol of the new era was cotton: Britain’s imports of raw cotton rose from 2.5 million pounds in 1760 to 22 million pounds in 1787 — almost nine times in 27 years. A series of eighteenth-century inventions increased the efficiency of each step of production (carding, twisting and spinning, and rolling), raised output per worker and produced stronger threads. Then Richard Arkwright created the cotton mill: costly machines could be bought, set up and maintained in the mill, and all processes were brought under one roof and one management, allowing careful supervision of production and quality and the regulation of labour — difficult when work was scattered across the countryside. By the early nineteenth century imposing mills were part of the English landscape, and contemporaries were so dazzled that they almost forgot the bylanes and workshops where production continued.

How rapid was industrialisation? NCERT makes four points. First, the most dynamic industries were cotton and metals: cotton led until the 1840s, then iron and steel took over as railways spread — in England from the 1840s and in the colonies from the 1860s; NCERT says that by 1873 Britain’s iron and steel exports were worth about £77 million, double its cotton exports (but see the trap). Second, new industries could not easily displace traditional ones: even at the end of the nineteenth century, less than 20 per cent of the workforce was in technologically advanced sectors, and much textile output came from domestic units. Third, ‘traditional’ industries were not stagnant: ordinary small innovations drove growth in food processing, building, pottery, glass work, tanning, furniture making and implements. Fourth, technological change was slow: new machines were expensive, often broke down, were costly to repair and less effective than claimed, so merchants and industrialists were cautious.

The steam engine shows this. James Watt improved Newcomen’s engine and, NCERT says, patented the new engine in 1781; his industrialist friend Matthew Boulton manufactured it, but for years found few buyers. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were, NCERT says, no more than 321 steam engines in England — 80 in cotton, 9 in wool and the rest in mining, canal works and iron works; other industries adopted steam much later. Historians now increasingly recognise that the typical worker of the mid-nineteenth century was not a machine operator but a traditional craftsperson and labourer.

In Victorian Britain there was no shortage of labour: poor peasants and vagrants crowded into cities in search of work. With plenty of labour, wages were low, so industrialists did not want machines that replaced workers and needed large investment. Demand in many industries was seasonal: gas works and breweries were busiest in the cold months, bookbinders and printers needed extra hands before Christmas, and ships were repaired in winter — so employers preferred hand labour hired for the season. Many products could be made only by hand: machines produced uniform, standardised goods for mass markets, while demand was often for intricate designs and specific shapes — mid-nineteenth-century Britain made 500 varieties of hammers and 45 kinds of axes. The upper classes — aristocrats and the bourgeoisie — preferred handmade things as symbols of refinement and class; machine-made goods were for export to the colonies. In labour-scarce countries such as nineteenth-century America, industrialists were keen on machines; Britain had no problem hiring hands.

Life of the workers. As news of jobs spread, hundreds tramped to the cities. Getting work depended on networks of friends and kin; those without connections waited weeks, sleeping under bridges, in Night Refuges run by private individuals, or in Casual Wards maintained by the Poor Law authorities. Seasonal work meant long spells without work: some returned to the countryside after winter, but most looked for odd jobs, which were hard to find until the mid-nineteenth century. Wages rose somewhat in the early nineteenth century, but averages hide variation between trades and years: when prices rose sharply during the long Napoleonic War, real wages fell, and income depended on the number of days of work, not just the wage rate. Even at the best of times until the mid-nineteenth century about 10 per cent of the urban population was extremely poor; in slumps such as the 1830s, unemployment rose to between 35 and 75 per cent in different regions.

Fear of unemployment made workers hostile to new technology. When the Spinning Jenny came into the woollen industry, women who lived by hand spinning attacked the machines, and the conflict lasted a long time. After the 1840s, building activity in the cities — widened roads, new railway stations and lines, tunnels, drains and sewers, embanked rivers — opened up more jobs: the number of workers in the transport industry doubled in the 1840s and doubled again in the next 30 years.

The age of Indian textiles. Before machine industries, Indian silk and cotton goods dominated the international textile market; coarser cottons were made in many countries, but the finer varieties often came from India. Armenian and Persian merchants carried goods from Punjab to Afghanistan, eastern Persia and Central Asia, on camel-back through the north-west passes and across deserts. A vibrant sea trade ran through pre-colonial ports: Surat in Gujarat linked India to the Gulf and Red Sea ports; Masulipatam on the Coromandel coast and Hoogly in Bengal traded with Southeast Asian ports. Indian merchants and bankers financed production, carried goods and supplied exporters: supply merchants gave advances to weavers, collected cloth from weaving villages and carried it to the ports, where big shippers’ brokers negotiated prices.

By the 1750s this network, controlled by Indian merchants, was breaking down. European companies gained power — first concessions from local courts, then monopoly rights to trade. Exports from the old ports fell dramatically, the credit that financed trade dried up and local bankers slowly went bankrupt: the gross value of trade through Surat fell from Rs 16 million in the last years of the seventeenth century to Rs 3 million by the 1740s. As Surat and Hoogly decayed, Bombay and Calcutta grew — an indicator of growing colonial power: trade through the new ports was controlled by European companies and carried in European ships, and surviving Indian trading houses had to operate within networks shaped by them.

What happened to weavers? The consolidation of East India Company power after the 1760s did not at first reduce textile exports: British cotton industry had not yet expanded and Indian fine textiles were in great demand, so the Company wanted more. Before winning political power in Bengal and the Carnatic in the 1760s and 1770s, it had struggled to secure regular supplies: French, Dutch and Portuguese traders and local merchants competed for cloth, so weavers and supply merchants could bargain and sell to the best buyer, and Company officials complained of high prices. With political power, the Company asserted a monopoly and built a system to eliminate competition, control costs and ensure regular supplies.

Weavers at first eagerly took advances, hoping to earn more; many leased out the small plots they had farmed and devoted all their time — and their families’ — to weaving. Soon there were reports of clashes between weavers and gomasthas. The old supply merchants had often lived in the weaving villages and helped weavers in crises; the gomasthas were outsiders with no long-term link to the village, who acted arrogantly and punished delays by beating and flogging. Weavers lost the space to bargain or sell to other buyers: Company prices were miserably low and loans tied them down. In many places in the Carnatic and Bengal weavers deserted their villages to set up looms where they had relatives; elsewhere they revolted with village traders; over time many refused loans, closed their workshops and took to agricultural labour.

In 1772 a Company official, Henry Patullo, predicted that demand for Indian textiles could never fall, since no other nation made goods of the same quality. Yet by the early nineteenth century a long decline of textile exports began: piece-goods were 33 per cent of India’s exports in 1811–12 but no more than 3 per cent by 1850–51. Why? As the cotton industry grew in England, industrialists pressed the government to impose import duties on cotton textiles so that Manchester goods faced no competition at home, and persuaded the East India Company to sell British manufactures in Indian markets. British cotton exports rose dramatically: at the end of the eighteenth century India imported virtually no cotton piece-goods, but by 1850 they were over 31 per cent of the value of Indian imports and by the 1870s over 50 per cent.

Cotton weavers faced two problems at once: their export market collapsed and their local market shrank, glutted with machine-made Manchester imports so cheap that weavers could not compete. By the 1850s reports from most weaving regions spoke of decline and desolation. By the 1860s came a new problem: when the American Civil War cut off US cotton, Britain turned to India; raw cotton exports rose, prices shot up, and weavers, starved of supplies, had to buy raw cotton at exorbitant prices — weaving could not pay. By the end of the century, factories in India began flooding the market with machine goods. How could weaving survive? (Section 8 answers: many did.)

The first cotton mill in Bombay came up in 1854 and began production two years later; by 1862 four mills were at work with 94,000 spindles and 2,150 looms. Jute mills came up in Bengal — the first in 1855 and another in 1862. In north India the Elgin Mill was started in Kanpur in the 1860s, and NCERT says the first cotton mill of Ahmedabad followed a year later (see the trap). By 1874 the first spinning and weaving mill of Madras began production.

The early entrepreneurs. Many business groups began in the China trade: from the late eighteenth century the British exported Indian opium to China and took Chinese tea to England, and many Indians became junior partners — providing finance, procuring supplies and shipping consignments. Dwarkanath Tagore of Bengal made his fortune in the China trade and set up six joint-stock companies in the 1830s and 1840s; they sank in the business crises of the 1840s, but later in the century many China traders became successful industrialists. In Bombay, Parsis such as Dinshaw Petit and Jamsetjee Nusserwanjee Tata built huge industrial empires from wealth earned partly from exports to China and partly from raw cotton shipments to England. Seth Hukumchand, a Marwari who set up the first Indian jute mill in Calcutta in 1917 (NCERT), also traded with China, as did the father and grandfather of G.D. Birla. Others accumulated capital through trade with Burma (Madras merchants), the Middle East and East Africa, or through internal trade, banking and transferring funds between cities.

As colonial control tightened, Indian merchants’ space shrank: they were barred from trading with Europe in manufactured goods, had to export mostly raw materials and food grains needed by the British — raw cotton, opium, wheat and indigo — and were edged out of shipping. Until the First World War, European managing agencies controlled a large sector of Indian industry; three of the biggest were Bird Heiglers & Co. (NCERT’s spelling), Andrew Yule and Jardine Skinner & Co. They mobilised capital, set up and managed joint-stock companies; in most cases Indian financiers provided the capital while the European agencies made all investment and business decisions. European merchant-industrialists had their own chambers of commerce, which Indian businessmen could not join.

Where did the workers come from? Factory workers numbered 584,000 in 1901 and over 2,436,000 by 1946 — about 4.2 times as many. Most came from nearby districts: peasants and artisans without village work went to industrial centres. In 1911 over half of Bombay’s cotton-mill workers came from neighbouring Ratnagiri, while Kanpur’s mills drew most hands from villages in Kanpur district. Millworkers usually moved between village and city, going home for harvests and festivals. In time workers travelled further: from the United Provinces to Bombay’s textile mills and Calcutta’s jute mills. Jobs were always scarce — job-seekers outnumbered jobs — and entry was controlled by the jobber.

European managing agencies invested in particular products: tea and coffee plantations (on land acquired cheaply from the colonial government), mining, indigo and jute — mostly for export, not for sale in India. Indian businessmen starting industries in the late nineteenth century avoided competing with Manchester in the Indian market. Since yarn was not an important part of British imports (only superior yarn was imported), early Indian cotton mills made coarse cotton yarn rather than fabric, used by Indian handloom weavers or exported to China.

In the first decade of the twentieth century the pattern changed. As the swadeshi movement gathered momentum, nationalists mobilised people to boycott foreign cloth; industrial groups organised to protect their interests and pressed the government for more tariff protection and other concessions. From 1906 Indian yarn exports to China declined as Chinese and Japanese mills flooded the Chinese market. So Indian industrialists shifted from yarn to cloth: cotton piece-goods production in India doubled between 1900 and 1912. Yet growth was slow until the First World War, which created a dramatically new situation: British mills were busy with war production, Manchester imports into India fell, and Indian mills suddenly had a vast home market; they were also called on to supply jute bags, uniform cloth, tents, leather boots, horse and mule saddles and much else. New factories came up, old ones ran multiple shifts, workers were hired and made to work longer hours, and production boomed. After the war Manchester never recaptured its old position in India: unable to modernise and compete with the US, Germany and Japan, Britain’s cotton industry collapsed, and colonial industrialists gradually captured the home market by substituting for foreign goods.

Small-scale industries predominate. Factory industry grew steadily after the war, but large industries were a small segment of the economy, about 67 per cent of them in Bengal and Bombay in 1911. Only 5 per cent of the industrial labour force worked in registered factories in 1911 and 10 per cent in 1931; the rest worked in small workshops and household units in alleys and bylanes. Some handicraft production actually expanded. Cheap machine-made thread wiped out hand spinning in the nineteenth century, but weavers survived: handloom cloth production almost trebled between 1900 and 1940.

How? Partly through technology: craftspeople adopt new tools when they raise output without excessive cost. By the 1910s weavers were using looms with a fly shuttle, which raised productivity, speeded production and reduced labour needs; by 1941 over 35 per cent of India’s handlooms had fly shuttles, and in Travancore, Madras, Mysore, Cochin and Bengal 70 to 80 per cent. Partly through markets: coarse cloth, bought by the poor, saw violently fluctuating demand — in bad harvests and famines the poor could not buy cloth — whereas demand for finer varieties bought by the well-to-do was stable: famines did not affect sales of Banarasi or Baluchari saris. Mills could not imitate specialised weaves — saris with woven borders, or the famous lungis and handkerchiefs of Madras. Weavers who expanded production did not necessarily prosper: whole households, women and children included, worked long hours. But they were not remnants of the past — their labour was integral to industrialisation.

New products need buyers who feel like using them; advertisements make goods appear desirable and necessary and create new needs. From the start of the industrial age they helped expand markets and shape a consumer culture. Manchester industrialists put labels on cloth bundles to make the place of manufacture and the company familiar and to mark quality: ‘MADE IN MANCHESTER’ in bold was meant to reassure buyers. Labels also carried beautiful images, and they reveal manufacturers’ calculations. Indian gods and goddesses appeared regularly, as if lending divine approval, and images of Krishna or Saraswati made a foreign product seem familiar.

By the late nineteenth century manufacturers printed calendars. Unlike newspapers and magazines, calendars were used even by people who could not read; they hung in tea shops and poor homes as well as offices and middle-class flats, so the advertisement was seen every day of the year — again with gods. Figures of emperors and nawabs also adorned advertisements and calendars, implying: respect the royal figure, respect the product. When Indian manufacturers advertised, the nationalist message was loud and clear: if you care for the nation, buy products Indians make. Advertisements became a vehicle of swadeshi. NCERT’s conclusion: industrialisation brought major technological change, factories and a new industrial labour force, but hand technology and small-scale production remained an important part of the industrial landscape.

The chapter’s side questions in order. Short outlines follow.

‘Write in brief’ (three questions, the first two with four parts each), ‘Discuss’ (four questions) and a Project, page 102.

Numbers

One-liners

• Proto-industrialisation was large-scale production for world markets before factories.
• Town guilds pushed merchants to organise production in the countryside.
• Richard Arkwright created the cotton mill, bringing all processes under one roof.
• Cotton led British industrialisation until the 1840s; then iron and steel grew fastest.
• Steam power spread slowly; the typical mid-Victorian worker was a craftsperson or labourer.
• Cheap, abundant labour and seasonal demand made many Victorian employers prefer hand labour.
• Women hand spinners attacked the Spinning Jenny for fear of losing work.
• The Company used gomasthas and advances to tie weavers to itself.
• Piece-goods fell from 33 to 3 per cent of India’s exports between 1811–12 and 1850–51.
• The American Civil War raised India’s raw cotton exports and prices, starving weavers.
• Many early Indian industrialists made their money in the China trade.
• European managing agencies controlled much of Indian industry until the First World War.
• Jobbers recruited mill workers from their villages and came to control them.
• Early Indian cotton mills made coarse yarn, not cloth.
• The First World War cut Manchester imports and boosted Indian industry.
• Only 5–10 per cent of industrial workers were in registered factories in 1911–31.
• Handloom output almost trebled in 1900–40, helped by the fly shuttle and fine weaves.
• Manchester labels and calendars used Indian gods and kings to sell goods.

Traps to avoid

• Cotton boomed in the late eighteenth century — NCERT’s ‘late nineteenth century’ is a slip.
• Iron and steel exports in 1873 were about half of cotton’s, not double — cotton stayed Britain’s top export.
• Watt’s key patent is 1769; NCERT’s 1781 patent was for rotary motion.
• E.T. Paull published in New York, USA — not ‘New York, England’.
• Hand spinning was wiped out; handloom weaving survived and expanded.
• The American Civil War increased, not reduced, India’s raw cotton exports.
• J.N. Tata died in 1904; TISCO was founded in 1907 and made steel from 1912.
• Ahmedabad’s first mill (1861) came before Kanpur’s Elgin Mills (1864).
• Early Indian mills spun coarse yarn; only superior yarn was imported from Britain.
• 5 and 10 per cent = factory share of industrial workers; 67 per cent = share of large industries in Bengal and Bombay.
• The fly shuttle is John Kay’s invention of 1733, widely adopted by Indian weavers only in the twentieth century.
• A seventeenth-century European ‘factory’ in India was a trading post, not a workshop.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• Asked so far: the impact of Britain’s Industrial Revolution on India — handicrafts ruined (1980, 2020: not machines in Indian textiles, not railways, not heavy duties on British goods in the first half of the nineteenth century); why India industrialised only gradually (1980); industrial Britain’s need for markets as a cause of colonialism (1988, Assertion–Reason); the first Bombay cotton mill of 1854 alongside paper (1870) and cement (1904) firsts (1994). Static facts likely in future: proto-industrialisation, Arkwright, the Spinning Jenny, gomasthas, managing agencies, the jobber, the 1854 and 1855 mills, TISCO, the fly shuttle, swadeshi and the First World War boom.
• Use the trap list: the late-eighteenth-century cotton boom, Watt’s patent, the Civil War’s effect, Tata’s dates, Ahmedabad before Kanpur, spinning versus weaving, and NCERT’s different percentages are the details most easily mis-stated.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• GS1 modern India: ‘how far was the Industrial Revolution responsible for the decline of handicrafts’ (2024) and ‘how the decline of artisanal industry crippled the rural economy’ (2017). Frame: pre-colonial strength (Surat, fine textiles) → Company control (gomasthas, advances — before the industrial revolution) → British duties and Manchester imports (33 to 3 per cent of exports; over 50 per cent of imports) → dear raw cotton in the 1860s → rural effects (weavers to farm labour, Koshtis to Berar, pressure on land — keec101) → limits (spinning wiped out, but handlooms trebled 1900–40; fine weaves). For ‘how far’, set Dutt and Bagchi beside Morris and Roy.
• GS1 world history: why the industrial revolution began in England and what life was like (2015) — use this chapter for merchant capital, proto-industry, colonies and markets, cotton and iron, and above all workers’ lives (seasonal work, unemployment in slumps, workhouses, machine-breaking, real wages); add the Crafts–Harley ‘slow revolution’ and the optimist–pessimist debate, attributed. Indian industrial growth (entrepreneurs, managing agencies, swadeshi, the First World War, the absence of capital goods) also supports answers on colonial economic policy and on the economic roots of nationalism.

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