The Age of Industrialisation: Class 10 History · Chapter 4

Ask a friend to sketch ‘industry’ and you will probably get a tall chimney, a factory gate and perhaps a railway line. Around 1900, artists and advertisers drew it the same way, only with far more excitement. To them, machines were proof that the world was moving forward, and that the countries which owned the machines were leading the way.

The message of both pictures is that machines mean triumph. Read that way, modern history is a parade of inventions, steam trains, steamships and humming factories, and industrialisation is progress, plain and simple. Many of us still think this way: a new flyover, a metro line or a glass tower looks like proof that a city is developing.

This chapter asks harder questions. Did industry always grow through fast technical change? What did machines and factories mean for the people who worked in them, or who lost their work because of them? Should we cheer every machine that replaces human work? We look first at Britain, the first country to industrialise, and then at India, where colonial rule shaped what changed and what did not.

4.1 Before the Industrial Revolution

Where does the story of industry begin? Most people would say: with the first factory. Many history books start there too, because we tend to equate industry with factories and industrial workers with machine-minders. Yet long before any factory chimney rose over England, villages across Europe were already turning out cloth in huge quantities for buyers overseas. The work happened in homes, not mills.

Why did this phase begin? In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europe's trade with the rest of the world was expanding and countries such as Britain were acquiring colonies. The demand for cloth and other goods kept climbing. Merchants wanted to produce more, but in the towns, trade was in the grip of guilds. These associations of producers in each craft protected their members by keeping outsiders out. The countryside was a different world, as the comparison shows.

For a peasant household the bargain had real attractions. The family could stay on its land and go on farming, while the merchant's work topped up what the fields, yielding less and less, brought in. Hours that would otherwise have been idle, on winter evenings or in the slack season after the harvest, could now earn money.

The system bound town and country together. The merchant lived in the town, but the work happened in the villages around it. Follow a bale of wool through England's cloth trade in Fig. 4.1. A merchant clothier bought wool from a stapler, who had sorted it by the quality of its fibre. Spinners turned it into yarn, weavers made cloth, fullers thickened and pressed it, and dyers coloured it. The cloth was finished in London, the country's great finishing centre, before export merchants shipped it abroad.

Notice who was in charge. Merchants owned the materials and controlled the trade, yet the goods were made by a great many families working on their own farms, not in factories. A single merchant might employ 20 to 25 workers at each stage, so one clothier could direct the work of hundreds of people he hardly ever met.

4.1.1 The Coming Up of the Factory

England had its first factories by the 1730s, but for decades they stayed rare. Their number shot up only towards the end of the eighteenth century, and the industry that led the way was cotton.11The textbook says cotton production boomed in the ‘late nineteenth century’, but its own import figures for 1760 and 1787 show that the boom came in the late eighteenth century.

Britain grew no cotton, so every pound of it had to be imported. The jump in imports in Fig. 4.2 shows how fast the industry grew. Imports rose from 2.5 million pounds in 1760 to 22 million pounds in 1787, almost nine times as much in under thirty years.

What made such growth possible? A chain of eighteenth-century inventions sped up each step of making thread: carding the raw fibre, twisting and spinning it, and drawing it out between rollers. Each worker could now turn out far more, and the yarn came out stronger and more even. The timeline picks out the best-known machines.

Then came the factory itself, and the cotton mill was the creation of Richard Arkwright. Until then, cloth had been made in thousands of cottages scattered over the countryside. The new machines were far too costly for a cottage, so they were bought, installed and kept running in one building. There, as Fig. 4.3 shows, every process came under one roof and one owner.

This mattered to the owner in three ways. He could watch the work as it happened, check the quality of every batch and lay down hours and rules for his workers. None of this had been possible while the work was spread across the villages.

By the early nineteenth century, mills had become a familiar sight in England. People came from far away to stare at them, and writers filled pages with the wonders of steam. Hardly anyone described the workshops in the side streets, although much of the country's work was still done there.

4.1.2 The Pace of Industrial Change

How fast did industry really change, and did it change only through factories? Historians answer with four points.

1. Cotton first, then iron and steel. The fastest-growing industries were cotton and metals. Cotton set the pace until the 1840s. Then iron and steel moved ahead, because railways needed rails, engines and bridges, first in England in the 1840s and, two decades later, in the colonies. The textbook states that Britain's iron and steel exports had reached about £77 million by 1873, twice the value of its cotton exports.22Trade returns of the time suggest these two may be swapped: iron and steel exports were worth about £36 million in 1872, while cotton goods stayed Britain's largest export for decades. For a board answer, use the textbook's statement.
2. Most workers stayed outside the new sectors. As late as 1900, fewer than 20 per cent of Britain's workers were employed in technologically advanced industries. Textiles grew fast, but a large share of the cloth was still made in homes and small units, not in factories.
3. Old trades kept improving. Food processing, building, pottery, glass-making, tanning, furniture-making and tool-making did not run on steam, yet they grew through many small, everyday improvements in methods and tools.
4. New technology spread slowly. Machines were expensive, broke down often and cost a lot to repair. They seldom worked as well as their makers claimed, so merchants and mill-owners were in no hurry to buy them.

The steam engine shows the last point clearly. Thomas Newcomen's engine of 1712 pumped water from mines but wasted most of its fuel. James Watt improved it, and in 1781 patented an engine that could turn wheels and so drive machinery.33Watt's first patent, for the separate condenser, dates from 1769; the textbook's 1781 refers to his engine for rotary motion. Watt went into partnership with the industrialist Matthew Boulton, whose works built the engines, but for years buyers were slow to come forward. The table gives the count of engines that the textbook quotes for the start of the nineteenth century.

So only 89 of the 321 engines worked in textiles, and most other industries took up steam only much later in the century.44Later research, which also counts older Newcomen-type pumping engines, finds more than 2,000 engines built in eighteenth-century Britain, most of them at mines. The textbook's point, that few were used to make cloth, still holds. Steam, the strongest new technology of the age, which could multiply a worker's output many times over, still took decades to catch on. That is why historians now picture the typical worker of the 1850s as a traditional craftsperson or labourer, rather than someone minding a machine.

4.2 Hand Labour and Steam Power

Why would a factory owner in Victorian Britain, the Britain of Queen Victoria's reign (1837–1901), turn down a machine that could do the work of many people? Begin with the labour market. Landless labourers and the homeless poor drifted into the cities looking for work, far more of them than there were jobs. With so many people competing, wages stayed low. An owner could hire all the hands he needed cheaply, so an expensive machine that saved labour made little sense.

Many trades were also seasonal. Look at Fig. 4.4. Gas works and breweries were busiest in the cold months. Printers and bookbinders needed extra hands in the run-up to Christmas. At the docks, winter was the time for repairing and refitting ships. In trades like these, owners preferred hand labour. They could take on workers for the rush and let them go when it was over, whereas a machine would stand idle and still cost money.

Variety was another reason. A machine of the 1850s could stamp out thousands of identical items, but customers wanted goods in particular shapes and intricate patterns. A carpenter needed a different hammer from a cobbler or a blacksmith: around 1850, British workshops made 500 varieties of hammer and 45 kinds of axe. Only skilled hands could produce that range.

Class taste pointed the same way. For Britain's aristocrats and wealthy middle classes (the bourgeoisie), an object that was carefully designed, finished by hand and unlike any other showed refinement and status. The cheaper machine-made goods went largely to buyers in the colonies.

4.2.1 Life of the Workers

With so many people chasing so few jobs, life was hard for workers. Rumours of work drew crowds of country people into the towns on foot. Getting hired was largely about contacts: a cousin or an old friend inside the factory could put in a word for you, and newcomers with no one to vouch for them waited longest.

While they waited, often for weeks, they slept wherever they could: under bridges, or in a shelter for the night. Private charities ran Night Refuges, and the Poor Law authorities, who handled relief for the destitute, kept Casual Wards.

Seasonal trades meant months with no wages at all. When the rush ended, workers were simply turned out. A few drifted back to the villages in spring, where farms needed hands again in some places; the rest scraped by on odd jobs, and until about 1850 even those were scarce.

Did workers grow better off? Money wages crept up in the early 1800s, yet that is a poor guide. An average wage blurs the gap between a skilled printer and a dock labourer, and it hides good years and bad. Two other things mattered more. One is the real wage, what the money can buy: in the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) prices soared, so a wage that looked unchanged bought far less. The other is how many days of work a person could find, because a fine daily rate earns nothing on days without work. Fig. 4.6 shows both effects with simple numbers.

Poverty was never far away. Even in good times, until the mid-nineteenth century about one in ten town-dwellers was extremely poor. In a slump, such as the hard years of the 1830s, unemployment in different regions climbed to 35 per cent, and in some places as high as 75 per cent.

No wonder workers feared new machines: a machine that did several people's work could throw them out of a job. The best-known case is the spinning jenny, which James Hargreaves built in 1764. With a hand spinning wheel, one person turned one spindle; with a jenny, one person turning a single wheel worked a whole row of spindles at once (Fig. 4.7). In the woollen districts, women whose families depended on their spinning fought back by wrecking jennies, and clashes over the machine went on for many years.

Work became easier to find after the 1840s, when the cities were rebuilt on a grand scale. Labourers dug tunnels and sewers, laid new railway lines and built stations, widened streets and walled in river banks. In London the first underground railway opened in 1863, built by digging deep trenches along the streets and roofing them over. The number of people working in transport doubled during the 1840s, and doubled again over the next thirty years.

4.3 Industrialisation in the Colonies

Now we turn to India, to see how industry changed in a colony. Again we will look beyond factories to the work done without machines, and we will concentrate mainly on textiles, India's most important industry.

4.3.1 The Age of Indian Textiles

Until machines took over, India was the world's great cloth-maker. Rough everyday cotton was woven in many countries, but for fine muslins, chintzes and silks, buyers very often turned to India.

The cloth travelled by land and by sea (Fig. 4.8). Armenian and Persian merchants carried it overland from Punjab into Afghanistan, on through the east of Persia and as far as Central Asia. They loaded bales of fine fabric onto camels and led them through the mountain passes of the north-west and across deserts. By sea, ships from Surat in Gujarat sailed west to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. Two ports on the east coast, Masulipatam on the Coromandel shore and Hoogly in Bengal, traded with Southeast Asia.

Follow a bolt of muslin from loom to ship. A supply merchant, often living near the weaving villages, advanced money to the weaver, collected the finished cloth and carried it to the coast. At the port, brokers working for the big shipping firms and exporters bargained over the price and bought it. Indian bankers financed every stage.

This Indian-run system was crumbling by the 1750s. The reason was the growing power of the European companies. Having won one privilege after another from local rulers, they finally secured the sole right, or monopoly, to trade. Surat and Hoogly, the ports Indian merchants had used, lost their business: exports collapsed, the loans that oiled trade stopped, and local bankers went under. Around 1700, trade worth about Rs 16 million passed through Surat; by the 1740s the figure had slumped to about Rs 3 million, a fall of more than 80 per cent.

Meanwhile Bombay and Calcutta were rising, and their rise tells us who now held power. Both were company towns: European firms decided what passed through them, and European ships carried it. Indian trading houses either went under or survived as junior partners working on the companies' terms.

4.3.2 What Happened to Weavers?

You might expect Company rule to have hit weavers at once. It did not, at least not through exports. In the decades after the 1760s, Europe still craved fine Indian cloth and Britain's own cotton industry was still small, so the Company's aim was to ship more Indian textiles, not fewer.

Its problem was getting a steady supply at a low price. Picture a weaver in Bengal in the 1750s. When his cloth was ready, several buyers might want it: agents of the French, Dutch and Portuguese companies, Indian merchants and the English Company. So he could hold out for a better offer. That was good for him and bad for the English Company, whose officials kept complaining to London that cloth was scarce and dear. Once it won political power, in Bengal in the 1760s and in the Carnatic in the 1770s, the Company set out to end this competition (Fig. 4.9).

Trouble followed quickly. Compare the old supply merchant with the new gomastha:

Caught between debts they could not repay and a price they could not raise, weavers had lost their freedom to choose. The gomastha's escort of sepoys made the threat plain. Weavers resisted in the ways open to them. Some simply left: across the Carnatic and Bengal, families abandoned their villages and set up their looms afresh wherever they had kin. Others, together with village traders, rose against the Company and its agents. And over the years many gave up altogether, turning down advances, shutting their workshops and working on other people's fields instead.

By about 1800 a new and bigger threat was on its way.

4.3.3 Manchester Comes to India

Henry Patullo, an official of the Company, confidently declared in 1772 that the world would always want Indian textiles, because no other country could make cloth of the same quality. He was soon proved wrong. From the early nineteenth century India's textile exports went into a long decline. In 1811–12 cotton piece-goods made up 33 per cent of the value of India's exports, but by 1850–51 they were only 3 per cent.

Behind this lay a double standard. At home, Britain's growing cotton lobby wanted no competition, so it got the government to tax imported cotton cloth, which kept Indian goods out of the British market. Abroad, the same lobby wanted India wide open, and it pushed the Company to sell Manchester cloth there. British cotton exports soared in the early nineteenth century. Around 1800 India imported almost no cotton piece-goods. By 1850 they made up more than 31 per cent of the value of India's imports, and by the 1870s more than 50 per cent.

Indian weavers were caught in a pincer. Abroad, their buyers had gone; at home, the bazaars were piled high with Manchester cloth, which machines made so cheaply that a handloom could not match its price. Officials touring the weaving districts in the 1850s described one ruined centre after another.

The 1860s added a third blow. War broke out in the United States (the American Civil War, 1861–65), and American cotton stopped reaching Lancashire. British buyers turned to India and shipped out so much raw cotton that its price in India soared. Weavers now struggled even to buy their raw material, and at such prices weaving could not pay. A fourth blow came late in the century, when India's own mills began selling machine-made cloth. Would the handloom survive at all?

4.4 Factories Come Up

India's first factories appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century. Bombay's first cotton mill was founded in 1854 and was producing yarn by 1856. In 1862 the city had four mills, which between them ran 94,000 spindles and 2,150 looms. Bengal's first jute mill opened in 1855, and a second followed in 1862. In the north, the Elgin Mill started work at Kanpur in the 1860s, and Ahmedabad got its first cotton mill in the same decade. By 1874 Madras too had a spinning and weaving mill in production.55Ahmedabad's first mill, set up by Ranchhodlal Chhotalal, opened in 1861, and the Elgin Mill is usually dated to 1862. The textbook places Ahmedabad's mill a year after Kanpur's.

Who set up these industries? Where did the money come from? And who came to work in them?

4.4.1 The Early Entrepreneurs

Industries were started in different regions by very different kinds of people. Many business families made their first fortunes in the China trade. From the late eighteenth century the British in India sent opium to China and carried Chinese tea to England. Indian traders earned their share by financing cargoes, buying supplies and arranging shipments, though the British controlled the trade. Some of those who grew rich this way began to dream of building industries at home. Fig. 4.11 shows where such money came from, and what held it back.

• Dwarkanath Tagore (Bengal) grew rich through the China trade before moving into industry. During the 1830s and 1840s he founded six joint-stock firms. His interests ranged from banks, insurance and mines to plantations, ships and shipyards, because he believed India would advance through Western ideas and industry. A wave of business failures in the 1840s brought his firms down along with many others.
• Parsi merchants of Bombay, among them Dinshaw Petit and Jamsetjee Nusserwanjee Tata, later founded great industrial houses. Their early wealth came partly from sales to China and partly from cargoes of raw cotton sent to England.
• Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy came from a family of Parsi weavers and made a fortune in the China trade, where his own ships carried the cargo. By the 1850s English and American shipping firms had out-competed him, and he had to sell his fleet.
• Marwari traders also had China links. Seth Hukumchand, whose jute mill in Calcutta (1917) was the first owned by an Indian, had traded with China, and so had the father and grandfather of the industrialist G.D. Birla.

Not all industrial money came from China. Madras merchants who traded with Burma, and others who did business across the Arabian Sea in the Middle East and East Africa, built up capital too. So did groups that never traded abroad but moved goods around India, kept and lent money, and sent funds from city to city for traders. Many of them put their savings into factories once the chance came.

Colonial rule, though, boxed them in. Indian merchants could not sell manufactured goods to Europe; what they could send out was what Britain needed, chiefly indigo, wheat, opium and raw cotton. And bit by bit, British firms squeezed them out of shipping.

Before the First World War, the real masters of much of Indian industry were European managing agencies, such as Bird Heilgers & Co., Andrew Yule and Jardine Skinner & Co.66The textbook spells the first name ‘Bird Heiglers’. An agency would collect money from investors, float a joint-stock company and run it. The money was often Indian, but the decisions about what to invest in and how to run the business were European. Europeans also kept their own chambers of commerce closed to Indian members.

4.4.2 Where Did the Workers Come From?

As mills multiplied, so did the demand for workers. In 1901 Indian factories employed 584,000 workers; by 1946 they employed more than 2,436,000, over four times as many.

Most mill-hands were villagers from nearby: farmers with too little land and artisans with too little work, who walked or took the train to the closest industrial town. In 1911, more than half the workers in Bombay's cotton mills came from the nearby district of Ratnagiri. Kanpur's mills drew most of their textile workers from villages in Kanpur district itself. Few cut their ties with home: they went back for harvests and festivals and then returned to the mill.

Later, word of mill jobs reached distant regions too. Workers from the United Provinces, for example, went to the cotton mills of Bombay and the jute mills of Calcutta. Even so, getting a job was never easy, because there were always more people looking for work than jobs to fill. The way into a mill usually ran through one man: the jobber.

Imagine arriving in Bombay from a Konkan village around 1920. The man who meets you is not the mill-owner but the jobber, perhaps someone from your own village who has worked in the mill for twenty years. He finds you a place in the spinning room and a corner to sleep in a crowded room nearby, and lends you money until your first wages come. You are grateful. Soon, though, you learn that his help is never free: he expects money and presents, and if you cross him you may lose your job. Fig. 4.12 shows how his role grew.

4.5 The Peculiarities of Industrial Growth

Look at what the European agencies chose to invest in: tea and coffee estates, on land the colonial government let them have cheaply; indigo; jute; mines. Almost all of it was for export. Selling to Indians was not their aim.

Indian mill-owners of the late nineteenth century made a careful choice. Manchester dominated the cloth market, but it sent India little yarn, and only the fine kind. So the first Indian mills spun coarse yarn rather than weaving cloth, selling it to India's handloom weavers or shipping it to China. That way they never had to face Manchester head-on.

Between 1900 and 1910, several changes pushed industry in a new direction:

• Swadeshi. The swadeshi movement, which grew after the partition of Bengal in 1905, urged people to boycott foreign cloth.
• Organised business. Industrialists banded together to protect their interests and pressed the government for higher tariffs (import duties) on foreign goods and for other concessions.
• China slips away. From 1906, Indian yarn sold less and less in China, as mills in China and Japan captured the Chinese market.

So Indian industrialists began to switch from yarn to cloth. Between 1900 and 1912, India's output of cotton piece-goods doubled. Still, until the First World War, industry grew only slowly.

The war of 1914–18 transformed the picture. Lancashire's mills switched to army orders, so far less Manchester cloth reached India, and Indian mills found the whole home market open to them. The longer the war lasted, the more the army itself ordered from Indian factories:

• tents
• cloth for uniforms
• leather boots
• saddles for horses and mules
• jute bags

To meet the demand, owners built new factories and kept old ones running shift after shift, with more workers putting in longer hours. Output soared through the war years.

The end of the war did not bring Manchester back. Britain's old industries had fallen behind newer rivals, the USA, Germany and Japan, and after 1918 its cotton industry went into steep decline, with exports of cloth falling sharply. Indian mill-owners, meanwhile, kept the customers they had won during the war, steadily replacing imported goods with their own and taking over the home market.

4.5.1 Small-scale Industries Predominate

Factories grew steadily after the war, yet big industry remained a small part of the economy. Most large units, about 67 per cent of them in 1911, were in Bengal and Bombay. A 1931 survey shows smaller clusters in Madras, Bihar, the United Provinces, Punjab and the Central Provinces. Elsewhere small units still ruled. Just 5 per cent of the industrial workforce was in registered factories in 1911, and twenty years later the share was still only 10 per cent. Everyone else worked in small workshops or at home, tucked away in back streets.

Surprisingly, some crafts grew in the twentieth century, handloom weaving among them. Hand-spinners had been ruined in the nineteenth century, undercut by cheap mill thread. Weavers, though, could use that same cheap thread, and they hung on. Between 1900 and 1940, handloom cloth output almost trebled. What explains this?

One answer is cheap, clever technology. Craft workers happily adopt a new device if it lets them make more without adding much to their costs, and the fly shuttle, invented in England by John Kay in 1733, did exactly that (Fig. 4.13). From the 1910s it spread through India's weaving villages: one weaver could now work faster and weave wider cloth with fewer helpers. More than a third of India's handlooms (over 35 per cent) had fly shuttles by 1941. In Travancore, Madras, Mysore, Cochin and Bengal the share was 70 to 80 per cent. Many other small improvements also helped weavers raise their output and compete with the mills.

Some weavers were better placed than others to survive competition from the mills.

Survival was not the same as prosperity. Handloom families toiled long hours for modest earnings, with every member, children included, doing some part of the work. But it would be wrong to see them as relics of a dying past. Their looms were as much a part of India's industrial story as the mills.

4.6 Market for Goods

Factories can make cloth by the mile, but someone has to buy it. A shopper who had always bought from the local weaver had to be persuaded that a bale from a faraway mill was worth trying. How did sellers create that wish?

Advertising was the main tool. A good advertisement does more than give information: it makes you feel you need something you had never thought about. You cannot escape ads today, on phones, hoardings, buses and cricket shirts. But they are not new. Ever since factories began turning out goods in bulk, sellers have used advertising to win customers in new places and to teach people new habits of buying, in the ways shown in Fig. 4.14.

Think of the brand names on the clothes you wear. Manchester's mill-owners used the same idea a century and a half ago. A label pasted on each bundle of cloth told the buyer two things, where it was made and by whom, and made a silent promise: this is good stuff. A bold ‘Made in Manchester’ was meant to reassure a shopper who had never heard of the mill.

Many labels were small works of art, and historians study them for clues to the sellers' thinking. Why put a goddess on a bale of English cotton? There were two reasons. A sacred image hinted at a blessing, as if the product came with divine approval. And a figure every Indian buyer knew, such as Lakshmi, Saraswati, Kartika or Krishna, made an unfamiliar foreign product feel like something from home.

Calendars were an even cleverer idea, printed from the late nineteenth century. A newspaper advertisement needs a reader; a calendar picture does not. So a calendar could reach almost everyone: it might hang in a roadside tea stall, a labourer's hut, a clerk's office or a middle-class flat. And it stayed on the wall for a whole year, so its owner saw the advertisement every day. Here too the gods helped to sell. A 1928 calendar for gripe water, a medicine for babies' stomach aches, showed the infant Krishna. A 1934 calendar for a soap showed the god Vishnu bringing sunlight across the sky.

Royalty sold goods too. Advertisements and calendars showed emperors, nawabs and maharajas, and one Manchester cloth label even carried a portrait of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. The argument went like this: what is good enough for a king is surely good enough for you. And if you honour the king, you should value the goods he seems to approve.

Indian manufacturers borrowed these methods for a patriotic purpose. Their advertisements told buyers that choosing Indian goods was a way of serving the nation. One Ahmedabad mill's cloth label, for instance, showed a goddess holding out cloth made in India and urging people to use Indian goods. In this way the humble cloth label joined the national movement, carrying the swadeshi appeal into every bazaar.

Conclusion

Factories, machines and a new class of industrial workers certainly changed the world. Yet the story does not end there: in Britain, and even more in India, hand tools and small workshops remained at the heart of industry.