Chapter 4 The Age of Industrialization Class 10th Notes History
Chapter 4 The Age of Industrialization Class 10th Notes History Social Science
Chapter 4, "The Age of Industrialisation" from Class 10 History analyses how the industrialisation changed Europe and India. It expounds on the pre-industrial world, factories emerging, effects on workers and traders, and industrialisation spread. This also identifies how industrialisation shifted modes of production, work conditions, and patterns of trade as it describes its effects on Indian industries at the time of British rule.
Proto-Industrialisation: The Pre-Factory Period
Prior to the great factory, Europe possessed a proto-industrial economy in which merchants subcontracted with peasants to make the goods in their own homes.
This was an intermediate phase between agrarian societies and industrial economies. Rather than big, centralized factories, manufacturing occurred in rural cottages, or the "putting-out system." Raw materials (like wool or cotton) were supplied by merchants and then retailed to peasants to be converted into finished products (like cloth).
Permitted rural households to supplement agriculture with income.
It was supplementary income for peasant farmers. It was mainly seasonal and employed proto-industrial labor as a temporary expedient, chiefly during winter when agriculture was comparatively less significant. Women and children were employed as well, who toiled at home, spinning or weaving cloth.
Merchants served as middlemen, organizing production and transporting countryside laborers to city markets. Merchants dominated the chain of supply purchasing raw materials, distributing them to producers, reaping produced goods, and selling at profit. The trend developed capitalism's base through creating networks of commerce and a money economy.
Governed by guilds, deciding who could be producers. Guilds were professional organizations of trained craftsmen, e.g., blacksmiths and weavers, that regulated membership, quality, and price within the craft. Guilds disliked the proto-industrial system because it bypassed their control, with untrained peasants making cheap goods. It was an indication of the breakdown of guilds when there was complete industrialisation.
This was the basis for full-scale industrialisation in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Proto-industrialisation provided skills, markets, and capital that powered the Industrial Revolution. It proved that decentralized production was able to accommodate increased demand for goods, but at no rate nor with such productivity levels as machinery-enabled factory equipment.
This system flourished in Britain, Flanders, and segments of Germany, where cloth production was prevalent. It also magnified Europe's reliance on colonial produce (i.e., India cotton), which tied industrialisation to foreign commerce.
Hand Labour. vs Steam Power in Britain
Britain was well endowed with low-cost labor, and industries consequently did not necessarily need machines.
When the Industrial Revolution started in the late 18th century, Britain had a vast population whom they had surplus to use as low-cost labor. This precluded the use of expensive machines in certain industries since labor was more economical than expensive steam engines or mechanical machinery.
Most sectors used hand labor as a means of cost-cutting.
Textiles, for example, still used handloom weavers despite the availability of spinning machines. Home shops and home production persisted as long as it required less front capital than the factory. Owners also wished to use hand labor so that they could do things that were requiring precision or flexibility machines were not yet able to.
Work was seasonal alone, therefore, so that people worked only when there was strong demand.
Mass industries such as textiles and agriculture had peak seasons (e.g., export or harvest deadline), and the laborers had off-season times idle. This unpredictability pushed most of them to work other jobs or move around in quest of a job.
Public works (tunnels, highways, railways) offered 19th-century work.
As Britain itself advanced with industrialization, she too expanded her transport system. The construction of canals, the building of roads, and railway building all offered jobs to thousands of laborers by hand (navvies), as well as absorbing some of the displaced labor made redundant by machines or seasonal fluctuation.
Therefore, even as industrialization introduced machinery, manpower was still in control in most industry.
The shift to steam power was incremental, not abrupt. Machines held sway in textile and mining but continued to dominate construction of buildings, small manufacturing, and rural communities in much of the 19th century.
The mutual dependency of machine labor and hand labor created social unease. The workers were apprehensive of losing their jobs to machines (e.g., the Luddite riots of 1811–1816), but British industrialization was based on the two systems supplementing each other.
The Factory System in India
Industrialization began in India in the mid-19th century, but it was bounded by British policies.
While British growth was spontaneous and natural, Indian industrial development was at the mercy of colonial interest. Neither the British East India Company nor subsequently the British Crown viewed India as an industrial nation but as a source of raw material and as a market for British goods free of any limit.
The first cotton mill was established at Bombay (1854) and afterwards at Ahmedabad and once more at Kanpur.
Bombay cotton mills marked the beginning of India's entry into factory production. The cities gave access to cotton cultivation regions and seaports so that they could be utilized to the maximum. Ahmedabad and Kanpur were the next textile centers which the Indian entrepreneurs developed in the presence of British hegemony.
The jute industry began in Bengal in 1855.
Bengal factories spun raw jute into sacks and ropes based on foreign requirements (shipping and agriculture, etc.). The Britishers controlled the mills and the Britishers themselves and the dividends shared with Britain and not India. Indian enterprise was small-scale with the market under British industry's control.
British measures of unrestricted imports of British merchandise and heavy duty on Indian exports suppressed Indian industries. Indian industry was backward and weak, and Indian mills could not rival Manchester's machine cloth.
Indian factory system was not a path to independence but a colonial instrument. It introduced modern technology at the behest of British economic interest, and it rendered India import-dependent.
Industrial Worker's Life
The shift from farm labor to factory work introduced novel hardships to workers.
Industrialization brought country people before city factories, ending the ancient agrarian way of life. Workers traded the uncertainty of agriculture for the regimentation of factory time.
Long hours and poor pay.
Factory shifts were usually 12–16 hours with little off time. Wages were just enough to get by, and little time for leisure or saving. Child and female labor were common as they were paid even lower wages.
Job insecurity as employees' jobs were subject to the mercy of factory demands.
Factories hired and dismissed subject to market demands. During depression, workers were sent off work without pay, leaving families destitute.
They predominantly shifted to urban areas, which were squalid and congested to live in.
Industrial metropolises such as Bombay and Calcutta were infested with city migrants, living in squalid slums without sanitation and clean water. Cholera proliferated abundantly under these conditions.
Workers had no or minimal protection, and their survival was at the mercy of industry needs.
There were no labor laws and no unions to begin with. Workers were exploited with no way out, living at the mercy of factory owners and the market.
This is precisely what happened in Britain during the Industrial Revolution, but Indian colonial exploitation was added to the misery because profits hardly fed back into indigenous societies.
Industrialisation in Colonies: British Control Over India
The British utilized Indian resources to power their own industrialization.
India was a "jewel in the crown" of the British Empire, shipping raw materials such as cotton, jute, and tea to British factories. Extraction was organized, and railways were established to carry the produce to the ports and exported.
Raw materials were extracted to keep British industries going.
Cotton went to Manchester mills, jute to Dundee mills, and tea to British tables. India was taxed to provide Britain's industrial behemoth, not to make its own.
Indian industries retaliated against British imports in good earnest.
British products in low-cost machine-made form inundated Indian markets and displaced Indian artisans and small mills. Tariffs protected British imports and imposed Indian products, assuring hegemony.
Local workers were subjected to poor working conditions and economic exploitation.
Indian workers in mines, plantations, and factories labored in substandard conditions for minimal wages. British companies benefited at the expense of Indian industries and workers.
Industrialization increased, but colonial domination guaranteed that Indian industries did not grow.
India was allowed a few factories, but its industrial growth was halted in order to keep Britain economically superior.
This "deindustrialization" of India transformed its pre-colonial position as textile titan to dependent colony during the 19th century.
The Market for Goods and Advertising
To pave the way for industrial expansion, advertisements played a significant role.
When industrial production rose exponentially, companies had to sell off excess goods. Advertising acted as a conduit between factories and consumers.
Created demand for new products.
Advertising brought new products (e.g., machines, apparel, soap) to the attention of those who had not a clue that they even existed, hidden necessities.
Shaped consumer habits by creating goods into needs.
Photographs and slogans pushed goods to modernity, health, or status. Advertising for British soap in India, for example, brought "civilization" and cleanliness among colonial subjects.
Newspaper, periodicals, and streetboard publications.
Print advert and billboards reached urban consumers, while hand-painted packs and labels reached rural consumers. British goods in India, for example, habitually employed imperial imagery to connote superiority.
Advertising is still a powerful force making markets even today.
Today's advertising is the offspring of those origins, employing psychology and the media to drive consumption throughout the globe.
In such colonies as India, colonial control was maintained through colonial promotion of British goods against indigenous goods, economically rendering the people more reliant.
Fall of Indian Weavers
Indian weavers were the world's best textile makers and were beleaguered by British policy.
Indian hand-woven attire (like muslin, calico) were the wonder of the whole world before British control. Colonial policy ruined the trade.
East India Company dominated the weavers and forced them to sell to British merchants only.
The company set low prices and monopolized trade, stripping the weavers of their bargaining power. It was anaxious to sell to other consumers and got the weavers engaged in exploitative activities.
Indian cloth had stiff competition from Manchester cloth.
The cheaper cloth produced by British machines captured Indian markets and pushed hand-woven cloth out of business. Tariffs were established, and the home-made cloth was not profitable. Most weavers lost their means of livelihood, and a few turned into cultivators in order to earn their livelihood.
Looms were not in use, and weavers became landless laborers or cultivators, but cultivation was not able to provide employment to all of them, and therefore poverty dominated as a whole.
Manchester cloth engulfed Indian markets by the 19th century and harmed Indian artisans severely.
India also became a textile importer instead of being a textile exporter in a role reversal of its pre-colonial economic hegemony.
Wearing destruction was evidence of broader deindustrialisation, as Britain converted India from a manufacturing center to a source of raw materials.
The Role of British-Manufactured Goods
Indian policies turned India into a market for British commodities.
India's 300 million consumers were an enormous consumer market. British law accorded this market highest priority to their mills, rather than Indian development.
British imports increased and Indian exports declined.
Pre-colonial Indian exports of textiles were dismantled by British imports of cloth. Britain's balance of trade with India was in Britain's interest by the 1860s.
Indian industries lacked raw material and were faced with strong competition from machine-made products by the 1860s.
British imports pushed Indian producers out of the market, so that local mills had only limited cotton, and hence industrial growth was thwarted.
Industrialisation in India therefore served British economic interests and not indigenous growth.
Indian factories were an afterthought to British industrial dominance, built for colonial purposes.
This economic imbalance continued until India gained independence in 1947, with long-term consequences on India's industrial potential.
Industrial Development in India
Indian enterprises failed during the British period but there was some growth.
Indian business houses, the Tatas and Petits being the best examples, set up industries.
The Tatas set up steel and cotton industries and the Petits set up factories in Bombay. They formed the backbone of new Indian industry.
The Swadeshi Movement was instructing Indians to boycott British goods and buy Indian industries.
This national movement was propagating self-sufficiency since 1905 and invoking the cry for indigenous products and resisting British rule.
Following World War I, Britain's economic strength declined and Indian industries thrived.
War pulled Britain's economy tight, and its hold over India loosened. Indian manufacturing grew, particularly during the two wars.
Indian economic independence continued to be constricted by colonial controls.
Tariffs and currency controls by Britain's policy limited India from ever growing to become non-competitive with Britain.
Post-WWI industrialization marked the turning point, and thus the stage was set for the post-independence industrialization spurt in India.
Early Indian Entrepreneurs
There were entrepreneurs who were able to survive Indians due to British dominance.
Visionary Indians overcame colonial constraints to create industries at a personal sacrifice that was huge.
Dwarkanath Tagore (Bengal) and Tata (Bombay) invested in industry.
Tagore went into shipping and coal, and J.N. Tata started the Tata Group with textiles followed by steel (Tata Steel, 1907).
Seth Hukumchand (Calcutta, 1917) established the first Indian jute mill.
His mill shattered British monopoly over jute, demonstrating Indians were capable of competing in mass industry.
Indian industrial development was stifled by British policy, with most profits going to Britain.
Competition from British companies, excessive taxation, and limited access to capital limited these pioneers' achievements.
These entrepreneurs were rebels of Indian determination, setting the stage for upcoming industrial giants following independence.
The Struggle of the Worker
The employees were rural-born, but work was scarce to find.
The migrants were unskilled and had a surplus of labor in cities like Bombay and Calcutta.
Middlemen (jobbers) were hired by most industries to procure workers.
The jobbers were casual but omnipotent workers who preferred relatives or demanded bribes.
There was cutthroat competition, and the workers bribed jobbers for jobs.
There were not many jobs available, and the workers took bribes for even low-quality, irregular work.
Housing was poor with dozens living in overcrowded houses and irregular wages.
Slums had dozens in one room, and irregular work made families susceptible to hunger.
And so, with industrial progress, the workers faced grim hardships.
Industrialisation gave jobs but no protection, as a result of the first world phenomenon of factory life.
Jobbers exercised enormous powers and dominated early Indian labor relations in industrial cities.
Continuity of Handloom and Small-Scale Industries
As the factories prospered, small-scale industries also thrived.
Nothing was lost to the factories; rural artisans managed to survive during industrialization.
Most craftsmen managed to survive by improving handloom weaving.
Weavers introduced new looms, designs, or colors to keep up with changing tastes, reviving their art.
Coarser and finer hand-spun cloth persisted.
Aristocrats subsidized fine cloth (sarees), and rural poor subsidized coarse apparel, keeping handlooms active.
Artisans could compete with large industries with technological advancements.
Low-capital technology like fly-shuttle looms enhanced efficiency without the need for factory-scale investment.
This confirmed the coexistence of small-scale industries and factory industries in India.
It was different from Britain, where handlooms were about to become extinct, but the diversified market in India kept small-scale production afloat to survive.
This survival is reflective of the complex industrial trajectory that India took and even today has the combination of tradition and modernity.