CBSE Class 10 Social Science The Age Of Industrialization Notes Set 03

These CBSE Class 10 History notes for Chapter 4 The Age of Industrialisation cover proto-industrialisation in Europe, the rise of factories and the role of hand labour versus steam power, the life of industrial workers, and industrialisation in colonial India -- the decline of Indian textile exports, the weaver-gomastha system, the rise of Indian-owned factories and entrepreneurs, where mill workers came from, and the peculiarities of Indian industrial growth. Note: per the current CBSE syllabus, this chapter is assessed only in school-level periodic/mid-term tests, not in the board exam.

Proto-Industrialisation

Proto-industrialisation was an early stage in the development of modern industrial economies, before the rise of fully industrial, factory-based societies, which laid the groundwork for later industrial development. It was marked by a growing involvement of rural families in market-oriented craft production, organised in a decentralised way under the control of merchants, and led to growing specialisation in both craft (industrial) and commercial agricultural production, gradually making traditional rural society more market-oriented.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, merchants from Europe's cities began moving into the countryside, advancing money to peasants and artisans and encouraging them to produce for an international market, as world trade expanded and colonies were established around the world.

Why not in the cities? Urban crafts and trade guilds — producer associations that trained artisans, controlled production, regulated competition and prices, and kept newcomers out — were powerful in towns, and rulers often granted specific guilds a monopoly over particular products, making it hard for new merchants to set up production within city limits.

Why the countryside? As open fields shrank and common lands came under tighter protection, cottagers and poor peasants, who had depended on these commons for firewood, berries, vegetables, hay and straw, needed new sources of livelihood. Many had only small plots of land, insufficient to employ the whole family, so when merchants offered advances to produce goods, peasant households readily agreed, staying in the countryside while supplementing their declining agricultural income and making fuller use of their family's labour. This created a close relationship between town and countryside: cloth manufacture was largely carried out in rural areas, organised by merchants based in towns, with each merchant typically employing 20 to 25 workers at every stage of production, so a single clothier could be responsible for hundreds of workers in total. In the making of woollen cloth, for instance, a merchant would buy wool from a wool stapler, have it spun into yarn by a spinner, woven by a weaver, finished by a dyer, and finally sold in a market such as London.

The Coming Up of the Factory

The earliest factories in England appeared around the 1730s, and multiplied through the eighteenth century, with cotton textiles the most important, fastest-growing industry. Britain imported about 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton in 1760; within thirty years, this had risen to about 22 million pounds, a growth linked to a series of innovations that simplified each stage of manufacture (carding, twisting, spinning and rolling), raising output per worker and also improving the quality and strength of thread and yarn.

Richard Arkwright developed the idea of the cotton mill. Earlier, cloth production was spread across the countryside, carried out in individual village households; a mill, by contrast, could house expensive new machinery, bringing every stage of production together under one roof, making supervision, quality control and labour discipline far easier than when production was scattered across the countryside. As a result, artists and observers of the period focused overwhelmingly on the mills themselves, largely overlooking the many small workshops and back lanes where much manufacturing still continued. Arkwright (1732-92) is credited with a simple, effective spinning machine — the water frame — which replaced manual spinning and allowed cotton yarn to be spun faster and in far larger quantities than before.

The pace of industrial change: cotton and metals were Britain's most dynamic sectors. Cotton led the way, growing rapidly until the 1840s; after that, iron and steel took over as the leading industry, as demand grew with railway construction in Britain from the 1840s and in the colonies from the 1860s — by 1873, Britain was exporting iron and steel worth £77 million, more than twice the value of its cotton exports. Even so, newer industries could not easily displace older ones: as late as the end of the nineteenth century, technologically advanced industries employed less than 20% of the total workforce, and even a growing industry like textiles still relied heavily on production outside factories, in domestic units. The real basis of growth was less the glamorous steam-powered cotton and metal industries than countless small, ordinary innovations in sectors such as food processing, building, pottery, glass-making, tanning, furniture-making and tool manufacture.

Technological change, overall, was slow to spread, since new technology was expensive, merchants and industrialists were often hesitant to adopt it, machines could break down with costly repairs, and new inventions frequently underperformed what their inventors and manufacturers had promised. The English inventor Thomas Newcomen (1664-1729) built the first practical fuel-burning engine, the atmospheric engine, in 1712; in 1781, James Watt improved and patented Newcomen's design, with a working model built by his business partner, Matthew Boulton. By the end of the nineteenth century, there were 321 steam engines across England, of which around 80 operated in cotton mills, 9 in wool mills, and the rest elsewhere.

Hand Labour and Steam Power

Advantages of manual labour: labour was cheap and plentiful in Victorian Britain, as poor peasants and the urban poor migrated to cities in large numbers in search of work, keeping wages low. Demand for labour in many industries was also seasonal — gas works and breweries were busiest in winter, bookbinders and printers needed extra hands before Christmas, and shipyards were busiest repairing vessels in the off-season — so industrialists often preferred to hire workers for the season rather than invest in machinery. Hand labour was also better suited to complex designs and uniquely shaped items (machines were better suited to standardised, uniform products) — for example, mid-nineteenth-century Britain produced some 500 different types of hammers and 45 types of axes, work that depended on human skill rather than mechanical technology. Victorian Britain's upper classes, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, also preferred handmade goods, which they associated with elegance and refinement, while machine-made goods were largely produced for export to the colonies.

The life of workers: for the newly emerging industrial working class, industrialisation often brought real hardship. An abundant supply of workers in the labour market meant many could not find work at all and so were forced to accept lower wages. Wages rose only slightly in the early nineteenth century, and these gains were often wiped out by rising prices; real wages fell sharply during the Napoleonic Wars. Until the mid-nineteenth century, around 10% of Britain's urban population lived in extreme poverty, a figure that could rise to between 35% and 75% during periods of economic crisis. Workers often opposed new technology out of fear of losing their jobs — when the Spinning Jenny was introduced into the woollen industry, hand spinners attacked the new machines. The Spinning Jenny, devised by James Hargreaves in 1764, sped up spinning and reduced the demand for labour, since turning a single wheel let one worker operate several spindles and spin several threads simultaneously.

After the 1840s, large-scale building activity in Britain's cities created a new wave of job opportunities — roads were widened, new railway stations and lines were built, tunnels were dug, drainage and sewer systems installed, and rivers embanked; the number of workers employed in transport doubled in the 1840s, and doubled again over the following thirty years.

Industrialisation in the Colonies: The Age of Indian Textiles

Since ancient times, Indian silk and cotton products dominated international textile trade. While coarser cottons were produced in many countries, the finer varieties were chiefly Indian. A vibrant trade network ran through the north-west frontier, mountain passes and deserts, as well as through major pre-colonial ports: Surat connected India to Gulf and Red Sea ports, while Masulipatam and Hooghly (in Bengal) linked India to Southeast Asia. Indian merchants and bankers played a central role in this network, financing production, moving goods and supplying exporters.

The decline of the old ports, and the rise of new ones: by the 1750s, this network, long controlled by Indian merchants, was unravelling, as European companies steadily gained power, leading to the decline of older ports such as Surat and Hooghly. Exports from these ports fell sharply, the credit that had sustained earlier trade dried up, and local bankers were gradually ruined — Surat's gross trade value fell from 16 million (in the late seventeenth century) to just 3 million by the 1740s. As Surat and Hooghly declined, Bombay and Calcutta grew in their place, trade through these new ports now controlled by European companies and carried on European ships — a clear marker of the growth of colonial power.

The life of weavers: after the 1760s, the establishment of East India Company control did not, at first, reduce Indian textile exports — Britain's own cotton factories had not yet developed, and fine Indian textiles remained in high demand in Europe, so the Company was keen to expand its textile exports from India. Before it established political control over Bengal and the Carnatic in the 1760s and 1770s, the Company faced competition from French, Dutch and Portuguese traders, as well as local merchants, so weavers and supply merchants could negotiate and choose their best buyer, and Company officials often complained in their letters home about supply problems and high prices.

Once the Company established political power, it moved to claim a monopoly over trade, and set up a system to eliminate competition, control costs, and secure a steady supply of cotton and silk textiles: it appointed paid gomasthas to supervise weavers directly, collect cloth and check its quality, sidelining existing traders and brokers; and it introduced a system of advances, under which weavers who accepted loans to buy raw material were bound to hand over their finished cloth to the gomastha alone, forbidden from selling it to anyone else. Weavers initially welcomed these advances, hoping to earn more as demand for fine textiles grew; weaving itself was a family enterprise, with women and children working at different stages. Many weavers, who had previously also cultivated small plots of land to support their families alongside weaving, were eventually forced to sell this land and devote themselves entirely to weaving.

Conflict between weavers and gomasthas soon followed. Earlier supply merchants had often lived within weaving villages, maintaining close, long-term relationships with weavers and supporting them in difficult times; the new gomasthas, by contrast, were outsiders with no such ties, who behaved arrogantly, arrived in villages with soldiers and peons, and punished weavers for delays with whipping and beating. Weavers lost their ability to bargain over price or sell to multiple buyers, since the Company's price was low and the loans they had taken kept them tied to it. In several parts of the Carnatic and Bengal, weavers abandoned their villages and resettled where they had family connections.

Manchester comes to India: in 1772, the Company official Henry Patullo confidently declared that demand for Indian textiles, given their quality, could never decline. Yet by the early nineteenth century, Indian textile exports fell sharply: piece-goods made up about 33% of India's exports in 1811-12, but only around 3% by 1850-51. This happened because cotton manufacturing developed in England, and British industrialists, worried about competition, pressured their government to impose import duties on Indian cotton textiles while persuading the East India Company to sell British cotton goods in Indian markets instead; British cotton exports to India rose dramatically in the early nineteenth century. Indian weavers faced a double blow: their export markets collapsed, and their domestic market shrank too, flooded with cheap, machine-made Manchester imports they could not compete with on price. By the 1860s, a new problem emerged: a shortage of good-quality raw cotton, as raw cotton exports from India rose and its price climbed, forcing weavers to pay very high prices for scarce supplies. By the end of the century, a further challenge emerged, as Indian factories themselves began producing machine-made cloth, flooding the market and accelerating the decline of traditional handloom weaving.

Factories Come Up

The first cotton mill in Bombay was established in 1854, beginning production two years later; by 1862, four mills were operating, with 94,000 spindles and 2,150 looms. Jute mills came up in Bengal, the first in 1855 and a second in 1862. The Elgin Mill was established in Kanpur in the 1860s, and the first cotton mill in Ahmedabad was set up around the same time; Madras's first spinning and weaving factory began operating in 1874.

The early entrepreneurs: the roots of several prominent Indian business communities lay in their trade relations with China, where, from the late eighteenth century, the British exported opium and imported tea; many Indian businessmen took part in this trade as junior partners, and used the capital they earned to invest in Indian industry, along with capital drawn from trade networks with Burma, the Middle East and Africa. Dwarkanath Tagore was among the traders who set up early industrial enterprises in the 1830s and 1840s, though his enterprise closed during the economic crisis of the 1840s. Later in the century, many businessmen became successful industrialists: in Bombay, Parsi entrepreneurs such as Dinshaw Petit and Jamsetjee Nusserwanjee Tata built large industrial empires; the Marwari businessman Seth Hukumchand set up the first Indian-owned jute mill in Calcutta in 1917, around the same time that G. D. Birla founded the Birla Group.

The East India Company gradually restricted Indian businessmen, barring them from trading manufactured goods directly with Europe, so that they were largely confined to exporting raw materials and foodgrain — raw cotton, opium, wheat and indigo — needed by Britain, and were squeezed out of the shipping business. Until the First World War, European Managing Agencies controlled a large share of Indian industry; important agencies included Bird Heilgers & Co., Andrew Yule, and Jardine Skinner & Co. In many cases, Indian financiers supplied the capital while European agencies made all the actual investment and business decisions; European merchant-industrialists maintained their own Chambers of Commerce, which Indian businessmen were not permitted to join. In 1912, J. N. Tata's family enterprise established India's first iron and steel works, at Jamshedpur.

Where did the workers come from? as the number of factories grew, so did the demand for workers — Indian factories employed about 584,000 people in 1901, rising to about 2,436,000 by 1946. Workers typically came from nearby towns and villages: in 1911, over half of Bombay's cotton mill workers came from the neighbouring district of Ratnagiri, while most Kanpur textile workers came from villages around the town itself. Mill workers often moved back and forth between village and city, returning home for harvests and festivals, though some travelled very long distances in search of work — workers from the United Provinces, for example, went to work in Bombay's textile mills and Calcutta's jute mills. Despite growing demand for labour, finding work remained difficult, since job-seekers always outnumbered available jobs, and entry into the mills was often restricted; most industrialists relied on a jobber, a trusted, long-serving employee, to recruit new workers, typically from his own village, help them settle in the city, and provide them with support and money in hard times. In turn, the jobber gained considerable power over these workers' lives, and could demand money or gifts in return for favours.

The Peculiarities of Industrial Growth

Export-oriented production: European Managing Agencies, which controlled much of India's early industrial production, focused on products meant chiefly for export rather than domestic use, establishing tea and coffee plantations and investing in mining, indigo and jute, after securing cheap land from the colonial government.

Avoiding competition with Manchester: when Indian entrepreneurs began setting up their own companies in the 1890s, they deliberately avoided competing with Manchester goods in the domestic cloth market. Early Indian cotton mills instead produced coarse cotton yarn (thread) rather than finished cloth, since yarn was not a major part of British imports into India; this yarn was used by Indian handloom weavers, and also exported to China.

The shift to cloth manufacturing: several developments changed this pattern by the first decade of the twentieth century. As the Swadeshi movement grew, nationalists organised boycotts of foreign cloth; Indian industrial organisations lobbied the government, together, for higher import duties and other concessions; and from 1906, Indian yarn exports to China fell sharply as Chinese and Japanese mills took over that market. As a result, Indian industry began shifting from yarn towards cloth production — cotton piece-goods output doubled between 1900 and 1912.

The impact of the First World War: industrial growth had remained slow before the war, but the war transformed the situation. British mills, now absorbed in war production, cut back their exports to India, suddenly leaving Indian mills with a large domestic market to supply, as demand grew for jute bags, cloth for army uniforms, tents, leather boots, and horse and mule saddles. New factories were built, older ones expanded and ran extra shifts, many new workers were hired (often working longer hours), and manufacturing output rose sharply during the war years. Manchester never regained its earlier dominance of the Indian market afterwards: Britain's economy struggled to compete with the United States, Germany and Japan after the war, its cotton production and cloth exports declined considerably, and local Indian industrialists steadily strengthened their position, gradually displacing foreign manufacturers and gaining greater control over the domestic market.

Small-scale industries predominate: though factory industry grew steadily after the war, large-scale factories still accounted for only a small part of the Indian economy. In 1911, Bengal and Bombay together held about 67% of all such factories, while small-scale production continued to dominate elsewhere in the country. Registered factories employed only a small share of the total industrial workforce — about 5% in 1911, rising to 10% by 1931 — with the rest working in small workshops and household units, often tucked away in streets and back lanes, out of sight of casual passers-by.