The Age of Industrialisation Summary Class 10 Social Science Chapter 2

Before the Industrial Revolution

• We often think of industrialisation as just the rise of factories. When we mention industrial production, we usually mean factory production, and when we refer to industrial workers, we think of factory workers. Many histories start with the first factories.
• However, this view has a flaw. Even before factories appeared in England and Europe, there was significant industrial production aimed at international markets, which didn’t rely on factories. Historians call this early phase of industrialisation proto-industrialisation, part of a trade network managed by merchants.
• During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, merchants from European towns began to venture into the countryside, providing money to peasants and artisans, encouraging them to produce for a central international market.
• Until the eighteenth century, India dominated the global market for fine textiles.

The Coming Up of the Factory

• By the 1730s, the earliest factories in England came up.
• The first symbol of the new era was cotton.
• A series of inventions in the eighteenth century increased the efficacy of each step of the production process.
• Richard Arkwright created the cotton mill.

The Pace of Industrial Change
How rapid was the process of industrialisation?

• The most dynamic industries in Britain were clearly cotton and metals.
• The new industries could not easily displace traditional industries.
• Technological changes occurred slowly because:
  1. The New technology was expensive.
  2. The machines often broke down and repair was costly.
  3. They were not as effective as their inventors and manufacturers claimed.

Hand Labour and Steam Power

• In Victorian Britain, there was no shortage of human labour.
• Therefore, industrialists did not want to introduce machines which required large capital investment.
• Many seasonal industries were also there who usually preferred hand labour.
• Handmade goods came to symbolize refinement and class

Life of the Workers

• Labours were available in abundance in the market which affected the lives of workers.
• After the busy season was over, workers became jobless.
• In the early nineteenth century, wages increased but the prices of goods also increased.

Industrialisation in the Colonies

• Before machine industries emerged, silk and cotton products from India were the most sought-after in the global textile market.
• By the early 1800s, Indian textile exports began to decline.
• A bustling sea trade existed through key pre-colonial ports.

What Happened to Weavers?

• After the East India Company established political power, they tried to eliminate the existing traders and brokers and establish a more direct control over the weaver.
• It appointed a paid servant called the gomastha to supervise weavers, collect supplies, and examine the quality of cloth.
• Loans were provided for purchasing raw material for production.
• The produced cloth was to be handed over to the gomastha.
• In many weaving villages there were reports of clashes between weavers and gomasthas because:
  1. The new gomasthas were outsiders, with no long-term social link with the village.
  2. The price weavers received from the Company was miserably low.

Manchester Comes to India

• As cotton industries in England grew, industrialists became concerned about foreign imports.
• They urged the government to impose tariffs on cotton textiles to protect Manchester products.
• They also influenced the East India Company to sell British goods in Indian markets.
• This created two issues for Indian cotton weavers:
  • Their export market shrank due to an influx of Manchester imports.
  • Lower-priced cotton products from machines became widely available.
• By 1811-12, piece-goods made up 33% of India's exports; by 1850-51, this dropped to 3%.
• By the late 1800s, weavers faced additional challenges as Indian factories began producing machine-made goods, flooding the market.

Factories Come Up

• In 1854, the first cotton mill in Bombay was established and began production in 1856.
• In Bengal, the first jute mill was founded in 1855, followed by another in 1862.
• By 1862, there were four mills operating with 94,000 spindles and 2,150 looms.
• In north India, the Elgin Mill opened in Kanpur in the 1860s, and the first cotton mill in Ahmedabad started a year later.
• The first spinning and weaving mill in Madras commenced production in 1874.

The Early Entrepreneurs

• In Bengal, Dwarkanath Tagore made his fortune in the China trade.
• In Bombay, Parsis like Dinshaw Petit and Jamsetjee Nusserwanjee Tata who built huge industrial empires in India.
• After colonial power came in power, Indian businessmen were barred from trading with Europe in manufactured goods.

Where Did the Workers Come From?

• Workers in most industrial areas came from nearby districts.
• Industrialists often hired a jobber to recruit new workers.
• The jobber would bring people from his village, ensure they got jobs, and help them settle in the city.

The Peculiarities of Industrial Growth

• European Managing Agencies set up tea and coffee plantations, acquiring land cheaply from the colonial government.
• These agencies focused on specific products and dominated industrial production in India.
• The swadeshi movement promoted Indian industries in the early 1900s.
• During the Civil War, cotton supplies from the US were disrupted, leading Britain to look to India.
• From 1906, exports of Indian yarn to China decreased due to competition from Chinese and Japanese mills.
• Indian factories began producing machine-made goods, flooding the market.
• Despite this, cotton piece-goods production in India doubled from 1900 to 1912.
• During the First World War, British mills focused on war production, causing Manchester imports to India to decline.
• The number of workers in Indian factories rose from 584,000 in 1901 to over 2,436,000 by 1946.
• After the war, Manchester could not regain its former market position in India.

Small-scale Industries Predominate

• After the war, while factory industries grew steadily, large industries made up only a small part of the economy.
• In 1911, around 67 per cent of these industries were in Bengal and Bombay.
• Only a small fraction of the industrial workforce was in registered factories: 5 per cent in 1911 and 10 per cent in 1931.
• Across the country, small-scale production remained dominant, with handicrafts sometimes even expanding in the 20th century.
• The handloom sector, previously affected by cheap machine-made thread, managed to survive.
• Handloom cloth production grew significantly, nearly tripling from 1900 to 1940.
• By the second decade of the 20th century, the life and work of weavers became essential to the process of industrialisation.

Market for Goods

• New consumers are created is through advertisements.
• Advertisements appear in newspapers, magazines, hoardings, street walls, television screens.
• Advertisements became a vehicle of the nationalist message of Swadeshi.