Class 10 Social Science Chapter 16 The Age of Industrialisation Notes in English

This chapter opens with two old pictures: a goddess of progress flying past railways and factories, and two magicians, one from “the East” with a magic lamp, one a modern mechanic with modern tools. Both pictures tell the same story: the modern world equals machines, factories and rapid progress. This chapter asks whether that story is actually true, by looking closely at how industrialisation really happened, first in Britain and then in colonial India.

1Before the Industrial Revolution

We usually think of industrialisation as the growth of factories, and of industrial workers as factory workers. But large-scale industrial production for an international market existed in Europe long before factories did.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, merchants from European towns moved into the countryside, gave money to peasants and artisans, and got them to produce goods for an international market. Why the countryside and not the town? Because in towns, powerful urban crafts and trade guilds stood in the way.

In the countryside, poor peasants and artisans agreed eagerly. Open fields were disappearing and common lands were being enclosed, so cottagers who once gathered firewood, berries and fodder from the commons needed a new source of income. Their own tiny plots could not provide work for all members of the household, so when merchants offered an advance to produce goods, whole families took it. The income from this proto-industrial work supplemented their shrinking income from farming, and let them use every member’s labour, not just the plot of land.

A close relationship grew between town and countryside. Merchants stayed in towns but the actual work moved through several hands in the villages before it reached the market.

The English merchant clothier bought wool from a stapler and carried it through this whole chain. The final finishing was done in London before the export merchant sold the cloth abroad, so London itself came to be known as a “finishing centre”. This proto-industrial system was really a network run by merchants: at each stage, every merchant employed 20 to 25 workers, which meant a single clothier could be controlling hundreds of workers scattered across many households, none of them in a factory.

1.1 The Coming Up of the Factory

England’s earliest factories appeared by the 1730s, but their numbers multiplied only in the late 18th century. Cotton was the first symbol of this new era, and its production boomed fast.

Raw cotton imported into Britain: nearly a nine-fold jump in 27 years.

A series of 18th-century inventions sped up every step of cotton production, and then Richard Arkwright created the cotton mill. Until then, cloth production was spread across the countryside, done inside village homes. Now, the costly new machines could be bought, installed and run under one roof, under one management.

Gathering every process into one mill allowed for careful supervision, a watch over quality, and control over labour, none of which was possible when work was spread across the countryside. By the early 19th century, factories had become such a visible part of the English landscape, and new technology seemed so magical, that contemporaries were dazzled by the mills and almost forgot that production was still going on in bylanes and small workshops too.

1.2 The Pace of Industrial Change

The book itself makes this point in four steps, because the pace of change was far slower and patchier than the “Dawn of the Century” pictures suggest.

2Hand Labour and Steam Power

Victorian Britain had no shortage of human labour. Poor peasants and vagrants kept moving to the cities looking for work, and when labour is plentiful, wages stay low. So industrialists felt no pressure to buy expensive, labour-replacing machines.

Wherever production fluctuated like this with the season, industrialists preferred to hire and release hand labour rather than invest in machines that ran all year round. Machines were also oriented to producing uniform, standardised goods for a mass market. But much of the market wanted goods with intricate designs and unusual shapes. In mid-19th-century Britain, 500 varieties of hammers and 45 kinds of axes were still made by hand, because they required human skill, not mechanical technology.

Countries that actually had a labour shortage, like 19th-century America, were the ones keen on using machines to save on workers. Britain, with plenty of hands, felt no such need.

2.1 Life of the Workers

An abundance of labour was good for factory owners but hard on workers. Getting a job at all depended heavily on friendship and family networks: a relative or friend already inside a factory made it far more likely you would be hired quickly. Without such connections, many job-seekers had to wait weeks, sleeping under bridges or in night shelters.

Seasonal work meant long stretches with no work at all; some workers went home to the villages after winter, most simply hunted for odd jobs in the city. Wages did rise somewhat in the early 19th century, but average figures hide real hardship. During the long Napoleonic War, prices rose so fast that the real value of wages fell sharply, and income depended not just on the wage rate but on how many days a worker actually found employment.

This constant fear of unemployment made workers hostile to new technology.

When the Spinning Jenny was introduced into the woollen industry, women who lived on hand-spinning began attacking the new machines, because the machines had taken away their work. This conflict over the Jenny ran on for a long time.

After the 1840s, building activity intensified in the cities (wider roads, new railway stations and lines, tunnels, drainage and river embankments), opening up greater opportunities of employment. The transport industry’s workforce doubled in the 1840s, and doubled again over the next 30 years.

3Industrialisation in the Colonies

3.1 The Age of Indian Textiles

Before machine industries existed anywhere, Indian silk and cotton goods dominated the world’s textile trade. Coarser cotton was made in many countries, but the finest varieties usually came from India, and they travelled both by land and by sea.

Indian merchants and bankers ran the whole network: financing production, carrying goods and supplying the big export houses. Supply merchants gave weavers advances, collected the finished cloth, and carried it to the ports, where brokers for the big shippers negotiated the price.

By the 1750s, this Indian-controlled network was already breaking down. European companies first won concessions from local courts, then monopoly rights to trade, and this crushed the old ports.

As Surat and Hoogly decayed, Bombay and Calcutta grew in their place, now firmly under European control and carried in European ships. Many old Indian trading houses collapsed; those that survived had to work inside a network the European companies now controlled.

3.2 What Happened to Weavers?

Strangely, the East India Company’s growing political power after the 1760s did NOT immediately hurt textile exports. British cotton industries had not yet expanded, and Europe still wanted fine Indian textiles badly. Before the Company won political control of Bengal and Carnatic (1760s-70s), French, Dutch, Portuguese and local traders all competed for cloth, so weavers and merchants could bargain and sell to the highest bidder. In their letters back to London, Company officials continuously complained of difficulties of supply and the high prices.

Everything changed once the Company held political power and could enforce a monopoly.

Weavers eagerly took the early advances hoping to earn more, and many had to lease out their small plots of land to weave full time, with the whole family, including children, put to work. But the new gomasthas were outsiders with no old ties to the village. They behaved arrogantly, arrived with sepoys and peons, and punished weavers for delays in supply, often by beating and flogging them.

Weavers fought back in the ways available to them:

3.3 Manchester Comes to India

In 1772 a Company official, Henry Patullo, confidently said the demand for Indian textiles could never fall, since no other nation made goods of the same quality. He was wrong.

Why? As England’s own cotton industry grew, its industrialists pressured the government to tax imported cotton textiles, protecting Manchester at home, while also persuading the East India Company to sell British manufactures in Indian markets as well.

Then, in the 1860s, a fresh problem hit: when the American Civil War cut off US cotton supplies, Britain turned to India for raw cotton instead. As India’s raw cotton exports rose, its price shot up at home, and Indian weavers were left starved of good-quality raw material, forced to buy at exorbitant prices, and weaving simply stopped paying. By the century’s end, Indian factories themselves had begun flooding the market with machine-made goods, adding a third blow.

4Factories Come Up

4.1 The Early Entrepreneurs

Many of India’s earliest industrial fortunes began in the China trade: exporting opium to China and bringing tea back to England, from the late 18th century. Indians who financed, supplied and shipped this trade later turned their profits into industry.

But colonial rule also squeezed Indian merchants hard: they were barred from trading manufactured goods with Europe, pushed into exporting mostly raw materials and food grains such as raw cotton, opium, wheat and indigo, and gradually edged out of the shipping business too.

4.2 Where Did the Workers Come From?

Most workers in an industrial region came from the surrounding districts. In 1911, over half the workers in Bombay’s cotton mills came from the single neighbouring district of Ratnagiri, while Kanpur’s mills drew most of their hands from villages inside Kanpur district itself. Millworkers routinely moved between village and city, going home for harvests and festivals. Later, as news of jobs travelled further, workers came from as far as the United Provinces to work in Bombay’s textile mills and Calcutta’s jute mills.

Getting a job was never easy, since job-seekers always outnumbered jobs, and entry into the mills was tightly controlled.

5The Peculiarities of Industrial Growth

European Managing Agencies invested mainly in tea and coffee plantations, mining, indigo and jute, using cheap land from the colonial government. Most of these were products required primarily for export trade and not for sale in India.

When Indian businessmen entered industry in the late 19th century, they deliberately avoided competing head-on with Manchester in the Indian market. Since yarn was not an important part of British imports into India (the little yarn imported was only of the superior variety), the earliest Indian cotton mills made coarse cotton yarn rather than cloth, sold to Indian handloom weavers, or exported to China.

The early 20th century brought sharp change. The Swadeshi movement mobilised people to boycott foreign cloth, and industrial groups organised for tariff protection. From 1906, Chinese and Japanese mills flooded China’s own market, so Indian yarn exports there declined, and Indian industrialists shifted from yarn to cloth production instead. Cotton piece-goods output in India doubled between 1900 and 1912.

Industrial growth was still slow before the First World War. The war changed everything: British mills turned to war production, Manchester’s imports into India fell away, and Indian mills suddenly had a vast home market of their own.

New factories opened, old ones ran multiple shifts, more workers were hired, and everyone worked longer hours as industrial production boomed through the war years. After the war, Manchester never recovered its old place in India. Britain’s economy crumbled after the war, unable to modernise and compete with the US, Germany and Japan, so its cotton exports collapsed while local Indian industrialists consolidated their hold on the home market.

5.1 Small-scale Industries Predominate

Even as factory industry grew steadily after the war, large-scale industry stayed a small part of the whole economy.

About 67% of India’s large industries in 1911 were concentrated in just two regions, Bengal and Bombay. Everywhere else, small workshops and household units, often invisible in ordinary alleys and bylanes, did most of the work.

The book shows these as the regions holding India’s large-scale industries in 1931 (its Fig. 24), carried here as a list rather than as a map. In the book’s figure, the circles indicate the size of industries in the different regions.

Handicrafts production actually grew in the 20th century in some cases. Cheap machine-made thread had wiped out the spinning industry in the 19th century, but weavers survived, and handloom cloth production almost trebled between 1900 and 1940. Why? Partly because of technological changes: weavers adopted new technology where it improved production without excessively pushing up costs.

Weavers and craftspeople who expanded production this way did not necessarily prosper. They lived hard lives, working long hours with the whole household, including children, at work. But as the chapter itself insists, they were not simply leftovers from an older time: their life and labour was an integral part of the process of industrialisation itself.

6Market for Goods

When a new product appears, people first have to be persuaded that they need it, and the chapter traces this back to the very start of the industrial age through advertisements.

Manchester industrialists put labels on their cloth bundles to show the place of manufacture and act as a mark of quality. Buyers who saw “MADE IN MANCHESTER” printed boldly were meant to feel confident buying it. These labels also carried images, very often Indian gods and goddesses like Krishna, Lakshmi, Saraswati and Kartika, which lent the imported cloth a feeling of divine approval and made it look familiar to Indian buyers. Historic and royal figures, such as Maharaja Ranjit Singh, appeared on labels too, to earn respect for the product.

From the late 19th century, manufacturers began printing calendars, which reached even people who could not read newspapers or magazines. Hung in tea shops, offices and homes rich and poor alike, a calendar put its advertisement in front of the same household every single day, all year. The Gripe Water calendar of 1928 used an image of baby Krishna, and the Sunlight Soap calendar of 1934 showed the god Vishnu bringing sunlight from the sky.

7Conclusion

The age of industry did bring real technological change, the rise of factories, and a whole new industrial labour force. But as this chapter has shown again and again, hand technology and small-scale production never disappeared. They stayed a genuinely important part of the industrial landscape throughout, in both Britain and India. Look back at the two opening pictures now: the goddess of progress and the two magicians told only half the story.