The Age of Industrialisation

This chapter examines the history of industrialisation, first in Britain — the first industrial nation — and then in colonial India. It shows that industrialisation was not simply a story of factories and rapid technological progress: even before factories there was large-scale production for the world market, known as proto-industrialisation. It traces the coming of the factory, the dominance of cotton and then iron and steel, the slow and uneven pace of technological change, and why industrialists in labour-rich Victorian Britain often preferred hand labour. It then turns to India: the age of Indian textiles and the decline of the old ports, what happened to the weavers under the gomastha and the system of advances, how Manchester cloth flooded the Indian market, and how Indian factories came up under early entrepreneurs and where their workers came from. Finally it looks at the peculiarities of industrial growth in India, the survival and expansion of small-scale and handloom production, and how advertisements created a market for goods. It is a key chapter of the Class 10 History (India and the Contemporary World II) Board syllabus.