INDUSTRIALISATION IN BRITAIN AND DEINDUSTRIALISATION IN INDIA – WORLD HISTORY
News:
Britain’s Industrial
Revolution was actually premised upon the deindustrialisation of India
What's
in the news?
●
As the Oxford Union celebrates its second
centenary in 2023, a look at one of the most viral moments that the famous
Oxford Union Debate has seen - Congress MP Shashi Tharoor's scathing indictment
of British colonialism in 2015.
Industrial
Revolution:
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The Industrial Revolution refers to a
series of transformations in the methods
and relations of production that exponentially increased outputs and put
the West on its path towards prosperity and power.
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These transformations included going from hand production methods to
machines; new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes; the
increasing use of water power and steam power; the development of machine
tools; and the rise of the mechanised factory system.
Colonial
expansion and British industry:
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British colonial conquest was primarily an
economic enterprise.
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The British East India Company was a
trading company which began maintaining its own territories to protect its
economic interests.
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As British control expanded over the
Indian subcontinent, India became one of
Britain’s most important assets – supplying men, materials and markets for
its colonial overlord.
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As Tharoor would say in his speech, “By
the end of the 19th century, India was
Britain’s biggest cash cow”.
Indian
Scenario:
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India is not an industrial country in the
true and modern sense of the term. But by the standards of the 17th and 18th
centuries, i.e., before the advent of
the Europeans in India, India was the ‘industrial workshop’ of the world.
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Further, India’s traditional village
economy was characterised by the “blending
of agriculture and handicrafts”. But this internal balance of the village
economy had been systematically slaughtered by the British Government.
Indian
Deindustrialisation:
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‘Deindustrialisation’ as a term is the systematic destruction of the Indian
domestic economy that was crucial to Britain’s industrial revolution.
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While there may not have been modern
industries, there were thriving economies across the subcontinent.
How
India's Deindustrialisation contributed to Britain's Industrialisation?
As the British colonised
the subcontinent, they controlled and changed the traditional economies to
benefit Britain such as
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India is becoming a source of cheap raw materials rather than expensive finished goods.
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One
way free trade - Britain’s harsh taxation system -
taxing Britain's imports especially Indian exports to the British at an
exorbitant rate.
○
England pursued the policy of protection
through the imposition of import duties and eased export duty for British
goods.
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India
served as a market for British's finished goods.
○
In the absence of Indian markets as well
as, to an extent, raw materials, British industry would neither see the demand
nor the supply to help it thrive.
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The Industrial Revolution improved the living standards, technological
capabilities and economic might of Britain, its ability to colonise became
even greater.
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In effect, this formed a cycle - colonialism supported British industrial
growth, which in turn fuelled further colonial expansion and repression.
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The story of the handloom workers, whose
fingers and looms were not only broken but who were driven to the streets
because of competition from the cheap mill-produced cloth from Britain, is
among the most famous.
○
Competition
from machine-made goods in the wake of the industrial
revolution hastened the process of the decline of traditional handicrafts.
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Dadabhai Naoroji in his 1867 book ‘Poverty
and Un-British Rule in India’, he proposed the “drain of wealth” theory, in which he articulated how British rule
had brought losses to the tune of hundreds of millions of rupees in the Indian
economy.
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RP Dutt in his 1940 classic, ‘India Today’
wrote that the capital to finance
the Industrial Revolution in India instead went into financing the Industrial
Revolution in Britain.
Thus, Britain came right
in, broke their thumbs, smashed their looms, imposed tariffs and duties on their
cloth and products, and started of course, taking the raw materials from India,
and shipping back manufactured cloth, flooding the world’s markets with what
became the products of the dark and satanic mills of Victorian England. That
meant that the weavers in India became beggars, and India went from being a world-famous exporter of finished cloth, into
an importer.