Revolutions in the World (History)

Blue revolution in India its features, objectives, outcomes, significance and impact

Blue Revolution or Neel kranti mission in India is associated with the adoption of a package programme (to increase the production of fish and marine products) started in 1970. Subsequently, the Brackish Water Fish Farms Development Agency were set up to develop aquaculture. Hiralal Chaudhuri and Dr. Arun Krishnan known as Father of Blue revolution.

The Blue Revolution has brought significant improvement in aquaculture by embracing new techniques of:-

• fish breeding,
  
• fish rearing,
  
• fish marketing, and
  
• fish export.

Question:-  Defining blue revolution, explain the problems and strategies for pisciculture development in india ?

Impact of blue revolution in india | UPSC – IAS

• The fish production in the country has increased from 0.75 million tonnes in 1950-51 to 68.69 million tonnes in 2006-2007 under Blue Revolution or Neel kranti mission. Fishing, aquaculture and a host of allied activities, a source of livelihood to over 14 million people as well as a major foreign exchange earner, in 2005-06 contributed about one per cent of the total GDP and 5.3 per cent of the GDP from agriculture sector.
• In Nellore district (Shrimp Capital of India), About 70 percent of the total work force is dependent upon agriculture either as farmers or as agricultural labour. Because of the Environment  and Temperature (The maximum temperature is 36-46C0 during summer and the minimum temperature is 23-25C0 during winter) the climate suits well for Shrimp Cultivation There had been a tremendous increase in the production of shrimp. Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have developed shrimp in a big way. The Nellore District of Andhra Pradesh is known as the ‘Shrimp Capital of India’.

Problems and Strategies of Blue revolution in India | UPSC – IAS

Despite tremendous success in the development of fisheries in the country during the last four decades (under Blue Revolution or Neel kranti mission) , pisciculture is facing a number of problems.

• Most of the fishermen are poor. They are not able to purchase good equipment to improve the harvest of fish .
• The water bodies (rivers, lakes, ponds, and coastal areas of the seas) are increasingly polluted.
• The area of paddy fields in which fisheries used to be kept is also decreasing under the impact of fast growth of population, industrialisation, and urbanisation.
• Adequate information about the environment of water-bodies (ponds, lakes, rivers, and sea is not available).
• Unpredictable nature of monsoon as a result of which the inland fisheries suffer adversely.
• Problem of marketing, cold storage, poor infrastructure and transportation.
• Inadequacy of research and extension service facilities.
• There is need of Pink Revolution (Prawns) in the coastal regions of the country and also need a new blue revolution scheme (2.0).

Objectives of Blue revolution in India | UPSC – IAS

• To fully tap the total fish potential of the country both in the inland and the marine sector and triple the production by 2020 under Blue Revolution or Neel kranti mission.
• To transform the fisheries sector as a modern industry with special focus on new technologies and processes.
• To double the income of the fishers and fish farmers with special focus on increasing productivity and better marketing post-harvest infrastructure including e-commerce and other technologies and global best innovations.
• To ensure inclusive participation of the fishers and fish farmers in the income enhancement under Blue Revolution or Neel kranti mission.
• To triple the export earnings by 2020 with focus on benefits flow to the fishers and fish farmers including through institutional mechanisms in the cooperative, producer companies and other structures.
• To enhance food and nutritional security of the country.

Features and importance of the Blue Revolution in india | UPSC – IAS

Some of the salient features of the Blue Revolution Scheme are as follows:-

• Providing suitable linkages and convergence with the ‘Sagarmala Project’ of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA), Ministry of Shipping, National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM), Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY) etc.
• The Blue Revolution scheme concentrates mainly on enhancing the production and productivity of aquaculture and fisheries (Fish farming or pisciculture)  both from the inland and marine sources.
• Promoting and encouraging the economically backward sections like the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, Women and their co-operatives to take up fishing.
• The Blue Revolution Scheme also encourages entrepreneurship development, private investment, Public-Private Partnership (PPP) and better leveraging of institutional finance.

Outcomes and Effects of Blue Revolution in India | UPSC – IAS

The Blue Revolution in India brought an significant improvement in the aquaculture and fisheries sector with the introduction of new techniques of rearing, marketing, exporting and fish breeding. Some of the major outcomes of the Blue Revolution in India are mentioned below:-

• Indian Fisheries Sector reached a production of 4.7 million tonnes of fish from a limit of 60,000 tonnes including 1.6 million tonnes of fish from freshwater aquaculture.
• India is recorded to achieve an average annual growth of 14.8% as compared to the global average percentage of 7.5 in the production of fish and fish products (Fish farming or pisciculture).
• The fishery has become India’s largest agricultural export over the last five years with a growth rate of 6% – 10%.
• India has become the world’s second-largest producer of fish with exports worth more than 47,000 crore rupees.
• The fisheries and aquaculture production contributes 1% and 5% to India’s GDP and Agricultural GDP respectively.

Blue Revolution 2.0 and Unutilized Potential in India | UPSC – IAS

• It is a matter of great concern that India is able to exploit only a fraction of the aquaculture potential available to it.
• India uses only about 40% of the available ponds, tanks and other water bodies for freshwater aquaculture and 15% of total potential of brackish water resources.

Blue Revolution 2.0 or Neel Kranti Mission:-

• The focus of the Blue Revolution 2.0/Neel kranti mission is on development and management of fisheries. This covers inland fisheries, aquaculture, marine fisheries including deep sea fishing, mariculture and all activities undertaken by the National Fisheries Development Board.
• The National Fisheries Development Board (NFDB) was established to enhance fish production and productivity in the country and to coordinate fishery development in an integrated and holistic manner.
• Now, the Board works under the Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying.
  • It aims to achieve economic prosperity of fishers and fish farmers. The same will be done by developing fisheries in a sustainable manner keeping in view bio-security and environmental concerns.

The blue revolution 2.0 has certain objectives and new dimensions which includes:-

• It’s aim is to augment fish production (Fish farming or pisciculture) to achieve its target of 15 million tonnes by 2020 under the Blue Revolution or Neel kranti mission and raise it thereafter to about 20 million tonnes by 2022-23.
• Ensuring inclusive participation of fishers and fish farmers in the income enhancement.
• Transforming the fisheries sector as a modern industry with special focus on new technologies and processes.
• Doubling the income of fishers and fish farmers with special focus on increasing productivity and better post harvest marketing infrastructure.
• Enhancing food and nutritional security of the country.

Inland vs Marine Fisheries in India | UPSC – IAS

East coast vs West coast of India | UPSC – IAS

• The higher fish production (Fish farming or pisciculture) in the Arabian Sea is due to the broader continental shelf.
• East Coast contributes about 28 per cent of the total production of marine fish in the country. The fishing activity along the East coast is mainly carried on from Rameswaram in the south to Ganjam in the north, with fishing season from September to April along the Coromandel Coast
• The National Fisheries Development Board has been set up to realise the untapped potential of fishery sector with the application of modern tools of research and development including biotechnology.

List of Commercially important fishes | UPSC – IAS

The catch of almost all commercially important marine fin fishes and shell fishes is on the decline trend and result in severe resource depletion and unemployment.

List of Sea fish

• Catfish,
• Herring,
• Mackerels,
• Perches,
• Mullets,
• Indian salmon,
• Shellfish,
• Eels,
• Anchovies,
• and Dorab

List of freshwater fish

• Catfish,
• Loaches,
• Perches,
• Eels,
• Herrings,
• Feather backs,
• Mullets,
• Carps,
• Prawns,
• Murrells,
• and Anchovies.

Note – Decline in marine capture fishery affects the availability of cheap protein for the public and also affects the GDP growth of the country.

Way Forward | UPSC – IAS

• Under Blue Revolution or Neel kranti mission – An integrated effort is needed by linking up the entrepreneurs, fisheries development agencies, State/UT Fisheries Departments and Marine and Brackish water Fisheries Research Institutions with regard to financial, technical and marketing aspects.
• India’s long coastline has the potential of becoming the strength of the economy particularly through the exploitation of the Blue Revolution or Neel kranti mission.
• A coordinated and synchronised action by empowering the entrepreneurs in the available business opportunities together can create a farmed seafood production sector in the country in the near future.
• India can grow to the extent of 10 trillion dollar economy as against 2.7 trillion dollar today with the help of the Blue Economy.
• India needs to develop more scientifically its fishing system and other related aspects such as freezing, packaging, etc.
• Effective hand-holding is needed for the entrepreneurs to get themselves established in the sector.

American Revolution, 1776: Goals and Outcomes | UPSC – IAS

The American Revolution was a colonial revolt that took place between 1765 and 1783. The American Patriots in the Thirteen Colonies won independence from Great Britain, becoming the United States of America. They defeated the British in the American Revolutionary War in alliance with France and others

As British settlers began to colonize – North America, Australia, and South Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they assumed that they shared in the political and legal rights of all Britons.

• By the 1760s, however, North American settlers were beginning to resent British control over their political and economic life. Control over American trade, restrictions on the development of American shipping, and the resulting limits on the development of certain kinds of manufacture, were as galling as the issue of taxation.
• The British victory of 1763 over the French in the Seven Years War in North America, concluding a global cluster of wars between the two powers, ended the threat of attack by French or Native Americans, and freed the American colonists from further need of British troops. However, the British continued to maintain a large army in North America and to tax the colonies directly to pay for it.

The Stamp Act of 1765 levied taxes on a long list of commercial and legal documents. The colonists protested with:-

• Riots,
• Destruction of government property, and
• A boycott of British goods until Parliament repealed the Act.

Further imperious decrees of King George III stoked increasing anger until, finally, the Americans revolted, declaring themselves an independent country in 1776 and fighting a war to end British rule over them. The American Declaration of Independence set out their list of “injuries and usurpations.”

It reflected the American resolve to secure the same legal rights as Britons had won at home almost a century earlier. It charged the king with “taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.” It blamed the king for abrogating the social contract that bound the colonies to Britain. It declared, ultimately, the right of revolution.

The American Revolution went further in establishing political democracy than had the Glorious Revolution in Britain. It abolished the monarchy entirely, replacing it with an elected government. Having declared that “all men are created equal,” with unalienable rights not only to life and liberty, but also to the vague but seductive “pursuit of happiness,” the revolutionaries now set out to consolidate their commitments in a new legal structure.

• Their leaders, such men as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, were soldiers, entrepreneurs, and statesmen of considerable erudition, common sense, restraint, and balance.

The constitution and the Bill of Rights, 1789 | UPSC – IAS

After the Americans won their war for independence, 1775–81, and achieved a peace treaty with Britain in 1783, political leaders of the 13 colonies met in Philadelphia to establish a framework for their new nation.

They drafted a new Constitution, which took effect in 1789, and a Bill of Rights, which was ratified in 1791. The American Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, guaranteed to Americans not only the basic rights enjoyed by the British at the time, but more:

• Freedom of religion (and the separation of Church and state), press, assembly, and petition;
• The right to bear arms;
• Protection against unreasonable searches and against cruel and unusual punishment; and
• The right to a speedy and proper trial by a jury of peers.

The Americans established a federal system of government. The states individually set the rules for voting, and many, but not all, removed the property requirements. By 1800, Vermont had instituted universal manhood suffrage, and South Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Delaware extended the vote to almost every adult white male taxpayer.

Historians of the early United States situate the more radical American approach to political liberty in at least four factors: religious, geographic, social, and philosophical.

• First, a disproportionate number of the settlers coming to America from Britain and Europe were religious dissenters, seeking spiritual independence outside the established churches of their countries. Their widespread, popular beliefs in the importance of individual liberties carried over from religion into politics.
• Second, the availability of apparently open land presented abundant individual opportunity to the new Americans (as they dispossessed Native Americans). Later, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner would formulate his “frontier thesis,” arguing that the relative freedom and openness of American life were based, psychologically as well as materially, on the presence of seemingly endless open frontier land.
• Third, landed and aristocratic privilege was absent, and the artisan classes were strong in the urban population. Finally, eighteenth-century political thought had generally grown more radical, especially among the philosophes in France. By the time the Americans wrote their Bill of Rights, the French Revolution was well under way.

The first Anti-imperial Revolution | UPSC – IAS

The American Revolution, in addition to securing British rights for Americans, was also, and perhaps more importantly, the first modern anti colonial revolution.

The trade and taxation policies imposed by Britain had pushed businessmen and artisans into opposition to British rule. Other nations, notably France, eager to embarrass Britain and to detach its most promising colonies, provided financial and military support, which helped the Americans to win their independence.

• One of the goals of the revolution was to open to settlement the North American continent west of the Appalachian Mountains. The British prohibition on this westward movement stood in their way, quite different from Spanish and Portuguese settlement policy in Latin America.

As the newly independent Americans migrated westward, annexing land as they went, they began to develop imperial interests of their own, expressed in the mystique of “manifest destiny.”

• This popular belief in America’s natural growth across the continent inspired the European Americans in their constant warfare against Native American Indians. It led Thomas Jefferson to acquire the huge Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803.
• Texans were encouraged to assert their independence from Mexico in 1836 and were then absorbed into the American Union in 1845. Warfare with Mexico in 1846–48 ended in victory for the United States and the annexation of the southwest.
• Other annexations of land in North America took place more peacefully, with negotiations with Britain for the Oregon country in 1844–46 and with Russia for the purchase of Alaska—“Russian America”—in 1867. Nevertheless, over the centuries America served as an inspiration to anti colonial forces.

Jawaharlal Nehru, leading India’s struggle for independence from Britain in the twentieth century, cited the American Revolution as a model for his own country: “This political change in America was important and destined to bear great results. The American colonies which became free then have grown today [1932] into the most powerful, the richest, and industrially the most advanced country in the world.” (Nehru, p. 355).

Negative effects of American Revolution | UPSC – IAS

The American Revolution, however, did not bring democracy to everyone. The greatest shortcoming was slavery. The system was finally ended only by the American Civil War (1861–65), the bloodiest in the history of the nation.

• Even afterward, racial discrimination characterized American law until the 1960s, and continues to mark American practice up to the present.
• The status of the Native American population actually worsened after the revolution, as settlers of European extraction headed west, first by wagon train and later by railroad.
• They slaughtered American Indians, pushed them out of the way, confined them to remote, semi-barren reservations, destroyed the buffalo herds on which their nomadic existence depended, and discouraged the preservation of their separate cultures and languages.
• For the indigenous peoples the effects of the revolution were exactly opposite to those of the settler-invaders: expansion became contraction, democracy became tyranny, prosperity became poverty, and liberty became confinement.

Conclusion | UPSC – IAS

The American Revolution went even further on the road to democracy than England’s Glorious Revolution. Declaring “all men are created equal,” the American revolutionaries abolished the monarchy and established an elected government “of, by, and for the people,” with basic rights that included freedom of religion, press, assembly, and petition; protection against cruel and unusual punishment; and the right to a speedy trial by a jury of one’s peers. The new nation’s Declaration of Independence inspired freedom-fighters all over the world. It did not, however, provide equal rights for women, and it left slavery in place – two issues that would continue to engage the Americans for decades, if not centuries.

Industrial Revolution in Britain, US and Europe | UPSC – IAS

A Global Process 1700 – 1914

Industrial Revolution Once defined – Primarily in terms of new technology in Britain and Europe, now recognized also as a global phenomenon of unprecedented transformation in social organization and political/military power.

Pre – Industrial Revolution Times

One of the key indicators of human progress has always been improvement in the tools that we use and the ways in which we organize production. Today we usually associate advanced industry with the Western world, but the most advanced civilization of pre-modern times was China of the Song dynasty (960–1279).

• China earned its reputation not only for its neo-Confucian high culture – its painting, poetry, and classical education – but also for its agricultural progress with new crops and more efficient harvesting. It produced armaments on a massive scale, including gunpowder and siege machines.
• The Song imperial government issued paper money and constructed extensive river and canal networks, which commercial ships navigated profitably. Under the Song, China was technically innovative, inventing the compass, improving the technology of silk production, ceramics, and lacquer, and vastly expanding printing and book production.
• China’s advances in iron manufacture were so extensive that deforestation became a problem in parts of the north. (Until coal took its place, wood was used to smelt the iron ore.) The iron improved the strength and durability of tools, weapons, and the construction of major building projects, especially bridges. Other parts of the world lagged behind China’s innovations in trade, commerce, and industry.

Beginning in the eighteenth century, however, Western Europe, and especially Britain, caught up with and surpassed China, and the rest of the world, in economic power and productivity. To increased concern with commerce, trade, and exploration; increased family demand for products for the household and the dining table; new technology; and commitment to financial success and the pursuit of profit. –  Slowly these new economic interests led to the creation of new tools:-

• Better ships;
• New and improved commercial instruments and organizations,
• Such as the joint stock company; and

Even the adoption and adaptation of some of China’s earlier inventions, including the compass, gunpowder, and movable type for printing. Business-people in Western Europe pursued new economic possibilities with a vigor and flexibility that were sometimes admirable, as in the search for new technologies, and sometimes morally reprehensible, as in the use of millions of slaves in the creation of vast sugar plantations in the Caribbean basin and in the extraction of gold and silver from New World mines through coerced labor for the benefit of European businessmen.

All these economic initiatives – innovation at home and exploitation overseas – paved the way for the Industrial Revolution, which began in the eighteenth century.

This modern Industrial Revolution began with simple new machinery and minor changes in the organization of the workplace, but these were only the first steps. Ultimately, the Industrial Revolution multiplied the profits of the business classes and increased their power in government and public life. It broadened and deepened in its scope until it affected

• Humanity globally,
• Transforming the locations of our workplaces and homes,
• The size and composition of our families and
• The quality and quantity of the time we spend with them,
• The educational systems we create,
• The wars we fight, and
• The relationships among nations.

As a global process the Industrial Revolution – restructured the procurement of raw materials in the fields and mines of the world, the location of manufacture, and the range of international marketplaces in which new products might be sold. As the masters of the new industrial productivity adopted this global view of their own economic activities, their ventures became imperial in scope. They marshalled the powers of their governments to support their global economic capacities. Reciprocally, the governments relied on the power of industrialists and business-people to increase their own international strength politically, diplomatically, and militarily. The balance of wealth and power in the world shifted, for the first time, toward Europe, and especially toward Britain, the first home of the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution in Britain, 1700–1860 | UPSC – IAS

What events gave birth to the Industrial Revolution? | UPSC – IAS

The Industrial Revolution began in Britain around 1700, and although it is called a “revolution,” it took more than 150 years to be fully realized. During this period Britain – 

• Created and mechanized a cotton textile industry, which soon became the world’s most productive;
• Created a railway network, which transformed the island’s transportation and communication systems; and
• launched a new fleet of steam-powered ships, which enabled Britain to project its new productivity and power around the globe.

Economic historians agree, however, that the industrial changes were possible because agriculture in Britain- the basis of its pre-industrial economy – was already undergoing a process of continuing improvement. The transformation was so fundamental that it is called an agricultural revolution. (This agricultural revolution in the use of new tools and implements in producing new crops for market profit was actually a second agricultural revolution. First occurred about 15,000 years ago, when nomadic peoples began to domesticate crops and animals and settle into villages.)

A Revolution in Agriculture (Industrial Revolution) | UPSC – IAS

Britain (along with the Dutch Republic, as the Netherlands was known until 1648) had the most productive and efficient commercial agriculture in Europe. Inventors created new farm equipment and farmers were quick to adopt it. Jethro Tull (1674–1741), as an outstanding example,

• Invented the seed drill (which replaced the old method of scattering seeds by hand on the surface of the soil with a new method of planting systematically in regular rows at fixed depths);
• A horse-drawn hoe; and an iron plow that could be set at an angle that would pull up grasses and roots and leave them to fertilize the land.
• New crops, such as turnips and potatoes from the New World, were introduced.
• Farmers and large landlords initiated huge irrigation and drainage projects, increasing the productivity of land already under cultivation and opening up new land.
• The word “agronomy,” the systematic concern with field crop production and soil management, entered the English language in 1814.

Governments revised dramatically the laws regarding land ownership in order to stimulate productivity. In Britain and the Netherlands, peasants began to pay landowners commercial rents that fluctuated with market conditions, rather than paying fixed, customary rents and performing compulsory labor services.

Moreover, lands that had been held in common by the village community and used for grazing sheep and cattle by shepherds and livestock owners who had no lands of their own were now parceled out for private ownership through a series of enclosure acts.

• Enclosures had begun in England in a limited way in the late 1400s. In the eighteenth century the process resumed and the pace increased. In the period 1714–1801, about 25 percent of the land in Britain was converted from community property to private property through enclosures.
• The results were favorable to landowners, and urban businessmen began to buy land as agricultural investment property.
• Agricultural productivity shot up; landowners prospered. But hundreds of thousands of farmers with small plots and cottagers who had subsisted through the use of the common lands for grazing their animals were now turned into tenant farmers and wage laborers. The results were revolutionary and profoundly disturbing to society. Peasant riots broke out as early as the middle of the sixteenth century. In one uprising, 3,500 people were killed.

The Industrial Revolution process continued throughout the period of the early Industrial Revolution as many of the dispossessed farmers turned to rural or domestic industry to supplement their meager incomes. Later, rural workers left the land altogether for new industrial jobs in Britain’s growing cities.

The capitalist market system transformed British agriculture and emptied the countryside, providing capital and workers for the Industrial Revolution. The economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) called capitalism a process of “creative destruction.” In the agricultural revolution and the Industrial Revolution we see evidence of both: the often painful destruction of older ways of life and the creation of new, uncharted ways.

A Revolution in Textile manufacture (Industrial Revolution) | UPSC – IAS

The first important commercial product of the Industrial Revolution in England was cotton textiles. Until the mid-eighteenth century, the staple British textile had been woolens, woven from the wool of locally raised sheep.

• By then, however, European traders in India realized that the cotton cloth of India was far more comfortable and far easier to clean. As they began to import these light, colorful, durable cotton textiles, the Indian fabrics began to displace woolens in the British market.
• The British government responded by manipulating tariffs and import regulations to restrict Indian cotton textiles, while British inventors began to produce new machinery that enabled Britain to surpass Indian production in both quantity and quality.
• The raw cotton would still have to be imported from subtropical India (and later from the southern United States and Egypt), but the British could create at home their own manufacturing processes that turned it into cloth, increasing British jobs and profits, and cutting back on the purchase of finished cloth in India, thus undercutting jobs and profits there.

Merchants organized much of the early industrial production through the putting-out system. They would drop off raw cotton at workers’ homes where women would spin it into yarn, which men would then weave into cloth, which merchants would later pick up.

Industrial Revolution – New Inventions | UPSC – IAS

(Spinning Jenny / flying Shuttle)

The spinning wheel, which had been in existence for centuries, allowed women to produce fairly uniform yarn. Men wove the yarn on looms that required two men sitting across from each other, passing the shuttle of the loom from left to right and back again.

• In 1733, John Kay invented the “flying shuttle,” which allowed a single weaver to send the shuttle forth and back across the loom automatically, without the need for a second operator to push it.
• The spinners could not keep up with the increased demand of the weavers until, in 1764, James Hargreaves introduced the “spinning jenny,” a machine that allowed the operator to spin several threads at once. The earliest jennies could run eight spindles at once; by 1770, it was 16; and by the end of the century, 120. Machines to card and comb the cotton to prepare it for spinning were also developed.

Thus far, the machinery was new, but the power source was still human labor, and production was still concentrated in rural homes and small workshops. Then a series of inventions led to the mechanization of the cotton industry. In 1769, Richard Arkwright patented the “water frame,” a machine that could spin several cotton strands simultaneously. Powered by water, it could run continuously.

In 1779, Samuel Crompton developed a “spinning mule,” a hybrid that joined the principles of the spinning jenny and the water frame to produce a better quality and higher quantity of cotton thread. Unfortunately, Crompton was too poor to patent it, but he sold designs for it to others. Now British cloth could rival that of India. Fascinated by Arkwright’s water frame, Edmund Cartwright believed he could make a fortune by applying the principles of the technology to weaving. After some experiments, he patented the power loom in 1785, with water power harnessed to drive the shuttle.

Meanwhile, in the coalfields of Britain, mine owners were seeking more efficient means of pumping water out of mine shafts. The key development was the steam engine. By 1712, Thomas Newcomen had mastered the use of steam power to drive the water pumps.

• In 1763, James Watt a technician at the University of Glasgow, was experimenting with improvements to Newcomen’s steam engine, when Matthew Boulton a small manufacturer, provided him with the capital necessary to develop larger and more costly steam engines. By 1785 the firm of Boulton and Watt was manufacturing new steam engines for use in Britain and for export.
• In the 1780s, Arkwright used a new Boulton and Watt steam engine instead of water power. From this point, equipment grew more sophisticated and more expensive. Spinning and weaving moved from the producer’s home or small workshop by a stream of water to new steam-powered cotton textile mills, which increased continuously in size and productivity. Power looms, such as Cartwright’s, invented to cope with increased spinning capacity, became commercially profitable by about 1800. Increasingly, in the 1800s, power looms became one of the most important technologies of the Industrial Revolution.
• The new productivity of the machines transformed Britain’s economy. It took hand spinners in India 50,000 hours to produce 100 pounds of cotton yarn. Crompton’s mule could do the same task in 2,000 hours. Arkwright’s steam-powered frame, available by 1795, took 300 hours; and automatic mules, available by 1825, took just 135 hours. Moreover, the quality of the finished product steadily increased in terms of strength, durability, and texture. Cotton textiles became the most important product of British industry by 1820, making up almost half of Britain’s exports. Prior to this mechanization, most families had spun and woven their own clothing by hand;

Thus the availability of machine-made yarn and cloth affected millions of spinners and weavers throughout Great Britain. (Industrial Revolution affect) As late as 1815 owners of new weaving mills continued the putting-out system. When cutbacks in production were necessary, the home workers could be cut. Thus the burden of recession could be shifted onto the shoulders of the home producer, leaving the mill owners relatively unscathed.

In 1791, home-based workers in the north of England burned down one of the new power-loom factories in Manchester. Machine-wrecking riots followed for several decades, culminating in the Luddite riots of 1810–20. Named for their mythical leader, Ned Ludd, the rioters wanted the new machines banned. Soldiers were called in to suppress the riots.

The textile revolution had an impact on economies around the world, devastating some, energizing others. India’s industrial position was reversed. Its markets for hand-manufactured textile were undercut by Britain’s new industrial production, and India, ironically, became the textbook example of a colonial economy, supplying raw cotton to Britain and importing machine-manufactured cotton textiles from Britain.

Industrial Revolution in United States of America | UPSC – IAS

Industrial Revolution in the United States, on the other hand, prospered, but its prosperity gave a new impetus to slavery. Britain’s new machine-operated mills required unprecedented quantities of good-quality cotton. Raw cotton was oily and full of seeds, and it was impossible to process it into yarn without first cleaning it or removing the seeds.

• In the United States, the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 enabled workers to clean 50 pounds of cotton in the time it had previously taken to clean 1 pound. This solved part of the supply problem.
• The plantation economy of the United States revived and expanded, providing the necessary raw cotton, but, unfortunately, it also gave slavery a new lease on life.
• American cotton production rose from 3,000 bales in 1790 to 178,000 bales in 1810, to 732,000 bales in 1830, and 4,500,000 bales in 1860. Almost all the cotton was produced by slave labor. The industrialization that had begun in Britain was reshaping the world economy.

The Industrial Revolution | UPSC – IAS

The Iron Industry

Industrial Revolution – Developments in the textile industry began with a consumer product that everyone used and that already employed a substantial handicraft labor force;  they mechanized and reorganized the process of production and relocated it from homes and small workshops to large factories. Other industrial innovations created new products.

Britain’s iron industry, which had been established since the mid-1500s, at first burned wood to heat iron ore and extract molten iron, but by about 1750 new mining processes provided coal, a more efficient fuel, more abundantly and more cheaply. About 1775, the iron industry relocated to the coal and iron fields of the English Midlands. A process of stirring the molten iron ore at high temperatures was introduced by Henry Cort in the 1780s. This “puddling” process encouraged the use of larger ovens and integrated the processes of melting, hammering, and rolling the iron into high-quality bars.

in Industrial Revolution times productivity increased dramatically. As the price of production dropped and the quality increased, iron was introduced into building construction. The greatest demand for the metal came, however, with new inventions:-

• The steam engine,
• Railroad track and locomotives,
• Steamships, and new urban systems of gas supply
• And solid and liquid waste disposal all depended on iron for their construction.

Britain’s world market share of iron multiplied from 19 percent in 1800 to 52 percent in 1840—that is, Britain produced as much manufactured iron as the rest of the world put together. With the new steam engine and the increased availability and quality of iron, the railroad industry was born. The first reliable locomotive, George Stephenson’s Rocket, was produced in 1829. It serviced the Manchester–Liverpool route, reaching a speed of 16 miles per hour.

• By the 1840s, a railroad boom swept through Britain and Europe, and crossed the Atlantic to the United States, where it facilitated the westward expansion of that rapidly expanding country.
• By the 1850s, most of the 23,500 miles of today’s railway network in Britain were already in place, and entrepreneurs found new foreign markets for their locomotives and tracks in India and Latin America.
• The new locomotives quickly superseded the canal systems of Britain and the United States, which had been built mostly since the 1750s, as the favored means of transporting raw materials and bulk goods between industrial cities.
• Until the coming of the steam-powered train, canals had been considered the transportation means of the future. (The speed with which the newer technology displaced the older is one reason historians resist predicting the future. Events do not necessarily proceed in a straight-line process of development, and new, unanticipated developments frequently displace older patterns quite unexpectedly.)
• Steamships, using much the same technology as steam locomotives, were introduced at about the same time. The first transatlantic steamship lines began operating in 1838. World steamship tonnage multiplied more than 100 times, from 32,000 tons in 1831 to 3,300,000 tons in 1876. With its new textile mills, iron factories, and steam-driven transportation networks, Britain soon became the “workshop of the world.”

Why did the Industrial Revolution start in England or Britain? | UPSC – IAS

The presence of a large domestic market should considered an important driver of the Industrial Revolution, particularly explaining why it occurred in Britain. In other nations, such as France, markets were split up by local regions, which often imposed tolls and tariffs on goods traded among them. Internal tariffs were abolished by Henry VIII of England, they survived in Russia until 1753, 1789 in France and 1839 in Spain.

Great Britain provided the legal and cultural foundations that enabled entrepreneurs to pioneer the Industrial Revolution. Key factors fostering this environment were:

• The period of peace and stability which followed the unification of England and Scotland
• There were no internal trade barriers, including between England and Scotland, or feudal tolls and tariffs, making Britain the “largest coherent market in Europe”
• The rule of law (enforcing property rights and respecting the sanctity of contracts)
• A straightforward legal system that allowed the formation of joint-stock companies (corporations)
• Free market (capitalism)

Historians have long debated the origins of the Industrial Revolution. The term itself was used at least as early as 1845, in the opening of Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England: “The history of the English working classes begins in the second half of the eighteenth century with the invention of the steam engine and of machines for spinning and weaving cotton.

• It is well known that these inventions gave the impetus to the genesis of an industrial revolution.
• This revolution had a social as well as an economic aspect since it changed the entire structure of middle-class society”.

Arnold Toynbee (the uncle of a twentieth-century historian with the same name) was apparently the first professional historian to use the term. In a set of lectures delivered in 1880–81, Toynbee identified 1760 as the beginning of the process. He chose this date in recognition of the inventions.

• In 1934, John Nef, economic historian at the University of Chicago, argued that because the iron industry was in place by the mid-sixteenth century, that date was a more appropriate choice.

More recent historians, such as Fernand Braudel, have also seen the roots of industrialization stretching back for centuries. They have stressed the underlying economic, political, social, intellectual, and scientific transformations.

All these processes coalesced in the British economy in the late eighteenth century to create the Industrial Revolution:

• Increasing productivity in agriculture;
• New merchant classes in power, and the evolution of a capitalist philosophy of economics that justified their power;
• A powerful state that supported economic development, despite the capitalist doctrine of laissez-faire, which called for the state to stay out of business;
• The rise of science, with its new, empirical view of the world, and of technology, with its determination to find practical solutions to practical problems;
• A social structure that allowed and even encouraged people of different classes to work together, especially artisans, who worked with their hands, and financiers, who provided capital;
• More intense patterns of global trading for buying raw materials and for selling manufactured products;
• An expanding population that increased both the labor supply and the demand for production;
• Slave labor in plantation economies, which brought more than a century of exceptional capital accumulation;
• The discovery of enormous deposits of gold and silver in the New World, which also increased capital accumulation; and
• Proto-industrialization – that is, early forms of industrial organization that introduced new skills to both management and labor, paving the way for large-scale factory production.

This question of the origins of the Industrial Revolution is not purely academic. The debate carries serious implications for planning industrial development in today’s world.

As many newly independent nations with little industry seek to industrialize, they ask: Does industrialization mean simply the acquisition of machinery and the adaptation of advanced technology? Or must a nation also experience a much wider range of agricultural, economic, philosophical, scientific, political, and social changes? How, and under what terms, can it raise the capital necessary to begin? What are the tasks confronting a government wishing to promote industrialization?

Those countries that have achieved high levels of industrialization – mostly the countries of Europe and their daughter civilizations overseas; Japan; and now some of the countries of East Asia have experienced a wide range of fundamental changes, akin to many of those experienced by Britain.