Industrial Revolution in England: Why It Began, Inventions, Life and Impact on India

Industrial Revolution: Meaning, Period and Proto-Industrialisation

How the Industrial Revolution Is Dated and Named

Historians still debate exactly when the Industrial Revolution began and ended. The widely used starting point is about 1760 in Britain, and by the middle of the eighteenth century Britain was already the leading commercial nation, with income per head well above the world average. Some historians, among them John Clapham and Nicholas Crafts, argue that the changes came gradually and that "revolution" is a misleading word.

The phrase itself has a short history. The earliest recorded use of "Industrial Revolution" dates from 1799, when the French envoy Louis-Guillaume Otto announced that France had entered the race to industrialise. In 1844 Friedrich Engels described a revolution that had changed the whole of civil society, and the lectures of Arnold Toynbee in 1881 gave the term its popularity in English.

The period is also called the First Industrial Revolution, to set it apart from the Second Industrial Revolution, whose new industries drove rapid growth again after 1870. The first phase rested on textile machinery, iron made with coal and the steam engine.

Proto-Industrialisation: Industry Before the Factory

Factories were not the beginning of industrial production. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries merchants in European towns turned to the countryside, supplying money to peasants and artisans and persuading them to produce for an international market. This early form of industry is called proto-industrialisation. It grew because world trade and colonies were raising demand for goods, while the powerful craft and trade guilds of the towns limited the number of newcomers and fixed prices, so new merchants could not expand production inside the town walls.

The countryside supplied willing workers. Open fields were disappearing and the commons were being enclosed, so cottagers and poor peasants who had depended on common land for firewood, berries, hay and straw needed another income. Many had plots too small to employ the whole household, and an advance from a merchant let them stay on the land while spinning or weaving for sale.

English wool shows the system at work. A merchant clothier bought wool from a wool stapler, carried it to spinners, and the yarn then passed to weavers, fullers and dyers. The finishing was done in London before the export merchant sold the cloth abroad. At each stage a merchant employed 20 to 25 workers, so a single clothier controlled hundreds of people who worked in their own homes and not under one roof.

Why the Industrial Revolution Began in England: Causes

Political Stability, Law and One Large Market

Britain provided the legal and political conditions in which businessmen could take risks. A period of peace and stability followed the unification of England and Scotland, and the settlement of 1688 after the Glorious Revolution established a constitutional monarchy that strengthened confidence in the rule of law. Property rights and contracts were enforced, and a straightforward legal system allowed joint-stock companies to be formed.

The market was large and open. There were no internal trade barriers, including between England and Scotland, and no feudal tolls and tariffs, which made Britain the largest coherent market in Europe. In France, by contrast, markets were split into regions that taxed goods moving between them, and internal tariffs survived there until 1789. A manufacturer in Manchester could therefore sell across the whole island on one set of rules.

War and geography helped as well. Most British fighting took place overseas, which spared the country the destruction of territorial conquest that hit much of Europe, and being an island kept it apart from the continental armies. Britain came out of the Napoleonic Wars as the only European nation not ravaged by financial plunder, and with the only significant merchant fleet.

Agricultural Revolution and Enclosure

Better farming fed more people with fewer farm workers. Crop rotation moved from fallow to turnips and clover under the Norfolk four-course system, which let light soils be cultivated intensively on enclosed farms and fed more livestock whose manure restored fertility. Agricultural output grew faster than population in the hundred years to 1770, and from 1700 to 1850 output per labourer rose by a factor of 2.5. The larger food supply supported a growing population.

Enclosure turned open fields and commons into individually owned, fenced holdings. Many farms were bought by yeomen who enclosed their property, and the more productive enclosed farms needed fewer farmers. Many villagers were left without land or grazing rights, and many moved to towns in search of work in the new factories. The same movement removed peasant resistance to change, since common land had been the safety net of the poor, and it supplied the wage labour that factories needed.

Capital, Banking and Overseas Trade

Capital was available, and institutions turned savings into investment. The Bank of England was founded in 1694 as the government's banker and debt manager, and the stable financial market built on its management of the national debt widened the pool of money for private ventures. Britain's extensive exporting cottage industries meant that markets already existed for early manufactured goods.

Colonial expansion in the seventeenth century brought international trade, financial markets and the accumulation of capital, and each of these fed British industry. Cotton shows the link clearly. Raw cotton had to be imported, and exports of British cotton goods increased dramatically in the early nineteenth century, so cloth makers depended on overseas supply and overseas markets at the same time.

The landed classes developed commercial interests, which made them pioneers in removing obstacles to capitalism. Another source of enterprise was the Dissenters, Protestants outside the Church of England. After 1660 they were barred from public office and from England's two universities, and they turned to banking, manufacturing and education, where new technologies gave them their opportunities.

Colonies, Slavery and Imperial Profits

The share of empire in paying for the Industrial Revolution is still debated, and the question has no settled answer. The American historian Brooks Adams wrote in 1895 that the Bengal plunder began arriving in London very soon after the Battle of Plassey, and that authorities agreed the Industrial Revolution began with the year 1760. Dadabhai Naoroji compiled the wealth drained from India in his book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India of 1901, and Romesh Chunder Dutt made a similar study in his Economic History of India. A recent estimate by Utsa Patnaik puts the sum extracted from India between 1765 and 1938 at 45 trillion US dollars in today's value.

Eric Williams argued in Capitalism and Slavery (1944) that European capital amassed through slavery was vital in the early years of the revolution, and Seymour Drescher criticised that view. Slavery also shaped the cotton supply. The invention of the cotton gin in 1792 made American green-seeded cotton profitable and spread slave plantations in the United States, Brazil and the West Indies.

Both strands lead to the same conclusion. Colonies provided raw materials, markets and capital, and the benefit flowed to Britain while the colonised economy was reorganised around British needs.

Coal, Iron and Water Power

Natural resources lay close together. Britain had the highest quality coal reserves known at the time, along with metal ores, abundant water power, numerous seaports and navigable waterways. Local supplies of coal, iron, lead, copper, tin, limestone and water power coincided in the north of England, the Midlands, South Wales and the Scottish Lowlands. The damp, mild climate of north-west England was ideal for spinning cotton, which made it a natural starting point for the textile industry.

In 1700 five-sixths of the coal mined worldwide was mined in Britain. Coal, coke, imported cotton, brick and slate replaced wood, charcoal, flax, peat and thatch, and that substitution mattered because mined materials do not compete for land with the crops that feed people. A workhorse needed 1.2 to 2.0 hectares of land to grow its fodder, while a steam engine burning coal needed no farmland at all.

Coal also pulled invention along. Many British mines had been dug below the water table, and the steam engine was developed to pump water out of them. Even though early engines were inefficient, they were economical because they burned coal that could not be sold. Iron rails were developed to move coal, which was a major sector of the economy.

Rivers, Roads and Canals

Cheap transport joined these resources to markets. Britain had over 1,600 kilometres of navigable rivers and streams by 1750, and a horse could pull a barge with a load tens of times larger than a cart could carry. From the 1720s turnpike trusts were set up to charge tolls and maintain roads, and in time almost every main road in England and Wales was the responsibility of such a trust. Between 1690 and 1840 productivity tripled for long-distance carrying and rose four-fold in stage coaching.

The Bridgewater Canal, opened in 1761 from Worsley to the fast-growing town of Manchester, cost £1,68,000 to build. Within one year the price of coal in Manchester fell by half. The success set off what historians call Canal Mania, and by the 1820s a national canal network existed. Canal construction also became the model for the organisation and methods used to build the railways, which largely replaced canals from the 1840s.

Patents, Societies and the Spread of Knowledge

Ideas travelled as fast as goods. Governments granted limited monopolies to inventors through a developing patent system, which rewarded those who revealed how an invention worked. The steam engine shows both sides. Patents let James Watt monopolise production and pushed the pace of technical change, but his monopoly also stopped other inventors from introducing improved engines and so slowed the spread of steam power.

Knowledge moved through people and networks. Workers trained in a technique moved to new employers, and manufacturers made study tours abroad and kept diaries of the methods they saw. Informal groups such as the Lunar Society of Birmingham, which met from 1765 to 1809 to discuss natural philosophy and its industrial uses, have been described as the revolutionary committee of the Industrial Revolution. The Royal Society of Arts published annual volumes of inventions, and technical encyclopaedias set out methods with engraved plates.

Translation of new technological knowledge into local languages helped it spread abroad, and French journals printed engineers' travel reports on British factories. Knowledge that began in English workshops could therefore be carried to the rest of Europe and the United States.

Why Britain and Not the Netherlands, China, France or India

Other regions of the eighteenth-century world had some of Britain's advantages, but none had all of them.

Inventions of the Industrial Revolution: Textiles, Iron, Steam and Railways

Cotton Machines: Flying Shuttle, Spinning Jenny and Power Loom

Cotton was the first symbol of the new era. Britain imported 2.5 million pounds (about 1,130 tonnes) of raw cotton in 1760, and by 1787 the figure had soared to 22 million pounds (about 10,000 tonnes). A series of inventions raised the efficiency of every step in the process of carding, spinning and weaving, and each machine removed one bottleneck only to create the next.

The jenny is the machine that workers feared most. By turning one wheel a worker could spin several threads at once, so the jenny reduced the demand for labour. When it was brought into the woollen industry, women who lived by hand spinning attacked the new machines, and the conflict continued for a long time. In 1790 a magistrate reported that a band of colliers and their wives, the wives having lost spinning work to the new engines, announced that they would cut a woollen machine to pieces.

Cromford and the Birth of the Factory System

Richard Arkwright created the cotton mill. Until then cloth production was spread across the countryside and done in village households. The new, costly machines could be bought, set up and maintained in a mill, where every process was brought under one roof and one management. That allowed closer supervision of production, a watch over quality and regulation of labour, none of which had been possible when work was scattered in the countryside.

Arkwright built a water-powered spinning mill at Cromford in Derbyshire in 1771 and a second, larger one in 1776 and 1777, and with these the "Arkwright System" was established. Cromford is regarded as the world's first water-powered cotton spinning mill. The scale, output and number of workers employed were without precedent, and the mills at Cromford became the model for factories around the world. The housing built for the workers still stands along a stretch of the Derwent valley, and the Derwent Valley Mills are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Arkwright is credited with a list of inventions, but many were developed by others, among them Thomas Highs and the clockmaker John Kay (not the John Kay of the flying shuttle). His contribution was organisation. He nurtured inventors, patented the ideas, financed the work and protected the machines, and so created the factory. Manchester acquired the nickname Cottonopolis in the early nineteenth century because of its sprawl of textile factories.

Iron Smelting with Coke and the Iron Bridge

Iron had been smelted with charcoal, and wood supplies were becoming scarce, while mining coal needed far less labour than cutting wood and making charcoal. In 1709 Abraham Darby made progress in using coke, made from coal, to fuel his blast furnaces at Coalbrookdale. His coke iron was not suitable for wrought iron at first and was used mostly for cast iron goods, but Darby's pots were thinner and cheaper than those of his rivals.

The next steps came later. Coke pig iron was hardly used for wrought iron until 1755, when Darby's son Abraham Darby II built furnaces at Horsehay and Ketley, where low-sulphur coal was available. Henry Cort developed rolling in 1783 and puddling in 1784. Puddling produced structural grade iron at a relatively low cost, but it was backbreaking and extremely hot work, and few puddlers lived to be 40. By the 1790s Britain no longer imported bar iron and had become a net exporter.

Cheaper cast iron became a structural material. The Iron Bridge over the Severn was built in 1779 by Abraham Darby III, from the drawings of the architect Thomas Farnolls Pritchard, and it is the first known metal bridge. Coalbrookdale is now part of the Ironbridge Gorge World Heritage Site. Later, the hot blast patented by James Beaumont Neilson in 1828 raised furnace temperatures and cut the fuel needed for each unit of pig iron.

Steam Engines: Savery, Newcomen and Watt

Steam was first used to pump water out of mines. Thomas Savery patented the "Miner's Friend" pump in 1698, and the first successful piston engine was introduced by Thomas Newcomen before 1712. Newcomen's engines drained deep mines and so opened up a great expansion in coal mining, though they were extremely inefficient by modern standards. The engines continued to be used in coalfields until the early nineteenth century.

James Watt changed the working principle. With the financial support of his partner Matthew Boulton he had perfected his engine by 1778, closing the top of the cylinder and adding a separate condenser chamber, which stopped the cylinder being cooled again and again. Boulton and Watt engines used only 20 to 25 per cent as much coal per horsepower-hour as Newcomen's. The first Boulton and Watt engines, installed in 1776, could only pump. In 1781 Watt patented the sun-and-planet gear, which turned the piston's motion into rotation, and in 1783 the engine was developed into a double-acting rotative type that could drive the rotary machinery of a factory or mill directly. The Soho Foundry was opened in 1795 to build such engines.

Why Steam Power Spread Slowly

Steam took decades to win over industry. Machines often broke down and repairs were costly, and new technology was expensive, so merchants and industrialists were cautious. At the start of the nineteenth century there were no more than 321 steam engines in all of England. Of these, 80 were in cotton industries, nine in wool industries and the rest in mining, canal works and iron works. Steam engines were not used in any of the other industries until much later in the century.

Even in 1800 steam supplied only an estimated 10,000 horsepower in Britain, and the figure had grown to 2,10,000 by 1815. Higher-pressure engines, built by Richard Trevithick in Britain and Oliver Evans in America once the Boulton and Watt patent expired, were light enough for locomotives and steamboats.

Steam Railways: Stockton and Darlington to Liverpool and Manchester

Railways combined the iron industry, the steam engine and the coal trade. They became practical once inexpensive puddled iron came into wide use after 1800, together with the rolling mill for making rails and the high-pressure steam engine. Steam locomotives followed the expiry of the Boulton and Watt patent in 1800, and steam-hauled public railways began with the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825.

The hot blast of 1828 made iron cheaper still, and the Rainhill trials of 1829 proved Robert Stephenson's locomotive design; the rapid spread of railways followed. On 15 September 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, engineered by Joseph Locke and George Stephenson and the first inter-city railway in the world, linked the manufacturing town of Manchester with the port of Liverpool. Its success set off a Railway Mania, and many of the workers who built the lines stayed in the cities and added to the supply of factory labour.

Railways also reshaped the metal industries. In England the demand for iron and steel grew rapidly from the 1840s as railways expanded, and the same was true in the colonies from the 1860s. Cotton led the first phase of industrialisation up to the 1840s, and after that iron and steel led the way. By 1873 Britain was exporting iron and steel worth about £77 million, double the value of its cotton exports.

Factory System, Cities and the Lives of Workers

Factory Towns and Urban Growth

The factory pulled people into towns, and towns became industrial cities. Manchester is often called the world's first industrial city, and its population grew six times between 1771 and 1831. Bradford grew by 50 per cent in every decade from 1811 to 1851, so that by 1851 only half its people had been born there.

National figures tell the same story. The population of England and Wales had stayed steady at about six million between 1700 and 1740 and then rose dramatically, and the population of England alone doubled from 8.3 million in 1801 to 17 million in 1850. London's population more than doubled between 1800 and 1850, which made it by far the largest city in the world.

Railway building and construction added to the demand for labour in cities. After the 1840s roads were widened, new railway stations came up, tunnels were dug, and drainage and sewers were laid. The number of workers in the transport industry doubled in the 1840s and doubled again over the next 30 years. Job-seekers moved from one construction site to the next.

Slow, Uneven Change: Hand Labour Beside Machines

The popular picture of a country of chimneys is partly misleading. Factories multiplied only in the late eighteenth century, although the first ones had appeared in England by the 1730s. Even at the end of the nineteenth century fewer than 20 per cent of all workers were employed in technologically advanced industries. A large share of textile output was produced outside factories, in domestic units, and the typical worker in the mid-nineteenth century was a craftsperson or labourer rather than a machine operator.

Labour was cheap and plentiful, so many employers saw no need for costly machines. Poor peasants and vagrants moved to the cities in large numbers, and when labour is abundant wages stay low. Where demand for work was seasonal, as in gas works, breweries, book-binding and the repair of ships in winter, employers took on hands for the season and avoided machinery. In countries short of labour, such as the United States, employers were keener to use power than in Britain.

Handwork also survived because of taste. Machines made uniform goods for a mass market, but demand was often for intricate designs and particular shapes. In mid-nineteenth-century Britain 500 varieties of hammers and 45 kinds of axes were produced, which needed human skill. The upper classes preferred handmade goods as a mark of refinement, and machine-made goods were largely sent to the colonies.

Housing, Health and Living Standards

Living conditions were harsh in the new industrial cities. People moved in so rapidly that there was not enough capital to build adequate housing, so low-income newcomers squeezed into overcrowded slums. Clean water, sanitation and public health facilities were inadequate. The death rate was high, especially among infants, and tuberculosis among young adults. Cholera, which spreads through food or water contaminated with a bacterium, and typhoid were endemic. In 1844 Friedrich Engels described the back streets of Manchester and other mill towns, where families lived in shanties with dirt floors and no sanitary facilities.

Reform followed the shocks. In 1854 John Snow traced a cholera outbreak in Soho, London, to a public well contaminated by a cesspit, and his finding that water could carry cholera led to changes in the design of public water and waste systems. After the Great Stink of the summer of 1858, the modern sewer system of London was built under the engineer Joseph Bazalgette from 1859. The Public Health Act of 1875 led to more sanitary housing, and Engels noted in 1892 that most conditions had greatly improved.

Historians disagree about whether workers gained. Some studies estimate that British wages rose only 15 per cent between the 1780s and 1850s, and that life expectancy did not rise sharply until the 1870s. Others stress that the share of Londoners who died before the age of five fell from 75 per cent in 1730‑1749 to 32 per cent in 1810‑1829. Wages also hid wide variation. When prices rose sharply in the Napoleonic wars the real value of earnings fell, and in slumps such as the 1830s unemployment in some regions reached between 35 and 75 per cent.

Women and Child Labour

Children were the cheapest workers. They were paid 10 to 20 per cent of an adult male's wage even though their output was comparable, since a machine needed no great strength and the new industry had no experienced adults. In England and Scotland in 1788 two-thirds of the workers in 143 water-powered cotton mills were children. Most workers in textiles, the leading industry in terms of employment, were women and children. In mines, children as young as five or six opened and shut ventilation doors underground, and later pushed and pulled coal tubs.

Historians disagree on women's gains. One view holds that capitalism lowered the status of women, because the home had earlier been a unit of production in which women played a vital part, and the factory pushed lower-class women into poorly paid jobs and middle-class women into unpaid household duties. Another view holds that it created the conditions for women's emancipation. A third view finds continuity, with a "family wage economy" in early industrialisation in which the husband, wife and older children all depended on their combined wages.

Protest, Trade Unions and the Luddites

Workers had few legal means of protest. The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 made any agreement of two or more workmen to raise wages or reduce hours a crime and drove labour organisations underground. Sympathy for the plight of workers brought repeal in 1824, and a new Act of 1825 allowed trade unions but severely restricted their activity.

The Luddites were craft workers who broke the machines that had cost them their jobs. The movement began on 11 March 1811 at Arnold in Nottinghamshire, among lace and hosiery workers, and spread to Yorkshire and Lancashire by 1813. They took the name of Ned Ludd, a folklore figure, and wrecked the machines that threatened each region's industry. The government sent in the militia and the army, and those caught were hanged or transported for life.

Other protests followed. At St Peter's Field in Manchester on 16 August 1819 cavalry charged a crowd of around 60,000 who had gathered to demand parliamentary reform, an event called the Peterloo Massacre, in which an estimated 18 people were killed. In 1834 six farm workers from Tolpuddle in Dorset were convicted for forming a union and transported to Australia. The Chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s was the first large working-class political movement, and its Charter of reforms, signed by three million people, was rejected by Parliament. In 1842 a general strike of cotton workers and colliers, organised through the Chartists, stopped production across Britain.

Factory Acts and the Mines Act: How Reform Came

Parliament legislated slowly and the early laws were weak. Factory owners resisted limits on child labour, and when the early acts were passed their enforcement was left to local magistrates. The Act of 1833 created a professional Factory Inspectorate, but the scarcity of inspectors still made enforcement difficult.

The Mines Act followed the 1842 report of the Royal Commission headed by Lord Ashley, which shocked the public by showing how young the children underground were. The Ten Hour Act met a long-standing demand of millworkers and was won through the Ten Hours Movement, whose public voice was Richard Oastler outside Parliament and Lord Ashley inside it. Its apparent success, with none of the disasters its opponents predicted, effectively ended objections in principle to factory legislation.

Spread of Industrialisation Beyond England

Industry on the Continent: Belgium, France and Germany

Industrialisation moved from Britain to western Europe and the United States in the early nineteenth century. In continental Europe it began in Belgium and France and spread to the German states by the middle of the century. Much of it used technology developed in Britain, which was bought from British firms or brought by British engineers and entrepreneurs seeking opportunities. By 1809 part of the Ruhr in Westphalia was nicknamed "Miniature England".

Belgium was the second country to industrialise. Coal gave Wallonia the lead, and from the 1820s, and especially after Belgian independence in 1830, factories with coke blast furnaces, puddling and rolling mills were built around Liège and Charleroi. The leader was John Cockerill, an Englishman who settled there. France followed a different path. Most French historians argue that it never had a clear take-off, and that growth was slow and steady through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Germany was held back at first by its political disunity into three dozen states. Trunk railway lines nevertheless linked the major cities by the 1840s, and by 1850 Germany was self-sufficient in the demands of railway construction, which gave a strong push to its steel industry. German unification in 1871 encouraged the consolidation of its industry.

The United States and Japan

The United States began as an agricultural economy. It used horse-powered machinery at first, and shifted to water power once textile factories were built from the 1790s, which concentrated industry in New England, where fast-flowing rivers were available. Samuel Slater, who had learned the new textile technology as a boy apprentice in Derbyshire, defied the laws against the emigration of skilled workers and left for New York in 1789. He founded Slater Mill at Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1793. American contributions included the cotton gin and a system for making interchangeable parts, aided by the milling machine.

Japan came later, and its path differed because the state led it. The Industrial Revolution there began about 1870 when the Meiji leaders decided to catch up with the West. The government built railways, improved roads, started a land reform programme, set up a Western-style school system, sent thousands of students to the United States and Europe, and hired more than 3,000 Westerners to teach modern science and technology. The government used tax revenue to fund model steel and textile factories, and in 1882 it founded the Bank of Japan.

Industrial Revolution and India

Indian Textiles Before British Mills

Before machine industries, silk and cotton goods from India dominated the international textile market. Coarser cottons were made in many countries, but the finer kinds often came from India. Armenian and Persian merchants carried fine textiles from Punjab to Afghanistan, eastern Persia and Central Asia, and a vibrant sea trade ran through ports such as Surat on the Gujarat coast, Masulipatam on the Coromandel coast and Hoogly in Bengal. Indian merchants and bankers financed the production, carried the goods and supplied the exporters.

By the 1750s this network was breaking down. European companies first gained concessions from local courts and then monopoly rights to trade. Exports from the old ports fell dramatically, the credit that financed trade dried up, and local bankers went bankrupt. In the last years of the seventeenth century the gross value of trade through Surat was ₹1.6 crore, and by the 1740s it had slumped to ₹30 lakh. While Surat and Hoogly decayed, Bombay and Calcutta grew, and trade through the new ports was controlled by European companies and carried in European ships.

The shift marked the rise of colonial power, but it did not yet hurt Indian weaving. After the consolidation of East India Company power from the 1760s, textile exports did not fall at first, because British cotton industries had not yet expanded and Indian fine textiles were in great demand in Europe.

Company Control of Weavers: Gomasthas and Advances

Political power let the East India Company tighten its hold on weavers. Before the Company won Bengal and the Carnatic in the 1760s and 1770s it found it hard to get regular supplies, because French, Dutch and Portuguese traders and local merchants competed for woven cloth. Once it held power it asserted a monopoly, and it moved in steps to cut competition, control costs and secure supplies.

First, it tried to remove the existing traders and brokers and to control the weaver directly through a paid servant called the gomastha, who supervised weavers, collected supplies and checked quality. Second, it stopped Company weavers from dealing with other buyers through the system of advances. Weavers received loans to buy raw material and had to hand over the cloth to the gomastha. Many gave up their small plots of land to weave full time.

Clashes followed. The gomasthas were outsiders who marched into villages with sepoys and peons and often beat and flogged weavers for delays. Weavers lost the space to bargain, and the price paid was miserably low. In many places in the Carnatic and Bengal weavers deserted their villages, and some rose in revolt together with village traders. Over time many refused loans, shut down their workshops and took to agricultural labour. This was a first blow to Indian weavers, and it was struck by Company policy before Manchester cloth arrived.

Manchester Comes to India: Duties, Imports and Collapse of Exports

The long decline of Indian textile exports began in the early nineteenth century. In 1811‑12 piece-goods accounted for 33 per cent of India's exports, and by 1850‑51 they were no more than 3 per cent. As cotton industries grew in England, industrial groups pressed the government to impose import duties on cotton textiles so that Manchester goods would meet no competition at home, and they persuaded the East India Company to sell British manufactures in India as well. The Charter Act of 1813 ended the Company's trade monopoly, except for tea and trade with China, and opened Indian markets to private British merchants.

British cotton exports to India then rose dramatically. At the end of the eighteenth century there had been virtually no import of cotton piece-goods into India. By 1850 cotton piece-goods were over 31 per cent of the value of Indian imports, and by the 1870s over 50 per cent. Machines made the cloth at lower cost, so weavers could not compete. They faced two problems at once. Their export market collapsed, and the home market shrank, glutted with Manchester imports. By the 1850s reports from most weaving regions told of decline and desolation.

Later Blows to Indian Weavers: Raw Cotton and Mills

Two further blows came to Indian weavers after the machine imports. In the 1860s, when the American Civil War cut off supplies of raw cotton from the United States, Britain turned to India, and the price of raw cotton in India shot up, so that weavers were starved of supplies and forced to buy at exorbitant prices. Towards the end of the nineteenth century Indian factories began production and flooded the market with machine goods.

The Governor-General William Bentinck observed in 1834 that the bones of the cotton weavers were bleaching the plains of India. Communities of skilled artisans were reduced to poverty and forced back to subsistence agriculture on increasingly overtaxed land.

The Drain of Wealth, Railways and Deindustrialisation

British policy imposed heavy duties on Indian textiles imported into Britain, while India was forced to accept British manufactured goods at minimal tariffs. Britain also controlled most of the sea trade as well as exchange rates, so Indian traders found it difficult to export as before. Similar scenes unfolded for India's manufactures of iron, steel and paper. The resulting decline of a country's industrial and manufacturing capacity is called deindustrialisation. In India it turned a producer of finished goods into a supplier of raw materials and a market for British goods. India's share of world GDP kept falling throughout colonial rule and was hardly 5 per cent at independence.

The wealth that Britain took out of India is known as the drain of wealth. It was extracted not just through taxes but also by charging Indians for the colonial power's spending on railways, the telegraph network and even wars.

Railways reveal the same pattern. The first passenger train ran in 1853 over 34 kilometres between Bombay and Thane. The network did bring people closer and integrated the internal market, but it was designed primarily to move raw materials from the interior to the ports for export and to distribute British manufactured goods across India. Routes largely ignored existing trade patterns. Most of the cost was paid from Indian tax revenue, so Indian money funded infrastructure that served British strategic and commercial interests first.

Indian Mills, Entrepreneurs and Factory Workers

Machines reached Indian industry only after the middle of the nineteenth century. The first cotton mill in Bombay was set up in 1854 and went into production two years later. By 1862 four mills were at work with 94,000 spindles and 2,150 looms. Jute mills came up in Bengal around the same time, the first in 1855 and another in 1862. The Elgin Mill started in Kanpur in the 1860s, the first cotton mill in Ahmedabad was set up in the same decade, and by 1874 the first spinning and weaving mill in Madras was running.

Many early entrepreneurs had earned money in the China trade, where the British in India exported opium to China and took tea back to England. Dwarkanath Tagore made his fortune there before founding six joint-stock companies in the 1830s and 1840s, and Parsis such as Dinshaw Petit and Jamsetjee Nusserwanjee Tata gathered the capital for large industrial empires partly from exports to China and partly from raw cotton shipments to England. The first iron and steel works in India, planned by Jamsetjee Tata before his death in 1904, began work at Jamshedpur in 1912.

Colonial control limited the space for Indian business. Indian merchants were barred from trading with Europe in manufactured goods and had to export mostly raw materials such as raw cotton, opium, wheat and indigo. Until the First World War European managing agencies, among them Bird Heiglers and Co., Andrew Yule and Jardine Skinner and Co., controlled a large part of Indian industry. Indian financiers often provided the capital, while the agencies took the investment and business decisions. Factory employment grew from 5,84,000 workers in 1901 to over 24,36,000 by 1946, and most mill workers came from nearby districts, for instance more than half the Bombay cotton workers in 1911 from Ratnagiri.

England Then and India Today: Quality of Life Compared

Industrial England and India today can be compared on child labour, hours and pay, health, women's work and the worker's voice.

India's law today covers each point on which early industrial England failed its workers, and it covers every worker, not only women and young persons in textile mills.

Labour Codes of 2025 and the Test of Enforcement

The four labour codes came into force on 21 November 2025 and rationalised 29 existing central labour laws. The protection of children rests on a separate law, the Child and Adolescent Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, which forbids work by children below 14 and bars adolescents of 14 to 18 from hazardous work.

Laws alone did not protect English workers, because factory inspectors were scarce, and enforcement is the real test of India's labour laws as well.

How Revolutionary Was the Industrial Revolution?

Gradual Change or Revolution: The Historians' Debate

Critics challenge the term on three grounds. The first is pace, since Clapham and Crafts argue that the changes came gradually and that "revolution" is a misnomer. The second is reach, since the new industries could not easily displace the traditional ones and still employed only a minority of workers in 1900.

The third is the slow spread of technology. Machines were often not as effective as their makers claimed, and seemingly ordinary and small innovations drove growth in many non-mechanised sectors such as food processing, building, pottery, glass work, tanning and furniture making.

The balanced view sees both a break and a continuity. Output, population and cities changed in ways that had no earlier parallel, and the textile industry did adopt modern methods. Yet most work in 1850 was still done by hand and the steam engine, the machine that symbolised the age, was slow to spread.

Industrialisation and the Global Divide

The Industrial Revolution changed the world's economic balance. The traditional centres of hand textile production in India, the Middle East and China could not withstand competition from machine-made textiles, which destroyed their hand-made industries and left millions without work. Economic historians describe a "Great Divergence" between industrialising Europe and the rest, and a growing division in each region's share of world manufacturing output.

Britain's lead did not last. By the late nineteenth century Germany dominated the chemical industry and the United States had become the leading industrial nation. Britain's own society changed with its economy. The Industrial Revolution saw the triumph of a middle class of industrialists and businessmen over the landed nobility and gentry.

Sources

• NCERT: India and the Contemporary World II (Class X), Chapter 4, The Age of Industrialisation
• NCERT: Exploring Society, India and Beyond (Class VIII), Chapter 4, The Colonial Era in India
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• UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Ironbridge Gorge
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• Wikipedia: British Agricultural Revolution
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• Wikipedia: Newcomen atmospheric engine
• Wikipedia: Great Stink
• Wikipedia: Mines and Collieries Act 1842
• Wikipedia: Combination Act 1799
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• Wikipedia: Peterloo Massacre
• Wikipedia: Factory Acts
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