PROTO- INDUSTRIALISATION

PROTO- INDUSTRIALISATION

All too often we associate industrialisation with the growth of the factory industry. When we talk of industrial production we refer to factory production. When we talk of industrial workers we mean factory workers. Histories of industrialisation very often begin with the setting up of the first factories.

There is a problem with such ideas. Even before factories began to dot the landscape in England and Europe, there was large-scale industrial production for an international market. This was not based on factories. Many historians now refer to this phase of industrialisation as proto-industrialisation.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, merchants from the towns in Europe began moving to the countryside, supplying money to peasants and artisans, persuading them to produce for an international market. With the expansion of world trade and the acquisition of colonies in different parts of the world, the demand for goods began growing. But merchants could not expand production within towns. This was because here urban crafts and trade guilds were powerful. These were associations of producers that trained craftspeople, maintained control over production, regulated competition and prices, and restricted the entry of new people into the trade. Rulers granted different guilds the monopoly right to produce and trade in specific products. It was therefore difficult for new merchants to set up business in towns. So they turned to the countryside.

Fig. 3 – Spinning in the eighteenth century.

(You can see each member of the family involved in the production of yarn. Notice that one wheel is moving only one spindle.)

In the countryside, poor peasants and artisans began working for merchants. As you have seen in the textbook last year, this was a time when open fields were disappearing and commons were being enclosed. Cottagers and poor peasants who had earlier depended on common lands for their survival, gathering their firewood, berries, vegetables, hay and straw, had to now look for alternative sources of income. Many had tiny plots of land which could not provide work for all members of the household. So when merchants came around and offered advances to produce goods for them, peasant households eagerly agreed. By working for the merchants, they could remain in the countryside and continue to cultivate their small plots. Income from proto-industrial production supplemented their shrinking income from cultivation. It also allowed them a fuller use of their family labour resources.

Within this system, a close relationship developed between the town and the countryside. Merchants were based in towns but the work was done mostly in the countryside. A merchant clothier in England purchased wool from a wool stapler, and carried it to the spinners; the yarn (thread) that was spun was taken in subsequent stages of production to weavers, fullers, and then to dyers. The finishing was done in London before the export merchant sold the cloth in the international market. London in fact came to be known as a finishing centre.

This proto-industrial system was thus part of a network of commercial exchanges. It was controlled by merchants and the goods were produced by a vast number of producers working within their family farms, not in factories. At each stage of production 20 to 25 workers were employed by each merchant. This meant that each clothier was controlling hundreds of workers.

Source: This topic is taken from NCERT TEXTBOOK

THE COMING UP OF THE FACTORY

THE COMING UP OF THE FACTORY

The earliest factories in England came up by the 1730s. But it was only in the late eighteenth century that the number of factories multiplied.

The first symbol of the new era was cotton. Its production boomed in the late nineteenth century. In 1760 Britain was importing 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton to feed its cotton industry. By 1787 this import soared to 22 million pounds. This increase was linked to a number of changes within the process of production. Let us look briefly at some of these.

Fig. 4 – A Lancashire cotton mill, painted by C.E. Turner, The Illustrated London News, 1925.

(The artist said: ‘Seen through the humid atmosphere that makes Lancashire the best cotton-spinning locality in the world, a huge cotton-mill aglow with electricity in the twilight, is a most impressive sight.’)

A series of inventions in the eighteenth century increased the efficacy of each step of the production process (carding, twisting and spinning, and rolling). They enhanced the output per worker, enabling each worker to produce more, and they made possible the production of stronger threads and yarn. Then Richard Arkwright created the cotton mill. Till this time, as you have seen, cloth production was spread all over the countryside and carried out within village households. But now, the costly new machines could be purchased, set up and maintained in the mill. Within the mill, all the processes were brought together under one roof and management. This allowed more careful supervision over the production process, a watch over quality, and the regulation of labour, all of which had been difficult to do when production was in the countryside.

Fig. 5 – Industrial Manchester by M. Jackson, The Illustrated London News, 1857.

Chimneys billowing smoke came to characterise the industrial landscape.

In the early nineteenth century, factories increasingly became an intimate part of the English landscape. So visible were the imposing new mills, so magical seemed to be the power of new technology, that contemporaries were dazzled. They concentrated their attention on the mills, almost forgetting the bylanes and the workshops where production still continued.

Activity:

1. The way in which historians focus on industrialisation rather than on small workshops is a good example of how what we believe today about the past is influenced by what historians choose to notice and what they ignore. Note down one event or aspect of your own life which adults such as your parents or teachers may think is unimportant, but which you believe to be important.

2. Look at Figs. 4 and 5. Can you see any difference in the way the two images show industrialisation? Explain your view briefly.

Source: This topic is taken from NCERT TEXTBOOK

THE PACE OF INDUSTRIAL CHANGE

THE PACE OF INDUSTRIAL CHANGE

How rapid was the process of industrialisation? Does industrialisation mean only the growth of factory industries?

First: The most dynamic industries in Britain were clearly cotton and metals. Growing at a rapid pace, cotton was the leading sector in the first phase of industrialisation up to the 1840s. After that, the iron and steel industry led the way. With the expansion of railways, in England from the 1840s and in the colonies from the 1860s, the demand for iron and steel increased rapidly. By 1873 Britain was exporting iron and steel worth about £ 77 million, double the value of its cotton export.

Second: the new industries could not easily displace traditional industries. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, less than 20 percent of the total workforce was employed in technologically advanced industrial sectors. Textiles were a dynamic sector, but a large portion of the output was produced not within factories, but outside, within domestic units.

Third: the pace of change in the ‘traditional’ industries were not set by steam-powered cotton or metal industries, but they did not remain entirely stagnant either. Seemingly ordinary and small innovations were the basis of growth in many non-mechanised sectors such as food processing, building, pottery, glasswork, tanning, furniture making, and production of implements.

Fourth: technological changes occurred slowly. They did not spread dramatically across the industrial landscape. New technology was expensive and merchants and industrialists were cautious about using it. The machines often broke down and repair was costly. They were not as effective as their inventors and manufacturers claimed.

Fig. 6 – A fitting shop at a railway works in England, The Illustrated London News, 1849. In the fitting shop, new locomotive engines were completed and old ones repaired.

Consider the case of the steam engine. James Watt improved the steam engine produced by Newcomen and patented the new engine in 1781. His industrialist friend Mathew Boulton manufactured the new model. But for years he could find no buyers. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were no more than 321 steam engines all over England. Of these, 80 were in cotton industries, nine in wool industries, and the rest in mining, canal works and ironworks. Steam engines were not used in any of the other industries till much later in the century. So even the most powerful new technology that enhanced the productivity of labour manifold was slow to be accepted by industrialists.

Fig. 7 – A spinning factory in 1830.

(You can see how giant wheels moved by steam power could set in motion hundreds of spindles to manufacture thread.)

Historians now have come to increasingly recognise that the typical worker in the mid-nineteenth century was not a machine operator but the traditional craftsperson and labourer.

Source: This topic is taken from NCERT TEXTBOOK