The Age of Industrialisation
India's textiles under colonial rule
Explain how colonial rule changed India's textile trade and weavers' lives.
India's textiles ruled the world. Before machines, Indian silk and cotton led the world market, especially fine cloth.
- By land: Armenian and Persian merchants carried cloth from Punjab to Central Asia, Afghanistan and eastern Persia, on camels through mountain passes and deserts.
- By sea: Surat (Gujarat) linked India to the Gulf and Red Sea; Masulipatam (Coromandel coast) and Hoogly (Bengal) linked it to Southeast Asia.
Indian merchants and bankers ran this network. Supply merchants gave weavers advances, collected the cloth and carried it to the ports, where brokers sold it to exporters.
The network breaks down. By the 1750s, European companies gained power: first concessions from local rulers, then monopoly rights to trade. The old ports where Indian merchants worked declined: trade through Surat fell from Rs 16 million in the late 17th century to Rs 3 million by the 1740s. Credit dried up and local bankers went bankrupt. Bombay and Calcutta grew instead, run by European companies and European ships: a sign of growing colonial power.
The Company controls the weavers. After it won political power in Bengal and the Carnatic (1760s-1770s), the East India Company wanted regular supplies at low prices, without competition from French, Dutch, Portuguese or local buyers.
- It pushed out the old traders and appointed a paid agent, the gomastha, to supervise weavers, collect cloth and check quality.
- Through advances (loans for raw material), it tied weavers to itself: anyone who took a loan had to hand the cloth to the gomastha, and to no one else.
Weavers took the loans hoping to earn more, but then had to lease out their small plots and weave full time, with women and children helping at every stage.
Neighbours and outsiders. The old supply merchants had often lived in the village, knew the weavers and helped them in hard times. The gomasthas were outsiders. They came with sepoys and peons, acted arrogantly, and beat and flogged weavers for late supplies. Weavers lost the chance to bargain or sell to others; the Company paid miserably low prices. So weavers in the Carnatic and Bengal fled to other villages, revolted with village traders, or refused loans, shut their workshops and became farm labourers.
Manchester comes to India. In 1772 a Company official, Henry Patullo, said demand for Indian textiles could never fall. He was wrong.
- British industrialists got import duties put on Indian cloth, so Manchester goods faced no competition in Britain, and pushed the Company to sell British cloth in India.
- Piece-goods were 33 per cent of India's exports in 1811-12, and only 3 per cent by 1850-51.
- Cotton piece-goods went from almost nothing to over 31 per cent of India's imports by 1850, and over 50 per cent by the 1870s.
So weavers faced two problems at once: their export market collapsed, and their home market was flooded with cheap machine-made cloth.
More blows. In the 1860s, the American Civil War cut off US cotton, so Britain bought India's raw cotton. Prices shot up, and Indian weavers could not afford good cotton. Then, by the end of the century, Indian factories began flooding the market with machine-made goods too. Reports from the 1850s on told of decline and desolation in weaving areas: the Koshtis of Central India, for example, left in large numbers to work as day labourers.
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