The Age of Industrialisation
Factories come up in India
Explain who built India's first factories and who worked in them.
The first Indian factories.
- Bombay's first cotton mill came up in 1854 and began producing two years after that; by 1862, four mills had 94,000 spindles and 2,150 looms.
- Bengal's first jute mill: 1855; another in 1862.
- Kanpur's Elgin Mill: the 1860s; Ahmedabad's first cotton mill a year later.
- Madras's first spinning and weaving mill: 1874.
Money from the China trade. Many business families began in the trade with China: the British sent opium from India to China and took tea to England, and Indians joined as junior partners, financing, supplying and shipping. Some later invested in industry.
- Dwarkanath Tagore (Bengal) started six joint-stock companies during the 1830s and 1840s; they sank in the business crises of the 1840s.
- Parsis in Bombay like Dinshaw Petit and Jamsetjee Nusserwanjee Tata built huge industrial empires with wealth from China exports and raw cotton shipped to England.
- Seth Hukumchand, a Marwari, opened Calcutta's first Indian-owned jute mill in 1917; the father and grandfather of G.D. Birla also traded with China.
Others made money trading with Burma, the Middle East and East Africa, or within India, carrying goods and lending money.
Squeezed by colonial rules. Indian merchants were barred from trading manufactured goods with Europe and had to export mainly raw materials (raw cotton, opium, wheat, indigo). They were also pushed out of shipping. Until the First World War, European Managing Agencies (such as Andrew Yule, Bird Heiglers & Co. and Jardine Skinner & Co.) controlled much of Indian industry: Indian financiers put up the money, but the Europeans made all the decisions. Indian businessmen could not even join their chambers of commerce. (In 1912, J.N. Tata set up India's first iron and steel works at Jamshedpur.)
Where workers came from. Factory workers grew from 584,000 in 1901 to over 2,436,000 by 1946. Most came from nearby districts: in 1911, over half of Bombay's cotton mill workers came from Ratnagiri; Kanpur's mills drew on villages in Kanpur district. Workers moved between village and city, going home for harvests and festivals. Over time, people travelled further: from the United Provinces to Bombay's textile mills and Calcutta's jute mills.
The jobber. There were always more job-seekers than jobs. Industrialists used a jobber, often an old, trusted worker, to recruit. He brought people from his village, got them jobs, helped them settle, and lent money in a crisis. So he gained power: he began demanding money and gifts and controlling workers' lives. A Bombay millworker recalled that families paid jobbers to get their sons work.
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