How sociology was born

Sociology is young: it grew up in 19th-century Europe out of two kinds of change.

Intellectual ideas:

• Evolutionary thinking (after Darwin) inspired early thinkers to sort societies into types and stages: pre-modern types such as hunter-gatherers, pastoral and agrarian societies, and non-industrial civilisations, against modern industrial society. Western societies usually placed themselves at the top as the most 'advanced'.
• The Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries put reason and the individual at the centre, and argued that the methods of science could be applied to human affairs. Problems like poverty, once accepted as natural, came to be seen as social problems with causes that could be studied, measured and solved.
• The French scholar Auguste Comte, considered the founder of sociology, believed that sociology would contribute to the welfare of humanity. Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer were other early sociologists.

Material changes: the Industrial Revolution, centred in Britain:

• Science and technology were applied to production: new machines, factories, and a new way of organising work, capitalism, run for profit.
• People left the land for towns and cities. In Britain about 20 per cent of people lived in towns in 1810; by 1910, about 80 per cent did. Factory towns grew crowded and unhealthy, with new problems of housing, sanitation and poverty.
• Work changed: labour was degraded to repetitive tasks; workers became alienated, cut off from each other and from what they made; a new middle class of managers and administrators appeared.
• Clock-time took over: factory work demanded fixed hours and punctuality, unlike the seasons and daylight that set the rhythm of farm work.
• Poverty and other ills came to be seen as social problems that could be studied and measured, for example through the social survey.

Why does an Indian student study this European story? Because India's own modern history is tied to British capitalism and colonialism, though their effects in India were different:

• In Britain, industry pulled people into cities.
• In India, cheap machine-made British cloth destroyed the market for Indian handicrafts. Old centres of weaving and trade such as Surat, Masulipatnam, Dhaka and Murshidabad declined, and ruined craftspeople moved back to the land: more people became dependent on agriculture.
• Colonialism also moved people across the world as workers. Example (new): families whose ancestors went from India as plantation workers to islands like Mauritius or Fiji may today speak English, French or a Creole far more than the Indian language of their great-grandparents: a living trace of that colonial, global past.