Industrialisation: Britain and India

Industrialisation means producing goods with machines driven by inanimate power, such as steam or electricity, instead of human or animal muscle.

In Britain, industrialisation drew people from villages to factory towns. Under 20 per cent of people lived in cities in 1800; by 1900, about 74 per cent did. Industrialisation and urbanisation went together.

In India, British industrialisation had the opposite first effect: deindustrialisation.

• India had been a great exporter of fine cotton and silk cloth. Cheap machine-made cloth from the mills of Manchester undercut Indian handlooms, both in India and abroad.
• Indian exports fell, and millions of weavers and artisans lost their livelihoods.

Old manufacturing and trading towns declined: Surat, Masulipatnam, Thanjavur, Dhaka and Murshidabad. Their wealth had come from trade, crafts and courts, all of which were disrupted.

Meanwhile, new colonial port cities grew: Bombay (Mumbai) and Madras (Chennai), along with Calcutta.

With crafts destroyed, people had to fall back on the land. More people moved into agriculture, not out of it, as the 1911 Census showed. So in India, industrialisation (in Britain) did not bring urbanisation; it pushed people back to villages.

The lesson: Britain's gain was India's loss. Industrialisation and urbanisation do not always happen together; it depends on where a country stands in the world economy.