1757- East of the Cape of Good Hope

by Narendra Mehra

  The cotton trade however became a capitalistic enterprise because the raw material, cotton, had to be imported. Also, the cotton textile produced in a factory became a commodity and needed markets for its manufactured goods. The English studied the Indian markets for export; they asked the Chambers of Commerce in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta to do the marketing studies so that they could dump their cotton textiles in India. They put tariff barriers on Indian textiles and eliminated all duties on British textile exports to India. They were the hegemons that killed the Indian textile industry. The modern day capitalist’s ‘mantra’ was to open up the markets for free trade so that the capitalists could get the market share for their goods. The same ‘mantra’ was not available to the Indian merchant, whose century old industry was decimated, whose investments in handicraft industries was rendered worthless and thousands of natives had lost their jobs. The combination of forces, the cheap staple, unfettered excess to Indian markets, no competition, all combined to earn for Britain at least ten billion pounds in the nineteenth century.

  Britain experienced a multifold increase in the supply of yarn which increased the cotton consumption from a tiny amount to close to half a billion pounds a year, mostly obtained from India at less than half the price of the imports from Georgia and Alabama in the United States. The employment picture in Britain improved dramatically, the growth in the power looms was dramatic and by one estimate there were over quarter million power looms operating in Britain in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. This was the picture of one industry, where machines brought about a large increase in productivity and did away with the skilled labor force in India. But, the playing field was not level; the tariff barriers in favor of Britain muddied up the situation, the competition from the Indian textile industry was banned as the Indian textile industry was denied the opportunity to modernize, the raw staple was obtained under despotic political conditions favoring the British. Otherwise, may be, it was proper to use the term Industrial Revolution at least in the cotton textile industry.

  Chemical Industry

  The chemical industry went through great discoveries and expansion in the nineteenth century but Britain did not participate in it. At best, Britain was involved marginally in areas like alum, copperas and bleaching of linen. That was also borrowed technology. Britain did not have any institutions of higher learning but took infant steps to set up chemical laboratories and happened to accidentally discover aniline dyes from coal tar. They gave it away not knowing what they had discovered and the Germans capitalized on that discovery.

  The manufacture and discovery of chemicals required schooling, formal education and scientific learning. Tinkering and learning by doing, is hit and miss, more miss than hit and Britain did not have that infrastructure. It had to rely on others for chemicals, dyes, bleaches, that it needed for its textile, soap and glass industries. The use of both sulfuric acid and sodium alkali was considered the measure of the industrial health of a nation in those days and Britain lacked in both. Even when the French invented the Leblanc process for the manufacture of sodium alkali from common salt, Britain was slow to react; presumably unable to grasp the significance of the discovery. Britain did not luck out. It just did not have the structural set up that took years of training, hard work, education and scholarship which was a prerequisite to inventing break through technologies. The British people did not have the skills, the scholarship or technical background to invent the groundbreaking inventions.

  Britain had plenty of coal tar from its coking operations, which would have provided the raw materials for the organic chemical industry. That was the stuff from which, dyes, drugs and fine chemicals were manufactured. At last, Britain opened the Royal College of Chemistry, under the direction of a German teacher and scientist August Wilhelm Hofmann and he assigned a student, named Henry Perkins, to try to synthesize quinine. The British needed it for protection against malaria in India. That was 1853. The British were trying to manufacture their own quinine synthetically, instead of making it from the bark of the cinchona tree, which was native to Java and Peru. Organic synthesis involved a definite protocol and that protocol would always synthesize something; at least not quinine, if one did not know what one was doing. It was like putting your hand in a cookie jar, you are sure to get a cookie, but not a particular cookie.

  Coal tar goo is a very big molecule and when it is cut, spliced and cross-linked with other molecules, it produces something. That was exactly what happened to Henry Perkins. Perkins ended up making blue aniline dye, patented it and left the Royal College of Chemistry to become a millionaire. Germans and the Swiss took over from there and went on to produce a whole range of dyes; they monopolized the production of dyes and other chemicals. That kind of discovery was the stuff of Industrial Revolution, see the capital letters, but Britain did not have it and never had it. The Germans and the Swiss made tons of money; selling the dyes to the British textile industry. It displaced the indigo and woad, high cost agriculture plants. The British Plantation owners in India were the losers, as they had exported about two hundred thousand tons of indigo from India in 1895-96 and they lost that business altogether.

  This episode of aniline blue dye crystallizes the debate about England’s Industrial Revolution. Yes indeed, England produced changes in the use of steam technology, went on to make the steam engine and the railway locomotive and developed the textile machinery. Those inventions, the textile machinery and the steam engine; were the product of trial and error, which stretched over a century and beyond. The market for cotton goods was huge, cotton fiber was versatile and easy to work with machines and the financial incentives were there to persist in the trial and error. Also, the textile machinery basically simulated the human movements for spinning and weaving and it was possible to keep tinkering with the rudimentary machines, rickety and jerky in its motions, to finally come up with a prototype that was commercially viable. Was it a break through technology; did it bring about a new economic order; hardly. It did improve the life of millions. People could wear cleaner and lighter clothes, it improved the personal hygiene and it was affordable. But such changes are common, in practically every industry; there is always a need to improve; to improve the efficiency and to cut cost in order to survive.

  Same argument goes for the steam engine and the locomotive. It did change and revolutionize the travel, it shortened the distance and it expanded the commerce. It depended on the metalworking technology, once those technologies were in place as a result of the development of guns and canons; it was possible to solve the problem of tighter clearance between the cylinder and the piston necessary for the steam engine. Technologies always leap frog in to newer inventions and applications and many a product have been produced as a result of the unintended consequences. The experimental locomotive at Killingworth colliery was an ideal workshop for making innumerable changes; every change gave birth to a fresh idea; trial and error; until finally, after a century of work, there was a commercial application.

  The industrial conditions in England were never suddenly altered. If a date were to be suggested when for example, one may say that England was ‘industrially revolutionized’, that date has been suggested, perhaps the years 1830-1840 or even a decade later. Britain had already become a banker to the world about half a century earlier. Where did the money come from? Not from ‘Industrial Revolution’.

  Analysis

  The British Society was molded on the lines of serfdom, feudal relations and guild type industrial mores. People did not have the freedom to pursue any occupation. Social status and power limited or prevented innovation. Vested interests decided how much competition was to be permitted. The entrance to various professions required the permission of various gilds. The British society was not a progressive society; it made wealth through colonial conquests and little from industrial revolution. It was not a secret, it was widely known in Europe about the source of Britain’s wealth. Various writers have reported Hitler’s analysis,
where Hitler summarized that England was wealthy because of the toil of 350 million Indian slaves.

  Industrial Revolution ‘was a work of fiction’. The British people were good at that. They constructed stories to create a perception and what a perception they constructed. There are innumerable books by British economists and historians, all glorifying their rule in India. There are essays and books trumpeting their achievements during the Industrial Revolution; they claim that they changed the world economic order. They have claimed that the economic destiny of India was shaped by the British Imperial Policy. Yes indeed, they shaped the economic destiny of India in the eighteenth and nineteenth century by plundering a nation, by setting up tropical plantations and taking the sale proceeds and profits to England and amassed a huge wealth. They shipped about one and a half million coolies to their tropical plantations in Mauritius, West Indies, Bourbon and the rest and filled the vacuum caused by the abolition of slavery. It created new wealth for British ‘nabobs’ in the tropical colonies. They shaped the economic destiny of India by plundering and usurping the princely treasuries and confiscatory taxation to generate ‘revenues’ for Britain. They shaped the economic destiny of India by forcing Indians to fight the Imperial Wars and forcing India to pay for it both in money and blood. One did not find a single contrarian voice in Britain. They all sing the same tune. It appeared to be a nation of united action, all subjects of the Crown, without a free voice of their own.

  At times, it makes one wonder, whether there was a national conspiracy to project a certain image of Britain. The truth was not important. No where, in all those books written about Britain’s Imperial conquests, there was even a hint of the economic effects of the British rule in India. Neither, there was a hint, what Britain got out of India during the three hundred years of their presence in India, one hundred years as traders with borrowed money from the natives and two hundred years as self-serving despotic rulers.

  The Truth

  The truth is that Britain survived. Without India, Britain what it is today, would not be existing. Britain survived a war lasting over twenty-two years (1793-1815). Napoleon lost because England was able to fund the war effort, Indian money was the sinew of the war. It bought for England guns and ships, while France was begging for money. Those British guns and ships broke the French sea power. The source of British prosperity was ‘the ill begotten revenues and the commerce’ of India. No wonder Britain was always spooked about loosing India. The root cause of the Britain’s successive wars with Afghanistan was nothing more than the imaginary fear of loosing India to Russia. India was the whole diamond mine; Britain’s security and the existence of its Empire depended on the security of its possession in India. Any threat to India was a threat to the existence of Britain and the Empire. India bankrolled the money and manpower to fight the First and Second World Wars. (See Imperial Wars). Napoleon and France and later Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler and Germany failed to accomplish the ruin of England. So strong was its economic position. England emerged from those crises as the banker and workshop of the world. Britain invested immense sums around the world. By early twentieth century, the value of Britain’s capital invested abroad exceeded many billions of pounds, about half of which was invested in the United States. A new Global Capital System was born.

  Cash the Myth:

  Britain attracts a lot of tourists every year seeking to embrace the past, the colonial past, the imperial past and the industrial past and the heritage industry is still cashing the myth. The truth was that the colonial past was an accident that produced the Imperial past and one was not possible without the other. It was kept a big secret by the British society which makes this narrative so fascinating.

  Was it not said earlier, that the soul of the British Society was money and is not the tourist industry the money game and who was better than the British at playing that game? The heritage industry was feeding on the ruins of the past; the abandoned factories, derelict machinery and the ruins of steam engines have all become tourist attractions. The money game works very hard to secure the myth for posterity and the nostalgia has embraced the glorious past. For examples of past glory, Lancashire is propped up to show evidence of past glory. The other places too welcome tourists to the birth place of Industrial revolution. This chapter breaks that myth and reader can understand the true place of Britain in the world Society. There is an appropriate couplet in Persian, which sums it up beautifully: ‘Pidram Sultan Bood’, meaning that ‘My father was a King.’

  Why did the bubble burst if Britain had ingenuity, excellence, and scholarship? Those traits are not temporary. Industrial Revolution has been portrayed as the triumph of ‘Western Economics and Science’, yes, indeed the western economics and science but not the British economics and science. And did Industrial Revolution produce the wealth of England? Various Anglo- Centric historians think so without producing any evidence to support it. This narrative has provided enough historical evidence to show where the money came from. The only triumph Britain can claim is that it has successfully hidden the truth about the source of its wealth; its authors and historians have successfully caricatured and stereotyped the thriving economy of India, which was the richest economy in the industrial civilized world, as a basket case and planted their own economy as the engine of western growth and prosperity.

  CHAPTER EIGHTH:

  EMPIRE

  The British Empire evolved slowly over a period of time. Until about the middle of the eighteenth century they did not have much except a few islands in the Caribbean and they were fighting with the French for control of the North American colonies. Then suddenly, the course of history took a sudden turn which changed the British fortunes dramatically. The British were able to establish their hegemony in the eastern part of India and ‘No Plassey, No Empire’ described that fascinating story in all its details. The British conquest started innocently as sea faring voyages for trade and commerce, where they sought permission of the local rulers to setting up the trading posts much like the other Europeans, the Dutch, the French and the Portuguese, who had sailed ahead of them for trade and commerce. From the very start, the British Sea faring commerce had a different agenda. The British had no money, they relied on local borrowings and they schemed continuously to get a foothold in India. The soul of the British traders stirred at the sight of money in the Indian subcontinent, they had ulterior motives from the outset and they worked feverishly towards that goal for a century. They made friends in India from whom they borrowed heavily and whom they tricked and deceived in the end. In the eighteenth century, when the ruling Mughal Empire melted away, the British seeing a power vacuum, got their chance to setting up a dominion in the eastern coastal province of Bengal. The British were tempted at the prosperity of Bengal but the war with the French was the catalyst that precipitated the invasion. Bengal was a very rich and flourishing land, teaming with tropical cash crops, skilled labor force and easily accessible coastal inlets to their sea faring crafts. The British secret plan became feasible when the French decided to pull out of the Indian Territory to limit their involvement during the Seven-Year War.

  A large part of the Empire consisted of the white dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Union of South Africa, and the Irish Free State. This was essentially an association of ethnically, culturally and racially similar people, which were technically not under the suzerainty of Britain. These were independent states who mostly acted independently in most matters political. After the First World War, those states signed the Peace Treaty with Germany separately and after the First World War joined the League of Nations as independent states. In the true sense of term Empire, those white territories were dominions in name only, essentially those were self-governing colonies. People flew the Union Jack and sang ‘God save the King or the Queen’ but went about their business with little interference from Britain. In the non- white world, those white states were viewed negatively dividing white and non-white world, but Britain used them as it added powe
r to the British economic might and Britain was able to exploit and misappropriate the resources of those states. Take the example of the Maoris in New Zealand, where Britain was able to take over most of their lands by making the natives sign fictitious documents. It would seem that using fake document with their spy Omi Chand during Plassey conquest in Bengal was not an isolated incident.

  In the waning years of the Empire, only after the First World War, Britain acquired mandates to German East Africa, Mesopotamia and Palestine; otherwise the empire was basically limited to India. Those mandates in the Middle East were acquired by tricking the Arabs. Britain encouraged Sharif Hussein to wage war against the Ottoman Turks for their freedom and promised all help; instead they reneged on that promise after the Arabs won the war and succeeded. The Arabs were set up by the British and stabbed in the back, Britain and France then carved up the Middle East (Sykes-Picot Agreement). Britain minimized the Arab success and contributions of the Arabs of Hejaz, promoted the idea that one-man army of Capt. T.E.Lawrence defeated the Turks, (remember the movie, Lawrence of Arabia). By virtue of that Sykes- Picot Agreement, the British took over lands east of the Jordan River including Mesopotamia (present day Iraq) and the French took over Syria and Lebanon. The Europeans also, partitioned Africa in the nineteenth century and in that deal, Britain got Nigeria, Egypt and the British East Africa. Both in the Middle East as well as in India, the British successes were driven by trickery, treachery, deception and fraud. They never won a decisive battle anywhere but used others to expand their sphere of influence.