This production, needless to say, though largely directed to home demand, also sold to plantations and colonies and kingdoms abroad. (Small objects of high value in proportion to weight and volume are ideally suited to smuggling. The best example is watches.) Small-town, relatively isolated markets on the European Continent, once reserved for local craftsmen, were now visited by tireless peddlers, bringing with them the outside world. Conservatives resented these intruders, not only for their competition and their foreignness (many peddlers were Jews) but for their threat to order and virtue. The German moralist Justus Möser, writing in the latter eighteenth century of the Osnabrück area in northern Westphalia, denounced the brass of these itinerants. They came to the cottage door while the husband was away (alas for patriarchal authority), tempting the wife with kerchiefs, combs, and mirrors, the instruments of vanity and waste. A Snow White story: the wicked stepmother is now a cunning peddler (as she becomes in the tale), and the princess is an adult, but as susceptible as a child.17
Some Good Deeds Go Rewarded
Britain was largely free of the irrational constraints on entry that dogged most Continental societies. The stupidest of these were religious:* the persecution and expulsion of Protestants from France (revocation in 1685 of the Edict of Toleration of Henri IV); and the widespread exclusion of Jews from all manner of trades, partly (psychologically) out of fear and hatred, partly (institutionally) by virtue of the Christian character of craft guilds and the lingering effects of earlier expulsions. Religion, moreover, was not the sole criterion of admission to craft and trade guilds. In parts of Germany, for example, only men “conceived by honorable parents under pure circumstances” (the German is better—von ehrliche Eltern aus reinem Bett erzeuget) were eligible.18 (Some scholars have tried to trivialize the economic consequences of these discriminations, as though for every person excluded, someone just as good or smart or experienced was waiting to step in; or as though these victims of prejudice and hatred were not precious carriers of knowledge and skills to eager competitors.19 We need not take these clevernesses seriously; they fail in logic and in fact.)
England profited here from other nations’ self-inflicted wounds. In the sixteenth century, weavers from the southern Netherlands sought refuge and brought with them the secrets of the “new draperies,” and Dutch peasants imported arts of drainage and a more intensive agriculture. In the seventeenth century, Jews and crypto-Jews, many of them third-and fourth-stage Marrano victims of Spanish and other persecutions, brought to England an experience of public and private finance;20 and Huguenots, merchants and craftsmen, old hands of trade and finance, came with their network of religious and family connections.21
The Value of Time
The Britain of the Industrial Revolution had preserved the structures and institutions of an older time—the monarchy, the guilds, the ceremonies, the costumes—but over a long period had sidetracked these and reduced them to vanities and appearances. Insofar as they retained influence and prestige, they were a drag. They gave us the nostalgic world (our nostalgia) of Jane Austen: a world of rural gentility and idleness, of heirs, nonheirs, and poor intriguers—pretenders to unearned wealth. It was a world that possessed considerable appeal, quietly lying in wait to draw the tired and incapable and handsome seekers of social rent into the nirvana of triviality.
But the action was elsewhere; with new men, improving landlords, aristocrats turned entrepreneurs, immigrants from within and without. The energy and busyness of this society could be measured by its material achievements, but also by its values. I would stress here the importance it gave to time and to saving time, because nothing better sums up the priorities. Two pieces of “unobtrusive” evidence: (1) the passionate interest in knowing the time; and (2) the emphasis on speed of transport.
The British were in the eighteenth century the world’s leading producers and consumers of timekeepers, in the country as in the city (very different here from other European societies). They made them well and pricey; they also batch-produced them and sold them cheap, if necessary on the installment plan. They stole them and resold them: if you couldn’t afford a new watch, you could buy an old one from a fence. Impecunious (and honest) would-be watch owners formed pools to buy one and drew for the right to get it.
The coaching services reflected this temporal sensibility: schedules to the minute, widely advertised; closely calculated arrival times and transfers; drivers checked by sealed clocks; speed over comfort; lots of dead horses. Note here the contrast with France. Across the Channel the government set speed limits and, to save the roads, required broad-rimmed wheels that rode heavy and slow. The passengers apparently did not mind. They preferred economy over time and quite correctly found that speed clashed with comfort. But France too was changing. As one coaching service put it in 1834 (on the eve of the railway age): “greater speed is incompatible with certain needs which, on grounds of convenience and sometimes health, are not dispensable. One no longer stops to take meals, even far apart; one can’t get off, even at the relay stations, and so on.” In short, no pit stops. Where is modesty? “Women, children, older men can’t take this regimen.”22
Why Not India?
Why no industrial revolution in India? After all, India had the world’s premier cotton industry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, unbeatable for quality, variety, and cost. This industry not only satisfied the large domestic demand but exported roughly half its output throughout the Indian Ocean and indirectly to Southeast Asia and China. To this huge market, beginning in the seventeenth century, came the stimulus of European demand—a huge shot in the arm that inevitably aggravated old and created new supply problems. Why, then, was there no interest in easing these difficulties by substituting capital (machines) for labor?
Indian historians have tended to overlook or reject this omission. Some, especially Indian nationalists, blame it on the Europeans, and most particularly the British. India had been prosperous and resourceful until these intruders burst on the scene, mixing into Indian politics and fomenting conflict. Some of this speculation is fantasy, and misdirected at that. One historian, for example, looks at the royal workshops (the karkbanas) of seventeenth-century India and dreams wistfully of a technological revolution: “One is tempted to speculate if [they] might not have moved in the direction of mechanization and become the state model factories for the modern industrialization of India, had they not been terminated by the British conquest of the country.”23 This, of an institution that could buy or command labor at will!
One useful way to approach the problem is to ask, cui bono, who benefits? Who would have gained from mechanization and transformation? Three groups or interests were involved: the workers (spinners and weavers); the middlemen, who typically advanced capital to the weavers against the promise of delivery; and the European traders and chartered companies, who wanted to buy for both the country (intra-Asian) trade and their European clientele.
It would be unreasonable to expect capital-using technological innovations from the first group. Workers had an obvious interest in getting materials (cotton fiber for spinners, yarn for weavers), but here they simply counted on merchant intermediaries. They had neither means nor the habit of command. A leading Indian economic historian cites as exceptional a “mutiny” of weavers in 1630 to protest against English competition for cotton yarn, and goes on: “Such instances of resistance were rare and have to be read together with the fact that the use of the horsewhip by the merchants’ servants was accepted as a normal fact of life by most artisans.”24
If there was to be a move to technological change, then, it would have to come from the Indian middlemen, who had both interest and, some of them, means; or from the European chartered companies. Yet neither budged.
Why not? Some explanations have been based on an implicit law of conservation of energy. The supply of labor was elastic, so it was easier and more economical to hire additional workers, from among untouchables and poor women for spinning, f
rom agricultural laborers for weaving, than to look to change in technology; and that may well be the whole of the story.25 Also, any unanticipated surge in demand (demand was segmented and different markets wanted different fabrics) could be met by shifting goods among markets, from domestic to foreign and from one foreign to another.
It was even possible, though very difficult, to assemble large numbers of workers “under one roof (in one place), to toil under supervision. This was the sort of thing the foreign trading companies tried to do, by way of ensuring prompt completion of tasks. In some instances such concentration yielded economies of scale and materials—in fuel-using branches, for example, or in assembly work such as shipbuilding. Technological change, then, in the form of organizational innovation, was not unknown. Such enterprises, however, remained the exception; “the small-scale family-based unit [retained] its position of primacy.”26
Hardware—instruments, equipment, machines—was another matter. This is what it took to make an industrial revolution, and India was not ready. “In India it is seldom that an attempt is made to accomplish anything by machinery that can be performed by human labour.”27 One reason for this “general indifference” no one seems to have had a passionate interest in simplifying and easing tasks. Both worker and employer saw hard labor as the worker’s lot—and as appropriate. Indifference, moreover, was promoted by segmentation: it was not the cloth merchant’s job to find, assemble, and deliver the raw materials. He advanced capital, and it was up to weaver and spinner to do the rest. This was significantly different from putting-out as practiced in Europe, where the merchant took part in the production process.
In India, then, the final buyer was cut off from the means of remedy. The worker did what he had always done, and so did the merchant. Dutch records tell us that merchants kept weavers “on a short leash,” paying them by the day so that they could not get ahead and run off, presumably with the goods.28 Some merchants hired agents to keep an eye on the weavers and check their progress. The aim here was to prevent the weaver, who invariably consumed his advance by the time he finished the work, from selling his finished piece to another buyer. We hear of agents who would enter the weaver’s house and cut the cloth from the loom, even though not completely done. Come back a day later, and it might be gone, and nine tenths of a piece was better than none.
The European companies in turn learned to accommodate these irregularities. Markets failed at times, but both Indians and Europeans seem to have viewed these lapses as a fact of life. Like famine: This too shall pass. The industry seems to have followed its own leisurely pace, which was not irrational. (It is ends that determine which means are rational.) In the Coromandel (southeast coast), for example, the raw cotton was moved from the interior to the spinning and weaving villages on and near the coast by huge bullock trains numbering in the thousands and tens of thousands, the whole shapeless mass feeding while shambling along at a rate of a few miles a day. Since the trek covered some three hundred or more miles, it took about half a year to deliver the goods.29
Meanwhile the European companies’ own rhythm of purchases and shipments reflected the irregularities of shipping and of capital availability, to say nothing of fluctuations in supply. Data, for example, on shipments by the East India Company of textiles from Bombay show a high variance, ranging from a few thousand (zero in one year) to almost a million pieces.30 The companies’ remedy was to keep large stocks and time their auction sales to match fluctations in European demand. (Their agents and purveyors in India did their best meanwhile to “shortstop” shipments normally destined to Asian markets.) All of this was costly, but cheaper than trying to transform technology.
Besides, it was not obvious to the East India Company that direct assistance to the Indian cotton industry was politically wise. British manufacturing interests would have seen that as treason. Toward the end of the seventeenth century a pamphleteer denounced the prospect that merchants would send over to India “Cloth-Weavers, and Dyers, and Throwsters, as well as Silk.” Do that, he warned, and “I question not but we shall have Cotton-Cloth and Knaves enough to make it a fashion and Fools enough to wear it.” The company made haste to deny the charge.31 The EIC was under constant attack as an exporter of specie and bullion; it did not want the additional onus of exporting jobs.
Finally, where were India’s ideas of mechanization to come from? Indian society did know technological change: the most important in the textile manufacture came with the substitution of the wheel for the distaff (though not for the finest muslin yarn). But innovation took place within the conventional manual context, and a big conceptual and social difference separates machines and hand tools. One must distinguish further between all-purpose tools and specialized: Indian artisans, however skilled, had scarcely started on the path to instrumentation. Here is Major Rennell, the first surveyor-general of Bengal, on a visit in 1761 to the Bombay shipyard: “…the work is performed by Indian artificers, who are observed to use but two kinds of edged tools, tho’ their work is durable and neat.”32 The skill was all in the hand, and not so much in the eye as in the feel; not surprising in a society without corrective lenses.
Worse yet, Indian craftsmen avoided using iron, and iron (and steel) is indispensable to precision work. This was not a ferruginous society. One Indian historian contrasts here Persian irrigation technique, which used iron wheels and gearing, and the Indian system, using wood, rope, and earthen pots; and like a good believer in substitutability, he explains the difference in economic terms: “…a tool of lower efficiency can be used to manufacture the same commodity by employment of cheap skilled labor.”33 He might also have noted that India had no screws: the metalworkers could not cut a proper thread; and that iron nails were rare. Their absence made a difference in shipbuilding. European ships were nailed and spiked; Indian vessels tied the planking to the hull with cords and ropes and rabbeted and glued the boards end to end.34
This manual mode explains as much as anything the failure of non-European craftsmen to make clocks and watches as good as Europe’s. They had the hands, the “matchless ingenuity,” but not the tools. They did extraordinary work, in musket making for example. “Even today, 1786,” wrote a French convert to Islam named Haji Mustafa, “Colonel Martin, a Frenchman, who has greatly distinguished himself these twenty-two years in the English service, has at Lucknow a manufactory where he makes pistols and fuzils better, both as to lock and barrel, than the best arms that come from Europe.”35 But these gifted craftsmen made each piece differently, because they could not or would not work by instruments. When the aforesaid Colonel Claude Martin, one of the most enterprising agents of the East India Company, wanted to buy a watch for himself, he sent to Paris and bought it from Louis Berthoud, the finest chronométrier in France; and when, as often, he sold clocks and watches to the court of Aoudh and other Indian clients, he got them too from Europe. Where else? The Indians, like the Chinese, were not doing anything in this area.36
Under the circumstances, the move to machinery in India was not to be envisaged. Such a leap would have entailed a shift from hand skills nurtured from childhood, linked to caste identity and division of labor by sex and age. It would also have required imagination outside the Indian cultural and intellectual experience. As Chaudhuri puts it: “In eighteenth-century India the empirical basis for an Industrial Revolution was conspicuously lacking. There had been no marked progress in scientific knowledge for many centuries, and the intellectual apparatus for a diffusion and systematic recording of the inherited skills was seriously defective.”37
And still in the nineteenth century: the British engineers who built the Indian railways understood that Indian labor, cheap as it was, would move earth and rock by hand; but they also took for granted that the Indians would use wheelbarrows. Not at all: the Indians were used to moving heavy burdens in a basket on their head and refused to change. We even have one report of Indian laborers placing barrows on their head rather than wheel them. Presumably such resis
tance reflected a desire to spread the work and increase employment, especially to women and children.38 All the same, European workers, very different, would have been happy to gain higher pay through greater productivity; to say nothing of easier labor.*
16
Pursuit of Albion
When I was a student I learned that homo sapiens is an animal species of single origin: all humans today, of whatever color or size, are descended from a common ancestor, split off from a larger hominid genus some millions of years ago. The same is true of the species industrial society. All examples, however different, are descended from the common British predecessor.
The Industrial Revolution in England changed the world and the relations of nations and states to one another. For reasons of power, if not of wealth, the goals and tasks of political economy were transformed. The world was now divided between one front-runner and a highly diverse array of pursuers. It took the quickest of the European “follower countries” something more than a century to catch up (see Table 16.1).
Some practitioners of the “New Economic History,” beguiled by measurement and impressed by puffish numbers of French commercial and industrial growth during the eighteenth century, have argued that British priority in industrialization was something of an accident and that the Industrial Revolution might as easily have occurred across the Channel. France, after all, was a bigger, more populous country, with a greater product in the aggregate, and it was overall equal to Britain in scientific and technological knowledge and capability. Still others, following the a priori reasoning of classical economic theory, have argued that it really made no difference to other countries that Britain had moved ahead in industrial technology and productivity. Each nation, after all, could and would follow its own comparative advantage, could and would buy what it needed on the most favorable terms.* So what if Britain made better and cheaper iron and steel? One could trade Lyons silks and Bordeaux wines and come out the better for the trade.1
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