After destroying its agriculture British had embarked upon
the destruction of Indian industry.
Several Indian historians have argued that British rule led
to a de-industrialization of India. By
the Act 11 and 12 William III, cap. 10, it was enacted that
the wearing of wrought silks and of
printed or dyed calicoes from India, Persia and China should
be prohibited, and a penalty of
£200 imposed on all persons having or selling the same.
Similar laws were enacted under George I, II and III, in consequence of the
repeated lamentations of the afterward so “enlightened” British manufacturers. And thus, during the
greater part of the 18th century, Indian manufactures were generally imported into England in order
to he sold on the Continent, and to remain excluded from the English market itself.
Ramesh Chandra Dutt argued (in
Economic History of India, London, 1987):
“India in the eighteenth century was a great manufacturing
as well as a great agricultural
country, and the products of the Indian loom supplied the
markets of Asia and Europe. It is,
unfortunately, true that the East India Company and the
British Parliament, following the selfish
commercial policy of a hundred years ago, discouraged Indian
manufacturers in the early years
of British rule in order to encourage the rising
manufactures of England. Their fixed policy,
pursued during the last decades of the eighteenth century
and the first decades of the nineteenth,
was to make India subservient to the industries of Great
Britain and to make the Indian people
grow raw produce only, in order to supply material for the
looms and manufactories of Great
Britain”.
According to Karl Marx,” However changing the political
aspect of India’s past must appear, its
social condition has remained unaltered since its remotest
antiquity, until the first decennium of
the 19th century. The handloom and the spinning wheel,
producing their regular myriads of
spinners and weavers, were the pivots of the structure of
that society.”“It was the British intruder
who broke up the Indian handloom and destroyed the spinning
wheel. England began with
driving the Indian cottons from the European market; it then
introduced twist into Hindostan,
and in the end inundated the very mother country of cotton
with cottons.” From 1818 to 1836 the export of twist from Great Britain to
India rose in the proportion of 1 to 5,200. In 1824 the export of British muslins to India hardly
amounted to 1,000,000 yards, while in 1837 it surpassed 64,000,000 of yards. But at the same
time the population of Dacca decreased from 150,000 inhabitants to 20,000. This decline
of Indian towns celebrated for their fabrics was by no means the worst consequence. “
There is a good deal of truth in the deindustrialization
argument. Moghul India did havea bigger
industry than any other country, which became a European
colony, and was unique in being an
industrial exporter in pre-colonial times. A large part of
the Moghul industry was destroyed in
the course of British rule.The second blow to Indian
industry came from massive imports of
cheap textiles from England after the Napoleonic wars: In the period 1896-1913,
imported piece goods supplied about 60 per cent of Indian cloth consumption, 45 and the
proportion was probably higher for
most of the nineteenth century. Home spinning, which was a
spare-time activity of village
women, was greatly reduced.
It took India 130 years to manufacture textiles and to
eliminate British textile imports. India
could probably have copied Lancashire's technology more
quickly if she had been allowed to
impose a protective tariff in the way that was done in the
USA and France in the first few
decades of the nineteenth century, but the British imposed a
policy of free trade. British imports
entered India duty free, and when a small tariff was
required for revenue purposes Lancashire
pressure led to the imposition of a corresponding excise
duty on Indian products to prevent them
gaining a competitive advantage.This undoubtedly handicapped
industrial development. If India had been politically independent, her tax
structure would probably have been different. In the
1880s, Indian customs revenues were only 2.2 per cent of the
trade turnover, i.e. the lowest ratio
in any country. In Brazil, by contrast, import duties at
that period were 21 per cent of trade
turnover.
British rule had not promoted industrialization in India
either.Japan and China were not
colonized by the British; they remained independent.The
Indian steel industry started fifteen
years later than in China, where the first steel mill was
built at Hangyang in 1896. The first
Japanese mill was built in 1898. In both China and Japan the
first steel mills (and the first textile
mills) were government enterprises, whereas in India the
government did its best to promote
imports from Britain.
Until the end of the Napoleonic wars, cotton manufactures
had been India’s mainexport.They
reached their peak in 1798, and in 1813 they still amounted
to £2 million, but thereafter they fell
rapidly. Thirty years later, half of Indian imports were
cotton textiles from Manchester.This
collapse in India’s main export caused a problem for the
Company, which had to find ways to
convert its rupee revenue into resources transferable to the
UK. The Company therefore
promoted exports of raw materials on a larger scale,
including indigo, and opium, which were
traded against Chinese tea. These dope-peddling efforts
provoked the Anglo-Chinese war of
1842
in which the British drug-pushers won and forced China to accept more and more
opium.
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