Q: Critically examine the arguments and evidence for and against ‘de-industrialization’ in colonial India.

A major issue in academic debates about the nature of the Indian economy under colonial rule has been the problem of de-industrialization, or the decline of indigenous manufacturing industry. In the accounts of nationalist intellectuals, and in the commonsense of much economic history-writing till the 1960s, it was more or less assumed that the nineteenth century in Indian history saw a major decline of handicrafts that was not compensated by the rise of modern industry, that this decline continued into the twentieth century, and that large sections of the working population were forced into agriculture. From the 1960s on, these positions were complicated considerably by a number of revisionist critiques, and in one form or another the literature bearing on the subject of de-industrialization has continued to grow right up till the present day.

Briefly, this essay tries to explore some of the major issues and positions involved in the debates around this problem. First, it examines Daniel Thorner’s seminal critique of the census data that apparently demonstrated de-industrialization. From this, it moves on to look at the controversy that exploded in the 1968 and 1969 editions of the IESHR around Morris D. Morris’ essay in 1968. While there were many attacks on Morris’s argument, the present essay only discusses ( apart from Morris’ own paper ) the critique offered by Toru Matsui. In itself, it can be argued that the debate around Morris’ piece generated more heat than light, but it set the tone for much subsequent research, and also put in place a certain crystallization of ideological faultlines that has defined ( some might argue bedevilled ) the different positions on de-industrialization. Ideology and analytical economic history were closely tied together in the debates from this point on. This essay then goes on to study the debate between A.K Bagchi and Marika Vicziany in the late 1970s. After this, it shifts to a brief examination of some of the empirical studies made of handloom industry in the colonial period, as contained in essays by Specker, Yanagisawa, and Sumit Guha. Finally, it attempts to engage with the important alternative interpretation set forth by Tirthankar Roy, arguably the most significant contribution to the debate in recent years, but also extremely problematic and questionable in its assumptions and implications.

Before turning to a systematic survey of the literature, a couple of broad qualifications need to be made. First, the hidden assumption made by both sides in the de-industrialization debate has been that it is possible to quantitatively demonstrate the crippling effects ( or absence thereof ) of colonial rule in the nineteenth century. While sustained quantitative analysis is indispensable, it can certainly be argued that the strength of the case against colonialism need not depend on this sort of proof. In other words, Morris’ bland assertion that the Raj’s main function was to secure ‘the welfare of its subjects’ can be rebutted without necessarily building up a picture of devastating economic decline: the exploitative and unjust nature of British rule is far too evident. This point is significant because otherwise the polemical attributions of ‘left-nationalism’ and ‘neo-colonialism’, which both sides in the debate have been guilty of making ( Roy’s dismissal of pre-existing literature on the colonial economy and Bagchi’s intemperate reaction to Vicziany are instances of this ) tend to stick. To argue, on the basis of empirical evidence, that ‘de-industrialization’ is too simple a category to be able to hold the experiences of nineteenth-century handicraft production, is not in itself a symptom of an apologia for colonialism. The fact that, in the actual debate, the faultline has often – though not always – been between radically different perspectives on the nature  of the colonial experience, should not obscure this, and lead one to simply read ideological motivations off every position in the available literature.

Second, there is the additional qualification that while the different essays assembled in this survey have a bearing on the de-industrialization debate, their value as history, curiously enough, does not lie in the light they throw on de-industrialization as a general problem. By and large, the bulk of the researches around this theme concentrate on the history of textiles, and, even more specifically, on handloom weaving. Roy is probably right in arguing that no comprehensive picture of de-industrialization can come from a narrow sectoral focus. With the exception of the essays of Thorner and Bagchi, the empirical content of the debate is less wide-ranging than one might expect. Having said that, the importance of the historical insights and evidence produced – from diverse positions – in the debate is unquestionable.

Daniel Thorner’s 1960 essay occupies an ambiguous place in the de-industrialization debate, and this is an ambiguity that in a sense demonstrates the artificiality of the ideological straitjackets into which historical research can be forced. Thorner made the first important critique of the thesis that Indian handicrafts experienced a measurable decline in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. In doing so, he became a necessary point of reference in all subsequent debates on the matter. Roy’s brief essay on de-industrialization ( significantly, delivered as the ninth Thorner Memorial Lecture ), for instance, tried to assimilate Thorner’s critique of the census to a general argument about the insufficiencies of ‘left-nationalist’ interpretations of Indian economic history. There is an incongruity in this chosen alignment. Alice and Daniel Thorner were – and remained – Communists, persecuted and driven abroad in the course of the McCarthy witch-hunts. This fact is an important warning against the tendency to invest arguments with political-ideological slants on the basis of simple, symptomatic readings of their position. It also shows up Roy’s tendency to greatly simplify and vulgarize a complex and rich spectrum of left-wing economic thought, accomodative of greater differences, and hence less rigid than he makes it appear. The fact that scholars as divergent as Thorner and Bagchi can both lay claim to the Marxist tradition is a valuable reminder of its internal diversity.

When he wrote, Thorner was reacting to the assumptions about de-industrialization in India that currently constituted the orthodoxy in economic history. Nationalists like R.C Dutt had argued that the policy of free-trade competition forced upon India by Britain in the later nineteenth century, and the concomitant denial of protective tariffs to indigenous industry, had certain devastating consequences for the Indian economy. The import of cotton goods trebled within 40 years ( 1870-1910 ), and Lancashire flooded the Indian textile market, thus obliterating a vigorous tradition of spinning and handloom weaving. The production of cotton goods within India fell, and exports also contracted considerably. These arguments had relied heavily on import-export statistics, and had assumed that imports showed a substitution of indigenous production by exports. This, in turn, rested on the assumption that the size of the market was static ( Morris’ criticism of this is his one substantive contribution to a debate that, ironically, his arguments seem to dominate ). However, Thorner was also tackling arguments about de-industrialization that came from other sources. Vera Anstey, writing from a position diametrically opposed to that of Dutt and Shelvankar, described India’s economic progress as ‘arrested development’. Colin Clark used the Census to demonstrate that the occupational structure of the Indian working population between 1881 and 1911 had shifted decisively against industry and in favour of agriculture.

It was the Census figures between 1881 and 1931 that provided the material that Thorner handled in his critique of the ‘de-industrialization’ orthodoxy. On the surface, the Census seems to bear out the orthodoxy quite unambiguously. In this period, the Census indicates a growth of the total working population from 115.1 million to 140 million. Within this, the number of people involved in agricultural work seems to have increased from 71.7 to 100.2 million, and the number of workers in manufacturing activity seems to have fallen from 21.1 to 12.9 million. Thorner’s brilliant essay lays bare the loopholes in this apparently explicit statistical statement, with the basic insight that the categories used in the Census simplified forms and experiences of work that were actually much more complex, and drew clear boundaries between activities that in reality were much less differentiated. The clear separation made between people involved in manufacture and trade is an important instance of this problem. Industry and commerce are actually very difficult to disaggregate, since the household often straddled both spheres of activity, and the makers of goods were also often sellers of goods. Further, the census also separated agricultural labour from ‘general’ or unskilled labour. In Thorner’s view, this is an arbitrary separation. It is possible to deduce from the Census figures an inverse relationship between agricultural and general labour: the years where one grew were also, invariably, the years when the other declined. This would suggest that the same people moved from agricultural labour to part-time non-agricultural activities ( construction work, transport services and so on ) and back. Finally, Thorner points out that the census figures about female labour were extremely unsound, since they were based on faulty enumerative practices. Women often refused to appear before the Census Commission, and the occupations of women were often equated with those of their husbands. Thus, to arrive at a sounder picture of the occupational structure of the Indian working force, argues Thorner, it is necessary to combine manufacture and trade under a single head, combine the categories of agricultural and general labour, and set aside the data for women ( the figures for women involved in manufacture seem to have been especially grossly overstated for 1881 ). Having made these qualifications, Thorner arrives at the startling conclusion that there was, over these fifty years, a 1% rise in the agricultural working population, and a 3% decline in the numbers of people involved in manufacture and trade. In other words, the occupational structure of India stood still.

Thorner’s analysis is not free of methodological difficulties. The complete identity assumed between agricultural and general labour is problematic. The assumed merging of manufacturing and trade can also be qualified, and it is possible to imagine a slow movement towards more or less clearly separated spheres of activity over this period. The exclusion of women from the analysis is questionable, since it leaves a large proportion of the working population unaccounted for. Finally, there is Bagchi’s interesting speculation ( of which more later ) that the absence of differentiation between different forms of labour and livelihood might have been precisely a product of de-industrialization: artisanal activity was probably far more specialized, for instance, in the early nineteenth century. This is not fundamentally a critique of Thorner’s position, for the latter accepts the possibility – and even seems to acknowledge the logical probability – of a genuine de-industrialization prior to the 1880s. Further, Thorner remarks upon the remarkable fact that in a period when population increased by over 100 million, there was no significant change in the occupational structure. If nothing else, this might be a clear indication of stagnation. Thorner’s claim upon the issue of de-industrialization is at the same time modest and inescapable: it is not possible, on the basis of Census figures, to quantitatively prove an absolute decline in industry. Thus, while his analysis did not claim to establish anything concrete, it served to destabilize old certainties and open up a fruitful arena of debate. Most significantly, perhaps, Thorner, writing in 1960, showed an astonishing sensitivity to the data that he sought to handle. It is all the more important that this data happened to be the Census, and his particular critique rested on the legitimacy of the categories of classification and enumeration that it chose to employ. The critique of Census categories has been a major component of recent historical research on a wide range of themes, and Thorner’s awareness of the problems with the way categories of knowledge are constructed is quite remarkable for its time.

II

The hard empirical grounding of Thorner’s analysis is aeons removed from the entirely speculative nature of Morris D. Morris’ 1968 article, ‘Towards A Reinterpretation of 19th Century Indian Economic History’. Thorner’s essay was a careful, meticulous and ultimately dazzling exercise in the interpretation of demographic data. It would not be inaccurate to say that Morris’ piece is characterized chiefly by the absence of any kind of data. To avoid being unjust to Morris, it is necessary to accept that the absence of sustained analyses of the nineteenth century Indian economy ( barring the unacceptably underrated work of the economic nationalists ) was a genuine problem at the time that he wrote. The tentative tone of Morris’ argument is fully understandable, and it is also true that he put forward his hypotheses as a stimulus to further research, in which endeavour he succeeded, in retrospect, quite dramatically. 

That said, the content of Morris’ vast generalizations about the Indian economy is often ( in fact usually ) quite untenable, and also quite inexplicable. Statements like these are a case in point: ‘Certainly, the general object of the raj was the welfare of the society.’ Or: ‘The British rule introduced the political framework of the…liberal nation state…Public order was established on a scale never seen before….Taxation and commercial regulations were largely eliminated.’ Or: ‘Indian society has been based historically on a non-animal-powered agriculture’. ( It is still unclear exactly where Morris gets this particular insight into the Indian economy from ). What is disturbing is not these isolated statements, but the fact that the structure of his argument is largely based on assumptions like these, and others of comparable looseness and unsoundness, some questionable and others wrong. Essentially, Morris makes out a case that the nineteenth century saw ( as a result chiefly of the manifold benefits of British rule: public order, efficient administration, the absence of war and conflict, improved communications ) significant positive economic changes: an expansion of agriculture with no decline in marginal product because of the productivity of land, a shift to high-value crops, slow population growth, and a consequent rise in per capita income. Many of these confident assertions have been questioned by Toru Matsui, Tapan Raycahudhuri, and others. Raychaudhuri makes the point that the eighteenth century was by no means as uniformly a period of decline as Morris’ essay assumes, and the early eighteenth century saw much commercial growth. Further, the expansion of agriculture was not uniquely a feature of British rule; previous dispensations ( the Mughals for instance ) had followed a deliberate policy of reclamation of land for agricultural purposes. Matsui also points out that the rise in per capita income in the nineteenth century probably did not compensate for the many devastations caused by war and political conflict in the second half of the eighteenth, and whatever the indicators of growth ( meagre though these are ) may suggest for the nineteenth century, the rise in per capita income would have been too limited to provide any obvious succour.

Of immediate concern here, though, is Morris’ particular revision of the history of handicraft production. Here, almost by accident, he seems to have put his finger on a weak point in the de-industrialization thesis: the assumption that the market was static. Thin though the argument was in its time, the researches of Roy and others in recent years have, ironically, given it both substance and stature. Morris’ speculation is that the import of cheap machine-made yarn helped indigenous weaving industry, cutting down its costs of procurement. The general fall in cloth prices led to a ‘movement down the demand curve’ ( in other words, the price levels fell, the volume of marketed cloth expanded, and demand was deepened ). Further, there was ‘a shift to the right of the demand curve’: the total quantity of cotton cloth available expanded. At worst, then, the expansion of British textile imports ‘skimmed off the expanding demand’ in an expanding market. The traditional sector might not have contracted absolutely, given the expansion of demand. At one level, this argument is Morris at his most Panglossian. However, it is also the most logically worked-out part of his essay, and has an empirical basis that, ironically, he would have been unaware of at the time.

Toru Matsui’s critique of Morris is hard-hitting but sophisticated. While his essay is wide-ranging and effectively attacks all the bases of Morris’ argument, it is only necessary here to take note of the section relevant to the question of de-industrialization. Matsui accepts the point that the competitive position of the handloom sector may have been strengthened by the low price of imported yarn. However, he argues, it is important to keep in mind the entirely destructive effect this would have had – and did have – on the indigenous spinning industry. Further, he takes issue with Morris’ general conclusion that the Indian weaver benefited from the import of cotton from Britain. The general fall in prices owed as much to the cheapness of the cloth imported from Britain as to that of the yarn. Only the import of yarn would have benefited Indian weavers. Equally importantly, Matsui points out that Morris recognizes, quite correctly, that it was the contraction of prices that caused the expansion of demand, and not the reverse. In such a situation, if generalizations are to be made, it would be more logical to conclude that the position of the Indian weaver declined, especially in the absence of any evidence of qualitative technological changes in the weaving industry. ( This is one area where Matsui’s conclusions have become outdated, given Tirthankar Roy’s studies of production processes in the traditional sector ). Matsui also argues strongly for the need for a more regionally disaggregated and differentiated history of traditional industry. He points out that the demand for cloth varied very widely, and that not all cloth was bought and sold in the open market. In this context, it makes little sense to talk of a general ‘shift to the right of the demand curve’. Regional experiences were, he argues, deeply inscribed into the picture of the fortunes and misfortunes of traditional industry. The survival, prosperity or destruction of handicrafts under colonial rule in specific regional contexts demands study on its own terms.

III

In 1976, the economic historian Amiya Kumar Bagchi, writing from a standpoint that Tirthankar Roy would later castigate as ‘left-nationalist’, attempted an empirical study of the process of de-industrialization in a specific geographical context: the districts of Patna, Gaya, Purnea, Bhagalpur and Shahabad in Gangetic Bihar. Bagchi’s investigations were a methodologically interesting exercise in comparative history. Fully cognizant of the difficulties in formulating anything like a statistical outline of employment, occupational structure, income or any of the other standard economic variables in the context of the nineteenth century, he selected two very different kinds of sources from two very different periods. Both these sources, however, he argued, could claim to be the most reliable documents available in their time. The first was the remarkable accounts of Dr Francis Buchanan ( later Buchanan-Hamilton ), based on his survey of Bihar and Bengal in 1809-13. The second was the section of the Census of 1901 that touched on the same region. While Bagchi’s methods were to come in for some sustained and cogent criticism from Marika Vicziany, his arguments did provide an important empirical basis for the case that nineteenth-century India experienced de-industrialization.

After a long defence of the merits of Buchanan-Hamilton’s investigations, Bagchi analyses the relevant comparative sets of statistical data, and comes to certain significant conclusions. In 1809-13, he estimates, the percentage of industrial to total population in the relevant districts of Buchanan-Hamilton’s survey ranged from 14.2% to 20.2%. The proportion of the industrial population dependent on cotton spinning and weaving was extremely high, ranging from 58% to 69.9%. In 1901, on the other hand, the population dependent on industry in the same region had shrunk to 5.5% – 11.6%, and the numbers dependent on cotton spinning and weaving to the industrial population was only 12.4% – 22.4%. Thus, the relative weight of the cotton sector in secondary industry – which it had dominated in the early nineteenth century – had contracted considerably by 1901. However, Bagchi argues that the cotton spinning and weaving industries were not the only ones to experience decline. Hunter’s Statistical Accounts and the District Gazetteer record a similar story of decline for silk manufacture, and for the cloth-dyeing industry. The paper industry of Gaya and Shahabad contracted almost to the point of extinction. Purnea, an important manufacturing centre ( dealing in commodities like lac ornaments, glassware, tooth-powder and blankets ) witnessed an almost complete deindustrialization. Further, the weaving of coarse cotton cloth had by this time ( the 1870s ) almost entirely replaced the production of finer varieties. This modest survival was due to the relatively steady demand for coarse cloth among the poor, the depression of weavers’ wages to the levels of those of unskilled labourers, and the taking up of weaving as a part-time occupation in the slack season, in order to supplement agricultural incomes. Thus, the mixing of occupations that Thorner identifies as a structural component of the composition of Indian labour, may actually, according to Bagchi, have been a consequence of the very process of de-industrialization.

In 1979, Marika Vicziany offered an important methodological critique of Bagchi in the IESHR, and his reply appeared in the same issue of the journal. Important points were raised in both essays, and despite the polemical edge of Bagchi’s riposte, there were serious questions that were left unresolved. As debates go, the Bagchi-Vicziany exchange was very unresolved. This flowed partly from significant methodological problems within the critique itself, and its rather careless attribution of the wrong sources to Bagchi’s account. Bagchi, in his turn, chose to be scathing rather than substantive in his reply. While he effectively showed up the gaps in Vicziany’s critique, he did not satisfactorily answer the larger methodological problems her essay had raised.

Vicziany’s critique of Bagchi is founded on a basic dissatisfaction with Buchanan-Hamilton as a source of information, and, more generally, with the notion of comparability between his accounts and the 1901 census. The first part of her survey is an examination of the reliability of Buchanan-Hamilton’s methods and conclusions. She points out that his data collection was largely constrained by the kinds of information he received from local people and rather unreliable guides, and his autonomy as an investigator was greatly restricted. Often the guides seem to have been agents of local zamindars and notables, and Buchanan himself seems to have felt that they were instructed about what to tell him. Buchanan records several instances of tensions and confrontations between himself and local people. Vicziany accepts that Buchanan’s surveys may have had value as a general account of the Bihar districts. However, she has legitimate doubts about the procedures of quantification he followed, since there is very little about the statistical dimension of his investigations in the journals themselves. The structure of local economy as recorded by Buchanan may have been very different from the real, ‘objective’ structure, and the quantitative part of Buchanan’s account seems to be suspect in terms of its reliability. His methods of enumeration seem to have been necessarily rough and piecemeal – especially, according to Vicziany, when it came to estimating the numbers of spinners.

Bagchi’s estimate of the number of persons dependent on spinning comes in for some criticism for Vicziany. Bagchi had made two alternative assumptions, based on the generally low earnings of spinners: a) that the average spinner supported one person other than herself, and b) that she supported herself alone. Vicziany takes issue with Bagchi over his refusal to consider a third possibility – that the spinner’s earnings could not sustain her, and that spinning work, therefore, was part-time. Vicziany points out that Buchanan himself had pointed to the part-time nature of spinning, and calculating from his estimates, she argues that the average wage of a spinner in Bhagalpur and Shahabad ( as opposed to Purnea ) was substantially below subsistence level. Vicziany also asserts that Montgomery Martin’s version of Buchanan’s statistical tables ( which she assumes are Bagchi’s prime source ) are too vague to serve as a reliable source. Here, though, she makes an astonishingly careless mistake which Bagchi is very severe on in his reply: in reality, Bagchi had access to the original tables drawn up by Buchanan, and, unlike Vicziany, did not have to rely on Montgomery Martin’s condensations. Vicziany also reiterates Thorner’s point about the difficulty of separating manufacture, agriculture and trade in the case of many people involved in artisanal activity: blanket-weavers, for instance, were simultaneously farmers, as were iron smelters. The makers of a particular kind of salt in Shahabad district, described by Buchanan, seem to have been labourers working at different jobs through the year.

Vicziany also examines Bagchi’s attempt to adjust data so as to be able to compare Buchanan’s surveys with the 1901 census, and reaches the conclusion that the effort to establish comparability fails. Census supervisors, she argues, were very aware of the crudeness of the categories they were forced to employ, and the divisions they made were often for purely pragmatic purposes. They instructed enumerators to distingush clearly between the principal occupation and subsidiary occupations of actual workers, and to separate workers from dependants clearly. The enumerators, however, often failed to make this distinction. Vicziany suggests that Bagchi uses the 1901 figures for a much finer-grained analysis than they could actually yield, and that the men who fashioned the census recognized its crudity. Finally, with respect to the decline of the handloom industry, Vicziany points out that Bagchi’s use of qualitative data relies exclusively on the District Gazetteers and the Statistical Account, ignoring alternative sources like the Indian Industrial Commission, which focuses on the survival of the indigenous cloth industry in the face of competition.

Bagchi’s reply to Vicziany, while devastating in its polemic, fails to address seriously the more substantive points made by her. He more or less dismisses the point about the comparability of data with a brief aside to the effect that all researchers suffer from the same problems that Buchanan faced. This is a somewhat unsatisfactory reply, since Vicziany had raised very concrete problems of analysis that flow from a study of Buchanan’s methods of data collection. In any case, Vicziany’s central point was that Buchanan’s quantitative analysis was of necessity founded on shaky data. The strength of the qualitative data, the authenticity of description, and the perceptiveness of the investigator do not negate the very real objective constraints he had to work with, which were much greater than the problems a well-organized bureaucratic setup like the Census Commission faced. Given the problems with the census data, the suggestion that Buchanan’s quantitative data are genuinely unreliable is not unreasonable.

Another point made by Bagchi is an impatient reiteration of his argument that the mixing of occupations was a product of deindustrialization. This is in itself an interesting speculation, and certainly there was a decline in full-time craft specialization. The problem is that it is difficult to locate the change in very precise historical time. It may well be the case that Company rule, destroying traditional industrial occupations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, killed craft specialization for a considerable length of time. However, it is unreasonable, in the absence of quantitative data, to put this theory forward with the kind of finality that Bagchi does. Bagchi argues that evidence from the seventeenth century on demonstrates considerable craft specialization, that the late nineteenth century is marked by a disappearance of this, and that colonialism is therefore clearly responsible for the intervening decline. This is a plausible argument as long as one does not insist that it is final and susceptible to quantification. Bagchi also tries to defend his method of deducing the number of spinners from the number of dependants on a spinner. He rejects Vicziany’s suggestion that the spinner’s income might not have been sufficient even to support herself, pointing out that in Purnea the average spinner earned almost as much as a ploughman. He is also on fairly strong ground when he defends the qualitative evidence for de-industrialization, pointing to detailed descriptions and eyewitness accounts. The logical slip he makes lies perhaps in the assumption that it is possible to generate quantitative evidence that unambiguously confirms this. As he acknowledges, there was a great deal of regional diversity in the experience of handicrafts. In this light, his implicit dismissal of Vicziany’s critique as a neo-imperialist ‘smart ploy’ is somewhat unwarranted and unnecessary. The Bagchi-Vicziany debate contains a great deal of empirical material and a lot of sophisticated analysis and qualification of difficult data – on both sides. The harshness of the tone of Bagchi’s reply, and his attribution of motives to Vicziany, unfortunately, obscures much of this richness.

IV

The 1980s and 1990s saw a series of regional studies that touched directly or indirectly on the subject of de-industrialization. The main focus of many of these studies was the handloom sector in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, and a great deal of empirical evidence, far richer than the de-industrialization ‘debate’ by itself could contain, was generated. The relevant arguments, for the purpose of this essay, are the ones put forward by Konrad Specker, Haruka Yanagisawa and Sumit Guha, whose contributions are contained in an important volume, Cloth And Commerce: Textiles In Colonial India, edited by Tirthankar Roy.

Specker’s essay is a brief survey of the development of the textile industry in Madras in the nineteenth century. Unlike the literature on the question of de-industrialization examined above, he does not seek to make any wide-ranging generalizations on the development ( or otherwise ) of the colonial economy: his study is focused and limited. Specker carefully traces the trajectory of the Madras handloom sector in the nineteenth century, distinguishing between long-term trends and responses to crises like famines. In general, he argues that the number of looms tended to increase between 1820 and 1870. This was not a smooth growth, though. It was highly differentiated regionally, and the famines of 1824-26 and 1833 had a debilitating impact upon production in Masulipatam and Guntur. A rise in the number of looms only set in after the 1840s and 1850s in most areas. In Cuddapah, North and South Arcot, Tanjore, Malabar and Coimbatore, there was a decline right up to 1870, partly as a result of textile imports from England, and partly because of the cotton boom of the 1860s, which pushed up the price of raw cotton. Guledgud and Kornadu, on the other hand, experienced considerable growth, since cloth produced in these areas faced no competition. Quantitatively, Specker argues, there was no long-term ‘destruction’ of the traditional textile industry. The real changes, though, were qualitative and product-specific. Imports from England tended to force the traditional sector to shift towards the production of coarse and low-grade cloth. However, product-specific advantages and demand patterns kept the industry afloat in many old centres of production. At the same time, contra Morris, the imports of machine-made yarn did not automatically strengthen the competitive power of the Indian weaver. Under-employment became a marked feature with the shift to coarse cloth production. Further, the greater the reliance of weavers on the local market, the greater was the danger of susceptibility to rising agricultural prices, especially in periods of crisis like the famine of 1877. In brief, the textile sector did experience a certain falling-off and marginalization, but there was no absolute decline, and the trajectories of growth and contraction were complex and regionally differentiated.

These trajectories, however, changed qualitatively in the twentieth century, and Yanagisawa’s essay ( also incorporated in Roy’s edited volume ) deals with these changes. The process he points to is market segmentation, in the context of the Indian cotton mills emerging as the major competitor to Indian handloom production as imports levelled off in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Between 1901-02 and 1936-37, the share of Indian mill production in the cloth market rose from 11.9% to 61.5%. The handloom sector countered this competition by diversifying production ( a process also emphasized by Roy ). Four types of alternative production emerged: fine-coloured cloths with high-count yarns, silk and sometimes jari or gold thread; coloured cloths woven with artificial silk yarn for lower-class consumption; coloured cloth exported abroad; and rough cloth with low-count yarns. The last of these shifts, towards coarse cloth production, was, according to Yanagisawa, largely a product of the late 1930s and the 1940s, and of war conditions. Yanagisawa also points to a shift in fashions, and consequently in demand and consumption patterns, that partly determined the shifts in handloom production. Production for female demand ( especially among the upper classes, where women’s clothes became costlier ) was one of these shifts, as handlooms began to cater to specific and new kinds of needs, supplying bodices and blouses. Demand for handmade saris also probably increased. Yanagisawa argues that the emancipation of the lower castes and the relaxation of social restrictions on their clothing resulted in increased demand for new kinds of cloth, like hosiery, and also for handloom-produced cloth for ceremonial purposes. Thus, the data generated by this study demonstrates that there was no decline in the south Indian handloom industry in terms of the number of looms despite the competition from indigenous mill-made cloth; in fact, the market for handloom production in certain products expanded. However, as Yanagisawa admits, the ‘economic condition of weavers may generally have worsened.’ The absence of any account of the changes in relations of power and production in traditional industry seriously limits the scope of his essay, since the diversification and sophistication of production bears no direct correlation with the living conditions and social experiences of weavers.

Guha’s essay, on the handloom industry of central India from 1825 on, intricately weaves together a number of economic processes into a complex and nuanced historical narrative. As might be expected, the picture is a differentiated one, and the trajectory of change is uneven, although patterns and correlations can be deduced. For the 1820s, Richard Jenkins’ report on Nagpur indicates a situation of flourishing textile manufacture and a large export trade. Jenkins’ census ( which only took into account the occupations of adult males ) also demonstrates that a sizeable workforce was involved in both spinning and weaving. From the 1820s to the 1860s, statistical material is much more limited, but scattered information from offical reports and the accounts of the Maheji fair at Khandesh suggest that the market for Nagpur textiles was still immense. Adverse changes, however, took place in the 1860s, as the prices of raw cotton soared. Local weavers dealing in coarser kinds of manufacture seem to have experienced a significant starvation of raw material, and a certain differentiation seems to have been generated by the shift to the production of finer fabrics, which were less affected by the boom in cotton prices. In general, though, weavers suffered, and this was exacerbated by the high price of foodgrains ( which would have constituted the bulk of their expenditure ), and the need to compete with cheaper imported textiles. The dependence of C.P weavers on handspun yarn made this struggle all the more unequal. Guha finds a marked decline in the weaving community of Nagpur city in 1866 as compared to 1825. Cotton production seems to have picked up after 1868, but there is evidence of considerable economic distress among weavers and spinners ( especially the latter ), as real incomes seem to have contracted. Between 1870 and 1895, two processes seem to be tied together. First, the weavers shifted to machine-spun yarn, and the spinning industry underwent a great decline. Spinning seems to have been reduced to a secondary or part-time occupation, often combined with agricultural labour. ( Interestingly, this lends weight to Bagchi’s general thesis ). Second, there was a distinct recovery in both the production and the consumption of handloom production, and the demand for coarse cloth picked up. Employment in weaving picked up, although the collapse of handspinning meant a definite fall in cumulative employment between 1870 and the twentieth century.

 This trend was partly modified and partly consolidated after 1900, as a cycle of scarcities and famines permanently destroyed handspinning. Weaving employment also contracted, though production didn’t fall substantially. Guha suggests that the poorest and least credit-worthy weavers would have been most likely to perish in this period of flux. There appears, in the statistical series of this period, a major discrepancy. While the consumption of yarn in traditional industry remained substantially unmodified between the 1880s and the 1940s, employment seems to have shrunk dramatically. Between 1901 and 1941, numbers employed declined from 150,000 to 70,000. Once again, distinct economic processes seem to have intersected here. Guha suggests that much employment in weaving would have become part-time, and many people involved in the production process would have not appeared in the census data, especially with the disappearance of spinning. The increase in yarn consumption after 1930 was also related to a technological change: the replacement of the throw-shuttle by the fly-shuttle. Thus, employment declined, working conditions may have become worse and more casualized for many, and productivity per loom probably increased – and all of these were part of the same historical process.

The Central Provinces, despite the moderacy of Guha’s conclusions, seem to bear out some key aspects of the de-industrialization argument quite clearly. The position of weavers seems to have been fairly fluctuating and unstable throughout the period after the 1820s. Employment seems to have witnessed a fairly steady contraction from the 1870s, though not as violent as that experienced in the previous decade. The spinning industry was obviously decimated, and weaving labour seems to have in many cases undergone a considerable deterioration in its terms of existence in the twentieth century. The other side of the picture is output and productivity, which seems to have undergone a certain qualitative expansion over time. In its basic outline, this does not seem so very different from the south Indian case, where again the case against de-industrialization seems to rest largely on the increase and sophistication of output. However, the individual features of the de-industrialization argument need disentangling and disaggregation, especially in the light of the complexity of the empirical data produced by regional studies. One part of the case for a decline in industry – the quantitative aspects of output and productivity – seems considerably weakened, or at least complicated, as a basis for argument. It is necessary, though, to examine the wider implications of the argument that India was ‘de-industrialized’. Logically, this would surely indicate a falling off of living standards in substantial sectors and a decline in employment. In other words, ‘de-industrialization’ also implies the tying together of structural changes in industry with growing immiserisation. In the case of textiles, such a historical correlation seems fairly plausible, though one needs to keep in mind here the qualification that it is unsound to extrapolate too much from such limited sectoral information.

V

Threading together the different critiques of the notion of de-industrialization, Tirthankar Roy has sought to evolve a different model of understanding the colonial economy ( though he frequently evinces distrust for the use of colonialism as an analytical category ). His motives are fairly transparent, and he spells them out in no uncertain terms: he seeks to develop a coherent non-Marxist account of the reasons for India’s historical under-development, and to tie the changes in economic relations and international trade in the nineteenth century to factors other than colonialism and exploitation. In so doing, he touches directly on the issue of de-industrialization, and offers to supply an alternative grid of understanding, one that often sounds like a pure inversion of the ‘left-nationalist’ positions. It would not be unfair to the structure  of Roy’s argument to describe it as a ‘things-were-not-as-bad-as-you-claim’ statement. However, it would be unfair to the real insights contained in his empirical investigations, and the implications of these go well beyond any simple ‘neo-imperialist’ claim. Even when disagreeing with Roy, it is possible to recognize that his work calls for a paradigm shift in the study of traditional small-scale industry.

The most sophisticated statement of Roy’s position is contained in his 1999 book, Traditional Industry In The Economy Of Colonial India. However, his other essays, his textbook on the colonial economy, and the 1993 monograph Artisans And Deindustrialization also articulate much the same argument. In the text of his Thorner Memorial Lecture in 2000, Roy has spelt out his disagreements with the proponents of de-industrialization with lucidity. He cautions against extrapolation from textile data alone, and he also suggests that the early nineteenth century provides a mixed picture, one that it is unsafe to generalize on the basis of. He calls for attention to the segmentation of the market, and argues that obsolescence ( caused by relative technological backwardness and cost-inefficiency in a context of international competition ) affected some sectors of the textile industry, while a wide range of crafts suffered no obsolescence of any kind, but rather a ‘commercialization’. Obsolescence was predominant in the early nineteenth century, and commercialization in the second half and in the twentieth century. He takes the decline in handloom weaving through much of the nineteenth century for granted, and argues that what needs to be explained is not this natural reaction to the opening up of the economy, but rather the recovery and survival of handlooms after 1880. This, he suggests, was a function of the comparative advantages of hand and power-weaving in different segments of the market, for different kinds of cloth. Handlooms were better equipped to make certain kinds of traditional garments for which there was considerable demand. In this process, the handloom sector witnessed a growth of capital accumulation and intensity, the development of qualitatively new relations of production, new investments and technological change. Naturally, the less cost-efficient and productive weavers were pushed out of employment’ others, however, managed to innovate successfully and meet the challenges of the twentieth century. ( One is tempted, on Roy’s behalf, to clarify his point with the observation, ‘Naturally, only the fittest survive!’, which is as good a summary as any of his economic philosophy ). Productivity increased, as did income, even as employment fell. The data for the productivity and the export of handloom cotton and silk goods, hides, skins, carpets and rugs from the early twentieth century all bear this out.

 Roy points to certain specific changes that defined commercialization in the Indian economy: long-distance trade expanded, regional markets integrated on an unprecedented scale, and contract law and private property rights came to characterize all economic relations. The important point here is that these processes held good as much for traditional industry as they did for modern industry. Production on contract for distant markets replaced earlier, non-commercial forms of production. In a context dominated by long-distance trade and the integration of markets, access to working capital and reliable information were indispensable. However, only a small number of entrepreneurs could command these resources, and they consequently expanded their business and managed to exert a tighter control over manufacturing processes. Capitalist relations thus evolved within the framework of traditional industry. Both part-time employment and household involvement in small-scale production declined, as specialization became the order of the day for labourers. Thus, argues Roy, there were ‘segments of decline and segments of growth’ within traditional industry in India, as was the case with all successfully industrializing nations. There was a genuine impetus and potential for growth from within the modernized and transformed ‘traditional’ sector. This was ultimately foiled not by colonialism, but by internal factors like the rapid growth of population and the excessive protectionism of government policy after independence.

Roy’s most significant arguments concern the changes in the organization of production, and the redefinition of the form of the transaction between employer and worker. He distinguishes between ‘spot-transactions’, where there is no prior agreement on prices and quantities, and contracts, where there is, and where, consequently, relations of production approximate much more closely to wage-labour’s negotiation with capital. Long-distance trade is often a concomitant of the latter. The colonial period, Roy points out, witnessed the growing contractualization of the employment relation, and the marginalization of other, non-contractual relationships. The leather industry saw one of the clearest breaks with the past, in that unskilled rural labour was replaced by wage-labour ( under equally hierarchical conditions ) in urban factories; the craft itself came to be relocated in towns. Other forms of organization, like karkhanadari or team-work, which characterized diverse kinds of production ranging from Benaras jari  to Moradabad brass, displayed more formal continuity. However, there were significant structural changes here too under the impact of long-distance trade, as there came to be a clearer division between capital and labour. Production processes in small-scale traditional industry also changed, in that the division of labour was more clearly articulated. Crafts – including coarse ones like leatherwork – came to be highly specialized with the growing reach of the world market in leather. Separated from agriculture, leather-workers also tended to bifurcate in terms of their tasks: flaying, tanning and manufacture were separated from one another. Simultaneously, there were important changes induced in technologies of production. Chemical processes in tanning and brassware were changed, power-plating replaced hand-plating of wires in jari, and thefly-shuttle and the warping mill were introduced.

The arguments made by Roy can be tackled at two levels. First, the question of de-industrialization. Here, one comes to the question of periodization. The classic arguments for deindustrialization were based largely on nineteenth-century evidence. Roy adduces growth in the small-scale industry, on the contrary, almost exclusively from the experience of the twentieth century. He tries to project this backward, but in none too convincing a manner, since he has to admit the fall in employment in the nineteenth century. Further, although Roy makes out a convincing case for the growth of productivity in the traditional sector in the twentieth century ( and to his credit diversifies his enquiry beyond textiles ), his blithe explanation of falling employment in terms of a survival-of-the-fittest argument – whereby the inefficient were justly pushed to the wall – resonates with all the platitudes of contemporary neo-liberalism, where humane and rights-based notions of welfare are replaced by a fetishization of efficiency and competition. In other words, Roy’s explanatory mechanism has no place for the sufferings of those – in both the nineteenth and the twentieth century – who paid the costs of India’s economic trajectory. To bring this back to the specifics of the debate, Bagchi’s article ( to take an instance ) seeks to articulate two arguments for de-industrialization, one based on quantitative data, and the other on qualitative data like official descriptions and eyewitness accounts. Roy is able to problematize and cast real doubts on the legitimacy – or, at least, the continuity – of a quantitative demonstration of industrial decline, and the changes he brings to light were  more ambiguous than the de-industrialization model can admit. On the other hand, there is no harm in recalling that the debate, in its roots, was also a debate about the misery of the Indian artisan and labourer in traditional industry. The collapse of spinning, the contraction of employment, and ( ironically ) Roy’s own superbly argued case for the entry of capitalist relations into traditional industry, all illustrate the reality of the unfreedoms, constraints and exploitation that working people had to suffer. Evidence of increased productivity need not be an indication of increased prosperity or freedom for those who produced. Even as far as the quantitative indicators go, the real qualifications to the thesis of de-industrialization, in a sense, come from the detailed regional studies that demonstrate the complexity of the trajectories that the handloom industry followed in the nineteenth century. Roy’s commercialization hypothesis, while valid and insightful in its own right, addresses a different period and a different set of data. It does not disprove the fact of de-industrialization, though it does effectively disprove its permanence.

The real strength of Roy’s work is its analysis of the changes in the organization of production and the emergence of what might be described as quasi-capitalist relations in the traditional sector of Indian industry. The significance of this is that it necessitates fresh research along these lines, and thus perhaps heralds a shift away from a controversy that has begun to look rather tired ( Roy’s own Thorner Memorial Lecture being an indication of its staleness and textbookishness ). However, pioneering though it is, Roy’s studies of production relations are also rather incongruous. A glance at his bibliography reveals a reference to the English economic historian Maxine Berg, whose brilliant studies of the transformations of traditional industry and labour in the eighteenth century in England are quite possibly a major influence on his own work. Berg had, in the 1980s, demonstrated the significance of changes in production organization and the flexibility of management practices in the early Industrial Revolution, and had brought into question the focus on the large-scale factory as the prime ( sometimes sole ) digit of analysis in an organizational landscape that was extremely diversified though quite uniformly exploitative. Roy’s data suggests the validity of enquiries along similar lines in the Indian context, expecially given the present-day ubiquity ( and, in the neo-liberal age, the sudden legitimacy ) of brutally exploitative working conditions and flexible employment practices in an industrial world dominated by small production units. However, Roy’s own arguments are wedded too closely to neo-liberal economic doctrine and an unproblematic belief in the free market to allow much nuance after a point.

De-industrialization, to sum up, has been a controversial issue in Indian economic history over almost forty years. In the different positions that have emerged in the academic debate, there seems to be something to be said for – and against – both sides. The overall picture seems more differentiated than any hard-and-fast position would allow. It might tentatively be suggested that there was probably genuine de-industrialization in a number of regions in the nineteenth century, though quantifying this is difficult. Productivity appears to have risen afterwards, but the contraction of employment countered this. The handloom sector was not destroyed; contrary to earlier nationalist arguments, it witnessed a certain region and product-specific growth. This, however, bears no correlation to the actual living conditions of weavers: in many cases, the relation may actually have been inverse. Roy’s recent focus on the changes in production relations lay out a potentially fruitful agenda for enquiry and speculation. This agenda is hard to realize within the structure of Roy’s own theoretical framework and certainties, though. The debates on small-scale traditional industry seem likely to continue and grow. Whether these debates can operate within the context of the de-industrialization controversy any more is quite another issue.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

  1. Daniel Thorner: ‘De-Industrialization In India, 1881-1931’ ( from Alice and Daniel Thorner, Land And Labour

 In India, Lucknow 1962 )

  1. Morris D. Morris: ‘Towards A Reinterpretation Of 19th Century Economic History’ ( IESHR, March 1968 )
  2. Toru Matsui: ‘On The Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History: A Review Of A ‘Reinterpretation’’

( IESHR, March 1968 )

  1. Tapan Raychaudhuri: ‘A Reinterpretation Of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History? ‘ ( IESHR, March 1968 )
  2. Amiya Kumar Bagchi: ‘De-Industrialization In Gangetic Bihar, 1809-1901’ ( from De et al, eds., Essays In Honour Of

Professor S.C Sarkar, New Delhi 1976 )

  1. Marika Vicziany: ‘Deindustrialization of India In The !9th Century: A Methodological Critique Of Amiya Kumar

Bagchi ‘ ( IESHR, 1979 )

  1. Amiya Kumar Bagchi: ‘A Reply’ ( IESHR, 1979 )
  2. Konrad Specker: ‘Madras Handlooms In The Nineteenth Century’ ( from Tirthankar Roy, ed.: Cloth And

Commerce: Textiles In Colonial India, Delhi 1996 )

  1. Haruka Yanagisawa: ‘The Handloom Industry And Its Market Structure: The Case Of The Madras Presidency In The

First Half Of The Twentieth Century’ ( from Roy, ed., Cloth And Commerce )

10.Sumit Guha: ‘The Handloom Industry Of Central India: 1825-1950 ‘ ( from Roy, ed., Cloth And Commerce )

11.Tirthankar Roy: Traditional Industry In The Economy Of Colonial India ( Cambridge, 1999 )

12.Tirthankar Roy: ‘De-Industrialization’ ( from Alice Thorner, ed: Land, Labour And Rights: 10 Daniel Thorner

 Memorial Lectures’, Delhi, 2001 )