History 10

History NCERT Notes | Class 10
Team Shashank Sajwan
THE RISE OF NATIONALISM IN EUROPE

The French Revolution and the Idea of the Nation
● The first clear expression of nationalism came with the French Revolution in 1789.
France was a full-fledged territorial state in 1789 under the rule of an absolute
monarch.
● The political and constitutional changes that came in the wake of the French
Revolution led to the transfer of sovereignty from the monarchy to a body of
French citizens. The revolution proclaimed that it was the people who would
henceforth constitute the nation and shape its destiny.
● The French revolutionaries introduced various measures and practices that could
create a sense of collective identity amongst the French people. The ideas of la
patrie (the fatherland) and le citoyen (the citizen) emphasised the notion of a
united community enjoying equal rights under a constitution.
○ A new French flag, the tricolour, was chosen to replace the former royal
standard. The Estates General was elected by the body of active citizens and
renamed the National Assembly. New hymns were composed, oaths taken
and martyrs commemorated, all in the name of the nation.
○ A centralised administrative system was put in place and it formulated
uniform laws for all citizens within its territory. Internal customs duties and
dues were abolished and a uniform system of weights and measures was
adopted. Regional dialects were discouraged and French, as it was spoken
and written in Paris, became the common language of the nation.
● When the news of the events in France reached the different cities of Europe,
students and other members of educated middle classes began setting up Jacobin
clubs.
○ Their activities and campaigns prepared the way for the French armies which
moved into Holland, Belgium, Switzerland and much of Italy in the 1790s.
With the outbreak of the revolutionary wars, the French armies began to
carry the idea of nationalism abroad.
● Within the wide swathe of territory that came under his control, Napoleon set about
introducing many of the reforms that he had already introduced in France.
○ Through a return to monarchy Napoleon had, no doubt, destroyed
democracy in France, but in the administrative field he had incorporated
revolutionary principles in order to make the whole system more rational
and efficient.
○ The Civil Code of 1804 – usually known as the Napoleonic Code – did away
with all privileges based on birth, established equality before the law and
secured the right to property.
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○ This Code was exported to the regions under French control. In the Dutch
Republic, in Switzerland, in Italy and Germany, Napoleon simplified
administrative divisions, abolished the feudal system and freed peasants
from serfdom and manorial dues.
○ In the towns too, guild restrictions were removed. Transport and
communication systems were improved. Peasants, artisans, workers and
new businessmen enjoyed a new-found freedom.
○ Businessmen and small-scale producers of goods, in particular, began to
realise that uniform laws, standardised weights and measures, and a
common national currency would facilitate the movement and exchange of
goods and capital from one region to another.
○ However, in the areas conquered, the reactions of the local populations to
French rule were mixed. Initially, in many places such as Holland and
Switzerland, as well as in certain cities like Brussels, Mainz, Milan and
Warsaw, the French armies were welcomed as harbingers of liberty.
○ But the initial enthusiasm soon turned to hostility, as it became clear that the
new administrative arrangements did not go hand in hand with political
freedom. Increased taxation, censorship, forced conscription into the French
armies required to conquer the rest of Europe, all seemed to outweigh the
advantages of the administrative changes.
The Making of Nationalism in Europe

● What we know today as Germany, Italy and Switzerland were divided into
kingdoms, duchies and cantons whose rulers had their autonomous territories.
Eastern and Central Europe were under autocratic monarchies within the territories
of which lived diverse peoples.
● They did not see themselves as sharing a collective identity or a common culture.
● Often, they even spoke different languages and belonged to different ethnic groups.
● The Habsburg Empire that ruled over Austria-Hungary, for example, was a
patchwork of many different regions and peoples. It included the Alpine regions –
the Tyrol, Austria and the Sudetenland – as well as Bohemia, where the aristocracy
was predominantly German-speaking.
○ It also included the Italian-speaking provinces of Lombardy and Venetia. In
Hungary, half of the population spoke Magyar while the other half spoke a
variety of dialects. In Galicia, the aristocracy spoke Polish. Besides these three
dominant groups, there also lived within the boundaries of the empire, a
mass of subject peasant peoples – Bohemians and Slovaks to the north,
Slovenes in Carniola, Croats to the south, and Roumans to the east in
Transylvania.
● Such differences did not easily promote a sense of political unity. The only tie
binding these diverse groups together was a common allegiance to the emperor.
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The Aristocracy and the New Middle Class
● Socially and politically, a landed aristocracy was the dominant class on the
continent. The members of this class were united by a common way of life that cut
across regional divisions.
● They owned estates in the countryside and also town-houses. They spoke French
for purposes of diplomacy and in high society. Their families were often connected
by ties of marriage. This powerful aristocracy was, however, numerically a small
group.
● The majority of the population was made up of the peasantry. To the west, the bulk
of the land was farmed by tenants and small owners, while in Eastern and Central
Europe the pattern of landholding was characterised by vast estates which were
cultivated by serfs.
What did Liberal Nationalism Stand for?

● Ideas of national unity in early-nineteenth-century Europe were closely allied to the
ideology of liberalism. The term ‘liberalism’ derives from the Latin root liber,
meaning free. For the new middle classes’ liberalism stood for freedom for the
individual and equality of all before the law. Politically, it emphasised the concept
of government by consent.
○ Since the French Revolution, liberalism had stood for the end of autocracy
and clerical privileges, a constitution and representative government
through parliament. Nineteenth-century liberals also stressed the
inviolability of private property. Yet, equality before the law did not
necessarily stand for universal suffrage.
○ Only for a brief period under the Jacobins did all adult males enjoy suffrage.
The Napoleonic Code went back to limited suffrage and reduced women to
the status of a minor, subject to the authority of fathers and husbands.
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries women and non-
propertied men organised opposition movements demanding equal
political rights.
○ In the economic sphere, liberalism stood for the freedom of markets and the
abolition of state-imposed restrictions on the movement of goods and
capital. During the nineteenth century this was a strong demand of the
emerging middle classes.
● Napoleon’s administrative measures had created out of countless small
principalities a confederation of 39 states.
○ Each of these possessed its own currency, and weights and measures.
○ Duties were often levied according to the weight or measurement of the
goods. Each region had its own system of weights and measures, this
involved time-consuming calculation.
○ An elle of textile material bought in Frankfurt would get you 54.7 cm of cloth,
in Mainz 55.1 cm, in Nuremberg 65.6 cm, in Freiburg 53.5 cm.
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A New Conservatism after 1815
● Following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, European governments were driven by a
spirit of conservatism.
● Conservatives believed that established, traditional institutions of state and society
– like the monarchy, the Church, social hierarchies, property and the family –
should be preserved.
● Most conservatives, however, did not propose a return to the society of pre-
revolutionary days. Rather, they realised, from the changes initiated by Napoleon,
that modernisation could in fact strengthen traditional institutions like the
monarchy.
○ It could make state power more effective and stronger. A modern army, an
efficient bureaucracy, a dynamic economy, the abolition of feudalism and
serfdom could strengthen the autocratic monarchies of Europe.
● In 1815, representatives of the European powers – Britain, Russia, Prussia and
Austria – who had collectively defeated Napoleon, met at Vienna to draw up a
settlement for Europe. The Congress was hosted by the Austrian Chancellor Duke
Metternich. The delegates drew up the Treaty of Vienna of 1815 with the object of
undoing most of the changes that had come about in Europe during the Napoleonic
wars.
● The Bourbon dynasty, which had been deposed during the French Revolution, was
restored to power, and France lost the territories it had annexed under Napoleon.
A series of states were set up on the boundaries of France to prevent French
expansion in future.
○ Thus, the kingdom of the Netherlands, which included Belgium, was set up
in the north and Genoa was added to Piedmont in the south. Prussia was
given important new territories on its western frontiers, while Austria was
given control of northern Italy.
● But the German confederation of 39 states that had been set up by Napoleon was
left untouched. In the east, Russia was given part of Poland while Prussia was given
a portion of Saxony. The main intention was to restore the monarchies that had
been overthrown by Napoleon, and create a new conservative order in Europe.
The Revolutionaries
● During the years following 1815, the fear of repression drove many liberal-
nationalists underground. Secret societies sprang up in many European states to
train revolutionaries and spread their ideas.
● To be revolutionary at this time meant a commitment to oppose monarchical forms
that had been established after the Vienna Congress, and to fight for liberty and
freedom. Most of these revolutionaries also saw the creation of nation-states as a
necessary part of this struggle for freedom.
● One such individual was the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini. Born in Genoa
in 1807, he became a member of the secret society of the Carbonari. As a young
man of 24, he was sent into exile in 1831 for attempting a revolution in Liguria.
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● He subsequently founded two more underground societies, first, Young Italy in
Marseilles, and then, Young Europe in Berne, whose members were like-minded
young men from Poland, France, Italy and the German states. Mazzini believed that
God had intended nations to be the natural units of mankind.
The Age of Revolutions: 1830-1848

● As conservative regimes tried to consolidate their power, liberalism and nationalism
came to be increasingly associated with revolution in many regions of Europe such
as the Italian and German states, the provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Ireland and
Poland.
● These revolutions were led by the liberal-nationalists belonging to the educated
middle-class elite, among whom were professors, schoolteachers, clerks and
members of the commercial middle classes. The first upheaval took place in France
in July 1830.
● The Bourbon kings who had been restored to power during the conservative
reaction after 1815, were now overthrown by liberal revolutionaries who installed a
constitutional monarchy with Louis Philippe at its head. ‘When France sneezes,’
Metternich once remarked, ‘the rest of Europe catches cold.’
● The July Revolution sparked an uprising in Brussels which led to Belgium breaking
away from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. An event that mobilised
nationalist feelings among the educated elite across Europe was the Greek war of
independence. Greece had been part of the Ottoman Empire since the fifteenth
century.
● The growth of revolutionary nationalism in Europe sparked off a struggle for
independence amongst the Greeks which began in 1821.
The Romantic Imagination and National Feeling

● The development of nationalism did not come about only through wars and
territorial expansion. Culture played an important role in creating the idea of the
nation: art and poetry, stories and music helped express and shape nationalist
feelings.
● Romantic artists and poets generally criticised the glorification of reason and science
and focused instead on emotions, intuition and mystical feelings.
● Their effort was to create a sense of a shared collective heritage, a common cultural
past, as the basis of a nation. Other Romantics such as the German philosopher
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) claimed that true German culture was to be
discovered among the common people – das volk.
● It was through folk songs, folk poetry and folk dances that the true spirit of the
nation (volksgeist) was popularised. So collecting and recording these forms of folk
culture was essential to the project of nation-building.
● Language too played an important role in developing nationalist sentiments. After
the Russian occupation, the Polish language was forced out of schools and the
Russian language was imposed everywhere.
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● In 1831, an armed rebellion against Russian rule took place which was ultimately
crushed. Following this, many members of the clergy in Poland began to use
language as a weapon of national resistance. Polish was used for Church gatherings
and all religious instruction.
● As a result, a large number of priests and bishops were put in jail or sent to Siberia
by the Russian authorities as punishment for their refusal to preach in Russian. The
use of Polish came to be seen as a symbol of the struggle against Russian
dominance.
Hunger, Hardship and Popular Revolt

● The 1830s were years of great economic hardship in Europe. The first half of the
nineteenth century saw an enormous increase in population all over Europe. In
most countries there were more seekers of jobs than employment.
● Populations from rural areas migrated to the cities to live in overcrowded slums.
Small producers in towns were often faced with stiff competition from imports of
cheap machine-made goods from England, where industrialization was more
advanced than on the continent.
● This was especially in textile production, which was carried out mainly in homes or
small workshops and was only partly mechanised. In those regions of Europe where
the aristocracy still enjoyed power, peasants struggled under the burden of feudal
dues and obligations. The rise of food prices or a year of bad harvest led to
widespread pauperism in town and country.
● Earlier, in 1845, weavers in Silesia had led a revolt against contractors who supplied
them raw material and gave them orders for finished textiles but drastically reduced
their payments.
1848: The Revolution of the Liberals

● Parallel to the revolts of the poor, unemployed and starving peasants and workers in
many European countries in the year 1848, a revolution led by the educated middle
classes was under way. Events of February 1848 in France had brought about the
abdication of the monarch and a republic based on universal male suffrage had
been proclaimed.
● In other parts of Europe where independent nation-states did not yet exist – such
as Germany, Italy, Poland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire – men and women of the
liberal middle classes combined their demands for constitutionalism with national
unification.
● They took advantage of the growing popular unrest to push their demands for the
creation of a nation-state on parliamentary principles – a constitution, freedom of
the press and freedom of association.
● The issue of extending political rights to women was a controversial one within the
liberal movement, in which large numbers of women had participated actively over
the years. Women had formed their own political associations, founded newspapers
and taken part in political meetings and demonstrations.
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● Despite this they were denied suffrage rights during the election of the Assembly.
When the Frankfurt parliament convened in the Church of St Paul, women were
admitted only as observers to stand in the visitors’ gallery. Though conservative
forces were able to suppress liberal movements in 1848, they could not restore the
old order.
● Monarchs were beginning to realise that the cycles of revolution and repression
could only be ended by granting concessions to the liberal-nationalist
revolutionaries. Hence, in the years after 1848, the autocratic monarchies of Central
and Eastern Europe began to introduce the changes that had already taken place in
Western Europe before 1815.
● Thus, serfdom and bonded labour were abolished both in the Habsburg dominions
and in Russia. The Habsburg rulers granted more autonomy to the Hungarians in
1867.
The Making of Germany and Italy

Germany – Can the Army be the Architect of a Nation?
● After 1848, nationalism in Europe moved away from its association with democracy
and revolution. Nationalist sentiments were often mobilised by conservatives for
promoting state power and achieving political domination over Europe. This can be
observed in the process by which Germany and Italy came to be unified as nation-
states.
● Nationalist feelings were widespread among middle-class Germans, who in 1848
tried to unite the different regions of the German confederation into a nation-state
governed by an elected parliament. This liberal initiative to nation-building was,
however, repressed by the combined forces of the monarchy and the military,
supported by the large landowners (called Junkers) of Prussia.
● From then on, Prussia took on the leadership of the movement for national
unification. Its chief minister, Otto von Bismarck, was the architect of this process
carried out with the help of the Prussian army and bureaucracy.
● Three wars over seven years – with Austria, Denmark and France – ended in
Prussian victory and completed the process of unification. In January 1871, the
Prussian king, William I, was proclaimed German Emperor in a ceremony held at
Versailles.
● The nation-building process in Germany had demonstrated the dominance of
Prussian state power. The new state placed a strong emphasis on modernising the
currency, banking, legal and judicial systems in Germany. Prussian measures and
practices often became a model for the rest of Germany.
Italy Unified
● Like Germany, Italy too had a long history of political fragmentation. Italians were
scattered over several dynastic states as well as the multi-national Habsburg
Empire. During the middle of the nineteenth century, Italy was divided into seven
states, of which only one, Sardinia-Piedmont, was ruled by an Italian princely house.
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● The north was under Austrian Habsburgs, the centre was ruled by the Pope and the
southern regions were under the domination of the Bourbon kings of Spain. Even the
Italian language had not acquired one common form and still had many regional
and local variations.
● During the 1830s, Giuseppe Mazzini had sought to put together a coherent
programme for a unitary Italian Republic. He had also formed a secret society called
Young Italy for the dissemination of his goals. The failure of revolutionary uprisings
both in 1831 and 1848 meant that the mantle now fell on Sardinia-Piedmont under
its ruler King Victor Emmanuel II to unify the Italian states through war. In the eyes
of the ruling elites of this region, a unified Italy offered them the possibility of
economic development and political dominance.
● Chief Minister Cavour who led the movement to unify the regions of Italy was
neither a revolutionary nor a democrat. Like many other wealthy and educated
members of the Italian elite, he spoke French much better than he did Italian.
● Through a tactful diplomatic alliance with France engineered by Cavour, Sardinia-
Piedmont succeeded in defeating the Austrian forces in 1859. Apart from regular
troops, a large number of armed volunteers under the leadership of Giuseppe
Garibaldi joined the fray.
● In 1860, they marched into South Italy and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and
succeeded in winning the support of the local peasants in order to drive out the
Spanish rulers.
● In 1861 Victor Emmanuel II was proclaimed king of united Italy. However, much of
the Italian population, among whom rates of illiteracy were very high, remained
blissfully unaware of liberal nationalist ideology.
The Strange Case of Britain

● Ireland suffered a similar fate. It was a country deeply divided between Catholics
and Protestants. The English helped the Protestants of Ireland to establish their
dominance over a largely Catholic country. Catholic revolts against British dominance
were suppressed.
● After a failed revolt led by Wolfe Tone and his United Irishmen (1798), Ireland was
forcibly incorporated into the United Kingdom in 1801. A new ‘British nation’ was
forged through the propagation of a dominant English culture.
● The symbols of the new Britain – the British flag (Union Jack), the national anthem
(God Save Our Noble King), the English language – were actively promoted and the
older nations survived only as subordinate partners in this union.
Visualising the Nation

● Artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave a face by personifying a
nation. In other words they represented a country as if it were a person.
● Nations were then portrayed as female figures. The female form that was chosen to
personify the nation did not stand for any particular woman in real life; rather it
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sought to give the abstract idea of the nation a concrete form. That is, the female
figure became an allegory of the nation.
● These ideals were represented through specific objects or symbols. The attributes
of Liberty are the red cap, or the broken chain, while Justice is generally a
blindfolded woman carrying a pair of weighing scales.
Nationalism and Imperialism

● By the last quarter of the nineteenth century nationalism no longer retained its
idealistic liberal-democratic sentiment of the first half of the century, but became a
narrow creed with limited ends. During this period nationalist groups became
increasingly intolerant of each other and ever ready to go to war.
● The major European powers, in turn, manipulated the nationalist aspirations of the
subject peoples in Europe to further their own imperialist aims. The most serious
source of nationalist tension in Europe after 1871 was the area called the Balkans.
● The Balkans was a region of geographical and ethnic variation comprising modern-
day Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece, Macedonia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Slovenia, Serbia and Montenegro whose inhabitants were broadly known as the
Slavs. A large part of the Balkans was under the control of the Ottoman Empire.
● The spread of the ideas of romantic nationalism in the Balkans together with the
disintegration of the Ottoman Empire made this region very explosive. All through
the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire had sought to strengthen itself through
modernization and internal reforms but with very little success.
● One by one, its European subject nationalities broke away from its control and
declared independence. The Balkan peoples based their claims for independence or
political rights on nationality and used history to prove that they had once been
independent but had subsequently been subjugated by foreign powers. Hence, the
rebellious nationalities in the Balkans thought of their struggles as attempts to win
back their long-lost independence.
● Nationalism, aligned with imperialism, led Europe to disaster in 1914. But
meanwhile, many countries in the world which had been colonised by the European
powers in the nineteenth century began to oppose imperial domination.
● The anti-imperial movements that developed everywhere were nationalist, in the
sense that they all struggled to form independent nation-states, and were inspired
by a sense of collective national unity, forged in confrontation with imperialism.
● European ideas of nationalism were nowhere replicated, for people everywhere
developed their own specific variety of nationalism. But the idea that societies
should be organised into ‘nation-states’ came to be accepted as natural and
universal.
NATIONALISM IN INDIA
● Modern nationalism in Europe came to be associated with the formation of nation-
states. It also meant a change in people’s understanding of who they were, and
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what defined their identity and sense of belonging. New symbols and icons, new
songs and ideas forged new links and redefined the boundaries of communities.
● In India, as in Vietnam and many other colonies, the growth of modern nationalism
is intimately connected to the anti-colonial movement.
● People began discovering their unity in the process of their struggle with colonialism.
The sense of being oppressed under colonialism provided a shared bond that tied
many different groups together.
● But each class and group felt the effects of colonialism differently, their experiences
were varied, and their notions of freedom were not always the same. The Congress
under Mahatma Gandhi tried to forge these groups together within one movement.
But unity did not emerge without conflict.
The First World War, Khilafat and Non-Cooperation

● The war created a new economic and political situation. It led to a huge increase in
defence expenditure which was financed by war loans and increasing taxes:
customs duties were raised and income tax introduced. Through the war years prices
increased – doubling between 1913 and 1918 – leading to extreme hardship for the
common people.
● Villages were called upon to supply soldiers, and the forced recruitment in rural
areas caused widespread anger. Then in 1918-19 and 1920-21, crops failed in many
parts of India, resulting in acute shortages of food. This was accompanied by an
influenza epidemic.
● According to the census of 1921, 12 to 13 million people perished as a result of
famines and the epidemic. People hoped that their hardships would end after the
war was over. But that did not happen.
The Idea of Satyagraha

● Mahatma Gandhi returned to India in January 1915. He had come from South Africa
where he had successfully fought the racist regime with a novel method of mass
agitation, called satyagraha.
○ The idea of satyagraha emphasised the power of truth and the need to
search for truth. It suggested that if the cause was true, if the struggle was
against injustice, then physical force was not necessary to fight the
oppressor. Without seeking vengeance or being aggressive, a satyagrahi
could win the battle through nonviolence.
○ This could be done by appealing to the conscience of the oppressor. People
– including the oppressors – had to be persuaded to see the truth, instead of
being forced to accept truth through the use of violence.
○ By this struggle, truth was bound to ultimately triumph.
○ Mahatma Gandhi believed that this dharma of non-violence could unite all
Indians.
● After arriving in India, in 1916 he travelled to Champaran in Bihar to inspire the
peasants to struggle against the oppressive plantation system.
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● Then, in 1917, he organised a satyagraha to support the peasants of the Kheda
district of Gujarat.
○ Affected by crop failure and a plague epidemic, the peasants of Kheda could
not pay the revenue, and were demanding that revenue collection be
relaxed.
● In 1918, Mahatma Gandhi went to Ahmedabad to organise a satyagraha movement
amongst cotton mill workers.
The Rowlatt Act

● Gandhiji in 1919 decided to launch a nationwide satyagraha against the proposed
Rowlatt Act (1919).
○ This Act had been hurriedly passed through the Imperial Legislative Council
despite the united opposition of the Indian members. It gave the government
enormous powers to repress political activities, and allowed detention of
political prisoners without trial for two years.
● Mahatma Gandhi wanted non-violent civil disobedience against such unjust laws,
which would start with a hartal on 6 April.
o Rallies were organised in various cities, workers went on strike in railway
workshops, and shops closed down.
○ Alarmed by the popular upsurge, and scared that lines of communication
such as the railways and telegraph would be disrupted, the British
administration decided to clamp down on nationalists.
○ Local leaders were picked up from Amritsar, and Mahatma Gandhi was
barred from entering Delhi.
○ On 10 April, the police in Amritsar fired upon a peaceful procession,
provoking widespread attacks on banks, post offices and railway stations.
Martial law was imposed and General Dyer took command.
● On 13 April the infamous Jallianwalla Bagh incident took place. On that day a large
crowd gathered in the enclosed ground of Jallianwalla Bagh.
○ Some came to protest against the government’s new repressive measures.
Others had come to attend the annual Baisakhi fair. Being from outside the
city, many villagers were unaware of the martial law that had been
imposed.
○ Dyer entered the area, blocked the exit points, and opened fire on the crowd,
killing hundreds. His object, as he declared later, was to ‘produce a moral
effect’, to create in the minds of satyagrahis a feeling of terror and awe.
○ There were strikes, clashes with the police and attacks on government
buildings. The government responded with brutal repression: satyagrahis
were forced to rub their noses on the ground, crawl on the streets, and do
salaam (salute) to all sahibs; people were flogged and villages (around
Gujranwala in Punjab, now in Pakistan) were bombed.
● Seeing violence spread, Mahatma Gandhi called off the movement.
● While the Rowlatt satyagraha had been a widespread movement, it was still limited
mostly to cities and towns. Mahatma Gandhi now felt the need to launch a more
broad-based movement in India. But he was certain that no such movement could
be organised without bringing the Hindus and Muslims closer together.
● To defend the Khalifa’s temporal powers, a Khilafat Committee was formed in
Bombay in March 1919. A young generation of Muslim leaders like the brothers
Muhammad Ali and Shaukat Ali, began discussing with Mahatma Gandhi about the
possibility of a united mass action on the issue.
○ Gandhiji saw this as an opportunity to bring Muslims under the umbrella of
a unified national movement. At the Calcutta session of the Congress in
September 1920, he convinced other leaders of the need to start a non-
cooperation movement in support of Khilafat as well as for swaraj.
Why Non-cooperation?
● In his famous book Hind Swaraj (1909) Mahatma Gandhi declared that British rule
was established in India with the cooperation of Indians, and had survived only
because of this cooperation. If Indians refused to cooperate, British rule in India
would collapse within a year, and swaraj would come.
● Gandhiji proposed that the movement should unfold in stages. It should begin with
the surrender of titles that the government awarded, and a boycott of civil services,
army, police, courts and legislative councils, schools, and foreign goods. Then, in case
the government used repression, a full civil disobedience campaign would be
launched.
● Through the summer of 1920 Mahatma Gandhi and Shaukat Ali toured extensively,
mobilising popular support for the movement. Many within the Congress were,
however, concerned about the proposals. They were reluctant to boycott the
council elections scheduled for November 1920, and they feared that the movement
might lead to popular violence.
● Finally, at the Congress session at Nagpur in December 1920, a compromise was
worked out and the Non-Cooperation programme was adopted.
Differing Strands within the Movement

● The Non-Cooperation-Khilafat Movement began in January 1921. Various social
groups participated in this movement, each with its own specific aspiration. All of
them responded to the call of Swaraj, but the term meant different things to
different people.
The Movement in the Towns

● The movement started with middle-class participation in the cities. Thousands of
students left government-controlled schools and colleges, headmasters and teachers
resigned, and lawyers gave up their legal practices.
● The council elections were boycotted in most provinces except Madras, where the
Justice Party, the party of the non-Brahmans, felt that entering the council was one
way of gaining some power – something that usually only Brahmans had access to.
● The effects of non-cooperation on the economic front were more dramatic.
○ Foreign goods were boycotted, liquor shops picketed, and foreign cloth
burnt in huge bonfires. The import of foreign cloth halved between 1921 and
1922, its value dropping from Rs 102 crore to Rs 57 crore.
○ Merchants and traders refused to trade in foreign goods or finance foreign
trade.
● As the boycott movement spread, and people began discarding imported clothes
and wearing only Indian ones, production of Indian textile mills and handlooms
went up.
Rebellion in the Countryside

● From the cities, the Non-Cooperation Movement spread to the countryside. It drew
into its fold the struggles of peasants and tribals which were developing in different
parts of India in the years after the war.
● In Awadh, peasants were led by Baba Ramchandra – a sanyasi who had earlier been
to Fiji as an indentured labourer.
○ The movement here was against talukdars and landlords who demanded
from peasants exorbitantly high rents and a variety of other cesses.
○ Peasants had to begar and work at landlords’ farms without any payment.
○ As tenants they had no security of tenure, being regularly evicted so that they
could acquire no right over the leased land.
○ The peasant movement demanded reduction of revenue, abolition of begar,
and social boycott of oppressive landlords.
○ In many places nai – dhobi bandhs were organised by panchayats to deprive
landlords of the services of even barbers and washermen.
○ By October 1920, the Oudh Kisan Sabha was set up headed by Jawaharlal
Nehru, Baba Ramchandra and a few others.
■ Within a month, over 300 branches had been set up in the villages
around the region.
■ So, when the Non-Cooperation Movement began the following year,
the effort of the Congress was to integrate the Awadh peasant
struggle into the wider struggle.
● Tribal peasants interpreted the message of Mahatma Gandhi and the idea of swaraj
in yet another way.
● In the Gudem Hills of Andhra Pradesh, for instance, a militant guerrilla movement
spread in the early 1920s – not a form of struggle that the Congress could approve.
○ Here, the colonial government had closed large forest areas, preventing
people from entering the forests to graze their cattle, or to collect fuelwood
and fruits.
○ Not only were their livelihoods affected but they felt that their traditional
rights were being denied.
○ When the government began forcing them to contribute begar for road
building, the hill people revolted. The person who came to lead them was
Alluri Sitarama Raju.
Swaraj in the Plantations
● For plantation workers in Assam, freedom meant the right to move freely in and
out of the confined space in which they were enclosed, and it meant retaining a
link with the village from which they had come.
● Under the Inland Emigration Act of 1859, plantation workers were not permitted to
leave the tea gardens without permission, and in fact they were rarely given such
permission.
● When they heard of the Non-Cooperation Movement, thousands of workers defied
the authorities, left the plantations and headed home.
● They believed that Gandhi Raj was coming and everyone would be given land in their
own villages. They, however, never reached their destination. Stranded on the way
by a railway and steamer strike, they were caught by the police and brutally beaten
up.
Towards Civil Disobedience

● In February 1922, Mahatma Gandhi decided to withdraw the Non-Cooperation
Movement. He felt the movement was turning violent in many places and
satyagrahis needed to be properly trained before they would be ready for mass
struggles.
● Within the Congress, some leaders were by now tired of mass struggles and wanted
to participate in elections to the provincial councils that had been set up by the
Government of India Act of 1919.
● They felt that it was important to oppose British policies within the councils, argue
for reform and also demonstrate that these councils were not truly democratic. C. R.
Das and Motilal Nehru formed the Swaraj Party within the Congress to argue for a
return to council politics.
● But younger leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose pressed for
more radical mass agitation and full independence.
● In such a situation of internal debate and dissension two factors again shaped Indian
politics towards the late 1920s.
○ The first was the effect of the worldwide economic depression.
■ Agricultural prices began to fall from 1926 and collapsed after 1930.
■ As the demand for agricultural goods fell and exports declined,
peasants found it difficult to sell their harvests and pay their
revenue.
■ By 1930, the countryside was in turmoil.
○ Against this background the new Tory government in Britain constituted a
Statutory Commission under Sir John Simon.
■ Set up in response to the nationalist movement, the commission was
to look into the functioning of the constitutional system in India and
suggest changes.
■ The problem was that the commission did not have a single Indian
member.
The Salt March and the Civil Disobedience Movement
● Mahatma Gandhi found in salt a powerful symbol that could unite the nation. On 31
January 1930, he sent a letter to Viceroy Irwin stating eleven demands. Some of
these were of general interest; others were specific demands of different classes,
from industrialists to peasants.
● The idea was to make the demands wide-ranging, so that all classes within Indian
society could identify with them and everyone could be brought together in a
united campaign.
● The most stirring of all was the demand to abolish the salt tax. Salt was something
consumed by the rich and the poor alike, and it was one of the most essential items
of food.
● The tax on salt and the government monopoly over its production, Mahatma Gandhi
declared, revealed the most oppressive face of British rule. Mahatma Gandhi’s letter
was, in a way, an ultimatum.
● If the demands were not fulfilled by 11 March, the letter stated, the Congress would
launch a civil disobedience campaign. Irwin was unwilling to negotiate.
● So, Mahatma Gandhi started his famous salt march accompanied by 78 of his
trusted volunteers.
○ The march was over 240 miles, from Gandhiji’s ashram in Sabarmati to the
Gujarati coastal town of Dandi. The volunteers walked for 24 days, about 10
miles a day.
○ Thousands came to hear Mahatma Gandhi wherever he stopped, and he told
them what he meant by swaraj and urged them to peacefully defy the British.
○ On 6 April he reached Dandi, and ceremonially violated the law,
manufacturing salt by boiling sea water.
● Worried by the developments, the colonial government began arresting the
Congress leaders one by one. This led to violent clashes in many palaces. When
Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a devout disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, was arrested in April
1930, angry crowds demonstrated in the streets of Peshawar, facing armoured cars
and police firing. Many were killed.
● A month later, when Mahatma Gandhi himself was arrested, industrial workers in
Sholapur attacked police posts, municipal buildings, law courts and railway stations –
all structures that symbolised British rule. A frightened government responded with
a policy of brutal repression. Peaceful satyagrahis were attacked, women and
children were beaten, and about 100,000 people were arrested.
How Participants saw the Movement

● In the countryside, rich peasant communities – like the Patidars of Gujarat and the
Jats of Uttar Pradesh – were active in the movement.
○ Being producers of commercial crops, they were very hard hit by the trade
depression and falling prices.
○ As their cash income disappeared, they found it impossible to pay the
government’s revenue demand. And the refusal of the government to
reduce the revenue demand led to widespread resentment.
○ These rich peasants became enthusiastic supporters of the Civil
Disobedience Movement, organising their communities, and at times forcing
reluctant members to participate in the boycott programmes.
○ For them the fight for swaraj was a struggle against high revenues.
○ But they were deeply disappointed when the movement was called off in
1931 without the revenue rates being revised.
○ So, when the movement was restarted in 1932, many of them refused to
participate.
● The poorer peasantry were not just interested in the lowering of the revenue
demand. Many of them were small tenants cultivating land they had rented from
landlords.
● As the Depression continued and cash incomes dwindled, the small tenants found it
difficult to pay their rent. They wanted the unpaid rent to the landlord to be
remitted.
○ They joined a variety of radical movements, often led by Socialists and
Communists.
○ Apprehensive of raising issues that might upset the rich peasants and
landlords, the Congress was unwilling to support ‘no rent’ campaigns in
most places.
○ So, the relationship between the poor peasants and the Congress remained
uncertain.
● During the First World War, Indian merchants and industrialists had made huge
profits and become powerful.
○ Keen on expanding their business, they now reacted against colonial policies
that restricted business activities.
○ They wanted protection against imports of foreign goods, and a rupee-
sterling foreign exchange ratio that would discourage imports.
○ To organise business interests, they formed the Indian Industrial and
Commercial Congress in 1920 and the Federation of the Indian Chamber of
Commerce and Industries (FICCI) in 1927.
○ Led by prominent industrialists like Purshottamdas Thakurdas and G. D.
Birla, the industrialists attacked colonial control over the Indian economy,
and supported the Civil Disobedience Movement when it was first launched.
○ They gave financial assistance and refused to buy or sell imported goods.
○ Most businessmen came to see swaraj as a time when colonial restrictions on
business would no longer exist and trade and industry would flourish without
constraints.
○ After the failure of the Round Table Conference, business groups were no
longer uniformly enthusiastic.
○ They were apprehensive of the spread of militant activities, and worried
about prolonged disruption of business, as well as of the growing influence of
socialism amongst the younger members of the Congress. The industrial
working classes did not participate in the Civil Disobedience Movement in
large numbers, except in the Nagpur region.
○ As the industrialists came closer to the Congress, workers stayed aloof.
● But in spite of that, some workers did participate in the Civil Disobedience
Movement, selectively adopting some of the ideas of the Gandhian programme, like
boycott of foreign goods, as part of their own movements against low wages and
poor working conditions.
○ There were strikes by railway workers in 1930 and dockworkers in 1932. In
1930 thousands of workers in Chotanagpur tin mines wore Gandhi caps and
participated in protest rallies and boycott campaigns.
○ But the Congress was reluctant to include workers’ demands as part of its
programme of struggle. It felt that this would alienate industrialists and
divide the anti-imperial forces.
The Limits of Civil Disobedience

● Not all social groups were moved by the abstract concept of swaraj. One such group
was the nation’s ‘untouchables’, who from around the 1930s had begun to call
themselves dalit or oppressed.
○ For long the Congress had ignored the dalits, for fear of offending the
sanatanis, the conservative high-caste Hindus. But Mahatma Gandhi declared
that swaraj would not come for a hundred years if untouchability was not
eliminated.
○ He called the ‘untouchables’ harijan, or the children of God, organised
satyagraha to secure them entry into temples, and access to public wells,
tanks, roads and schools.
○ He himself cleaned toilets to dignify the work of the bhangi (the sweepers),
and persuaded upper castes to change their heart and give up ‘the sin of
untouchability’.
○ But many dalit leaders were keen on a different political solution to the
problems of the community.
○ They began organising themselves, demanding reserved seats in educational
institutions, and a separate electorate that would choose dalit members for
legislative councils.
○ Political empowerment, they believed, would resolve the problems of their
social disabilities.
○ Dalit participation in the Civil Disobedience Movement was therefore
limited, particularly in the Maharashtra and Nagpur region where their
organisation was quite strong.
○ Dr B.R. Ambedkar, who organised the dalits into the Depressed Classes
Association in 1930, clashed with Mahatma Gandhi at the second Round
Table Conference by demanding separate electorates for dalits.
○ When the British government conceded Ambedkar’s demand, Gandhiji began
a fast unto death. He believed that separate electorates for dalits would slow
down the process of their integration into society.
○ Ambedkar ultimately accepted Gandhiji’s position and the result was the
Poona Pact of September 1932.
■ It gave the Depressed Classes (later to be known as the Schedule
Castes) reserved seats in provincial and central legislative councils,
but they were to be voted in by the general electorate.
■ The dalit movement, however, continued to be apprehensive of the
Congress Led national movement.
● When the Civil Disobedience Movement started there was thus an atmosphere of
suspicion and distrust between communities.
● Alienated from the Congress, large sections of Muslims could not respond to the call
for a united struggle.
○ Many Muslim leaders and intellectuals expressed their concern about the
status of Muslims as a minority within India.
○ They feared that the culture and identity of minorities would be submerged
under the domination of a Hindu majority.
The Sense of Collective Belonging

● Nationalism spreads when people begin to believe that they are all part of the
same nation, when they discover some unity that binds them together.
● This sense of collective belonging came partly through the experience of united
struggles.
○ But there were also a variety of cultural processes through which
nationalism captured people’s imagination.
○ History and fiction, folklore and songs, popular prints and symbols, all played
a part in the making of nationalism.
● The identity of the nation is most often symbolised in a figure or image. The identity
of India came to be visually associated with the image of Bharat Mata.
○ The image was first created by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay. In the 1870s
he wrote ‘Vande Mataram’ as a hymn to the motherland.
○ Later it was included in his novel Anandamath and widely sung during the
Swadeshi movement in Bengal.
○ Moved by the Swadeshi movement, Abanindranath Tagore painted his
famous image of Bharat Mata.
○ In this painting Bharat Mata is portrayed as an ascetic figure; she is calm,
composed, divine and spiritual.
● As the national movement developed, nationalist leaders became more and more
aware of such icons and symbols in unifying people and inspiring in them a feeling of
nationalism.
● During the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, a tricolour flag (red, green and yellow)
was designed.
○ It had eight lotuses representing eight provinces of British India, and a
crescent moon, representing Hindus and Muslims.
○ By 1921, Gandhiji had designed the Swaraj flag.
■ It was again a tricolour (red, green and white) and had a spinning
wheel in the centre, representing the Gandhian ideal of self-help.
○ Carrying the flag, holding it aloft, during marches became a symbol of
defiance.
● Another means of creating a feeling of nationalism was through reinterpretation of
history.
● The British saw Indians as backward and primitive, incapable of governing
themselves.
● In response, Indians began looking into the past to discover India’s great
achievements.
○ They wrote about the glorious developments in ancient times when art and
architecture, science and mathematics, religion and culture, law and
philosophy, crafts and trade had flourished.
○ This glorious time, in their view, was followed by a history of decline, when
India was colonised.
○ These nationalist histories urged the readers to take pride in India’s great
achievements in the past and struggle to change the miserable conditions of
life under British rule.
Conclusion
● A growing anger against the colonial government was thus bringing together
various groups and classes of Indians into a common struggle for freedom in the first
half of the twentieth century.
● The Congress under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi tried to channel people’s
grievances into organised movements for independence.
● Through such movements the nationalists tried to forge a national unity. But, diverse
groups and classes participated in these movements with varied aspirations and
expectations.
○ This is precisely why the unity within the movement often broke down. The
high points of Congress activity and nationalist unity were followed by phases
of disunity and inner conflict between groups.
THE MAKING OF A GLOBAL WORLD

The Pre-modern World
● All through history, human societies have become steadily more interlinked. From
ancient times, travellers, traders, priests and pilgrims travelled vast distances for
knowledge, opportunity and spiritual fulfilment, or to escape persecution. They
carried goods, money, values, skills, ideas, inventions, and even germs and diseases.
● As early as 3000 BCE an active coastal trade linked the Indus valley civilisations with
present-day West Asia. For more than a millennia, cowries (the Hindi cowdi or
seashells, used as a form of currency) from the Maldives found their way to China
and East Africa.
● The long-distance spread of disease-carrying germs may be traced as far back as the
seventh century. By the thirteenth century it had become an unmistakable link.
Silk Routes Link the World

● The silk routes are a good example of vibrant pre-modern trade and cultural links
between distant parts of the world. The name ‘silk routes’ points to the importance
of West-bound Chinese silk cargoes along this route.
● Historians have identified several silk routes, over land and by sea, knitting together
vast regions of Asia, and linking Asia with Europe and northern Africa.
● They are known to have existed since before the Christian Era and thrived almost till
the fifteenth century. But Chinese pottery also travelled the same route, as did
textiles and spices from India and Southeast Asia. In return, precious metals – gold
and silver – flowed from Europe to Asia.
● Trade and cultural exchange always went hand in hand. Early Christian missionaries
almost certainly travelled this route to Asia, as did early Muslim preachers a few
centuries later. Much before all this, Buddhism emerged from eastern India and
spread in several directions through intersecting points on the silk routes.
Food Travels: Spaghetti and Potato

● Food offers many examples of long-distance cultural exchange. Traders and
travellers introduced new crops to the lands they travelled. Even ‘ready’ foodstuffs
in distant parts of the world might share common origins.
● Take spaghetti and noodles. It is believed that noodles travelled west from China to
become spaghetti. Or, perhaps Arab traders took pasta to fifth-century Sicily, an
island now in Italy.
● Similar foods were also known in India and Japan, so the truth about their origins
may never be known. Yet such guesswork suggests the possibilities of long-distance
cultural contact even in the pre-modern world.
● Many of our common foods such as potatoes, soya, groundnuts, maize, tomatoes,
chillies, sweet potatoes, and so on were not known to our ancestors until about five
centuries ago.
● These foods were only introduced in Europe and Asia after Christopher Columbus
accidentally discovered the vast continent that would later become known as the
Americas.
Conquest, Disease and Trade

● The pre-modern world shrank greatly in the sixteenth century after European
sailors found a sea route to Asia and also successfully crossed the western ocean to
America.
● For centuries before, the Indian Ocean had known a bustling trade, with goods,
people, knowledge, customs, etc. criss-crossing its waters.
○ The Indian subcontinent was central to these flows and a crucial point in
their networks. The entry of the Europeans helped expand or redirect some
of these flows towards Europe.
● Before its ‘discovery’, America had been cut off from regular contact with the rest
of the world for millions of years. But from the sixteenth century, its vast lands and
abundant crops and minerals began to transform trade and lives everywhere.
○ Precious metals, particularly silver, from mines located in present-day Peru
and Mexico also enhanced Europe’s wealth and financed its trade with Asia.
○ Legends spread in seventeenth-century Europe about South America’s fabled
wealth.
● Many expeditions set off in search of El Dorado, the fabled city of gold.
● The Portuguese and Spanish conquest and colonisation of America was decisively
under way by the mid-sixteenth century. European conquest was not just a result of
superior firepower.
○ In fact, the most powerful weapon of the Spanish conquerors was not a
conventional military weapon at all. It was the germs such as those of
smallpox that they carried on their person.
○ Because of their long isolation, America’s original inhabitants had no
immunity against these diseases that came from Europe.
○ Smallpox in particular proved a deadly killer.
○ Once introduced, it spread deep into the continent, ahead even of any
Europeans reaching there. It killed and decimated whole communities,
paving the way for conquest.
○ Until the nineteenth century, poverty and hunger were common in Europe.
Cities were crowded and deadly diseases were widespread. Religious conflicts
were common, and religious dissenters were persecuted.
○ Thousands therefore fled Europe for America. Here, by the eighteenth
century, plantations worked by slaves captured in Africa were growing cotton
and sugar for European markets.
● Until well into the eighteenth century, China and India were among the world’s
richest countries.
○ They were also pre-eminent in Asian trade.
○ However, from the fifteenth century, China is said to have restricted overseas
contacts and retreated into isolation. China’s reduced role and the rising
importance of the Americas gradually moved the centre of world trade
westwards. Europe now emerged as the centre of world trade.
The Nineteenth Century (1815-1914)

● The world changed profoundly in the nineteenth century. Economic, political, social,
cultural and technological factors interacted in complex ways to transform
societies and reshape external relations.
● Economists identify three types of movement or ‘flows’ within international
economic exchanges.
○ The first is the flow of trade which in the nineteenth century referred largely
to trade in goods (e.g., cloth or wheat).
○ The second is the flow of labour – the migration of people in search of
employment.
○ The third is the movement of capital for short-term or long-term investments
over long distances.
○ All three flows were closely interwoven and affected peoples’ lives more
deeply now than ever before. The interconnections could sometimes be
broken – for example, labour migration was often more restricted than goods
or capital flows.
● Yet it helps us understand the nineteenth-century world economy better if we look
at the three flows together.
A World Economy Takes Shape

● A good place to start is the changing pattern of food production and consumption
in industrial Europe. Traditionally, countries liked to be self-sufficient in food. But in
nineteenth-century Britain, self-sufficiency in food meant lower living standards and
social conflict.
○ Population growth from the late eighteenth century had increased the
demand for food grains in Britain.
○ As urban centres expanded and industry grew, the demand for agricultural
products went up, pushing up food grain prices.
○ Under pressure from landed groups, the government also restricted the
import of corn. The laws allowing the government to do this were commonly
known as the ‘Corn Laws’. Unhappy with high food prices, industrialists and
urban dwellers forced the abolition of the Corn Laws.
○ After the Corn Laws were scrapped, food could be imported into Britain
more cheaply than it could be produced within the country.
○ British agriculture was unable to compete with imports. Vast areas of land
were now left uncultivated, and thousands of men and women were thrown
out of work. They flocked to the cities or migrated overseas.
○ As food prices fell, consumption in Britain rose.
○ From the mid nineteenth century, faster industrial growth in Britain also led
to higher incomes, and therefore more food imports.
○ Around the world – in Eastern Europe, Russia, America and Australia – lands
were cleared and food production expanded to meet the British demand. It
was not enough merely to clear lands for agriculture. Railways were needed
to link the agricultural regions to the ports.
○ New harbours had to be built and old ones expanded to ship the new
cargoes.
○ People had to settle on the lands to bring them under cultivation. This meant
building homes and settlements.
○ All these activities in turn required capital and labour. Capital flowed from
financial centres such as London.
○ The demand for labour in places where labour was in short supply – as in
America and Australia – led to more migration.
○ Nearly 50 million people emigrated from Europe to America and Australia in
the nineteenth century.
○ All over the world some 150 million are estimated to have left their homes,
crossed oceans and vast distances over land in search of a better future.
● A similar story can be told for cotton, the cultivation of which expanded worldwide
to feed British textile mills.
● Or rubber. So rapidly did regional specialisation in the production of commodities
develop, that between 1820 and 1914 world trade is estimated to have multiplied
25 to 40 times.
○ Nearly 60 percent of this trade comprised ‘primary products’ – that is,
agricultural products such as wheat and cotton, and minerals such as coal.
Role of Technology
● The railways, steamships, the telegraph, for example, were important inventions
without which we cannot imagine the transformed nineteenth-century world.
● But technological advances were often the result of larger social, political and
economic factors.
○ For example, colonisation stimulated new investments and improvements
in transport: faster railways, lighter wagons and larger ships helped move
food more cheaply and quickly from faraway farms to final markets.
● Animals were slaughtered for food at the starting point – in America, Australia or
New Zealand – and then transported to Europe as frozen meat. This reduced
shipping costs and lowered meat prices in Europe.
● The poor in Europe could now consume a more varied diet. To the earlier
monotony of bread and potatoes many, though not all, could now add meat (and
butter and eggs) to their diet.
● Better living conditions promoted social peace within the country and support for
imperialism abroad.
Late nineteenth-century Colonialism

● Trade flourished and markets expanded in the late nineteenth century. But this was
not only a period of expanding trade and increased prosperity.
● In many parts of the world, the expansion of trade and a closer relationship with the
world economy also meant a loss of freedoms and livelihoods.
● Late Nineteenth-century European conquests produced many painful economic,
social and ecological changes through which the colonised societies were brought
into the world economy.
● Britain and France made vast additions to their overseas territories in the late
nineteenth century. Belgium and Germany became new colonial powers.
● The US also became a colonial power in the late 1890s by taking over some colonies
earlier held by Spain.
Rinderpest, or the Cattle Plague
● In Africa, in the 1890s, a fast-spreading disease of cattle plague or rinderpest had a
terrifying impact on people’s livelihoods and the local economy.
● In this era of conquest even a disease affecting cattle reshaped the lives and
fortunes of thousands of people and their relations with the rest of the world.
● Historically, Africa had abundant land and a relatively small population. For
centuries, land and livestock sustained livelihoods and people rarely worked for a
wage.
● In the late nineteenth century, Europeans were attracted to Africa due to its vast
resources of land and minerals.
○ Europeans came to Africa hoping to establish plantations and mines to
produce crops and minerals for export to Europe.
○ But there was an unexpected problem – a shortage of labour willing to work
for wages.
● Rinderpest arrived in Africa in the late 1880s. It was carried by infected cattle
imported from British Asia to feed the Italian soldiers invading Eritrea in East Africa.
Entering Africa in the east, rinderpest moved west ‘like forest fire’, reaching Africa’s
Atlantic coast in 1892.
● It reached the Cape (Africa’s southernmost tip) five years later. Along the way
rinderpest killed 90 per cent of the cattle. The loss of cattle destroyed African
livelihoods.
● Planters, mine owners and colonial governments now successfully monopolised
what scarce cattle resources remained, to strengthen their power and to force
Africans into the labour market.
● Control over the scarce resource of cattle enabled European colonists to conquer
and subdue Africa.
Indentured Labour Migration from India

● Indentured labour migration from India also illustrates the two-sided nature of the
nineteenth-century world.
○ It was a world of faster economic growth as well as great misery, higher
incomes for some and poverty for others, technological advances in some
areas and new forms of coercion in others.
● In the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Indian and Chinese labourers
went to work on plantations, in mines, and in road and railway construction projects
around the world.
● In India, indentured labourers were hired under contracts which promised return
travel to India after they had worked five years on their employer’s plantation. Most
Indian indentured workers came from the present-day regions of eastern Uttar
Pradesh, Bihar, central India and the dry districts of Tamil Nadu.
● In the mid-nineteenth century these regions experienced many changes – cottage
industries declined, land rents rose, lands were cleared for mines and plantations.
○ All this affected the lives of the poor: they failed to pay their rents, became
deeply indebted and were forced to migrate in search of work.
● The main destinations of Indian indentured migrants were the Caribbean islands
(mainly Trinidad, Guyana and Surinam), Mauritius and Fiji.
○ Closer home, Tamil migrants went to Ceylon and Malaya.
○ Indentured workers were also recruited for tea plantations in Assam.
● Recruitment was done by agents engaged by employers and paid a small
commission.
○ Many migrants agreed to take up work hoping to escape poverty or
oppression in their home villages.
○ Agents also tempted the prospective migrants by providing false information
about final destinations, modes of travel, the nature of the work, and living
and working conditions.
○ Often migrants were not even told that they were to embark on a long sea
voyage. Sometimes agents even forcibly abducted less willing migrants.
● But workers discovered their own ways of surviving. Many of them escaped into the
wilds, though if caught they faced severe punishment.
○ Others developed new forms of individual and collective self-expression,
blending different cultural forms, old and new.
● In Trinidad the annual Muharram procession was transformed into a riotous carnival
called ‘Hosay’ (for Imam Hussain) in which workers of all races and religions joined.
● The protest religion of Rastafarianism (made famous by the Jamaican reggae star
Bob Marley) is also said to reflect social and cultural links with Indian migrants to
the Caribbean.
● ‘Chutney music’, popular in Trinidad and Guyana, is another creative contemporary
expression of the post-indenture experience.
● These forms of cultural fusion are part of the making of the global world, where
things from different places get mixed, lose their original characteristics and become
something entirely new.
● From the 1900s India’s nationalist leaders began opposing the system of
indentured labour migration as abusive and cruel. It was abolished in 1921.
● Yet for a number of decades afterwards, descendants of Indian indentured workers,
often thought of as ‘coolies’, remained an uneasy minority in the Caribbean islands.
● Some of Naipaul’s early novels capture their sense of loss and alienation.
Indian Entrepreneurs Abroad

● Growing food and other crops for the world market required capital. Large
plantations could borrow it from banks and markets. But small ones? Indian
financers
● Shikaripuri shroffs and Nattukottai Chettiars: They were amongst the many groups
of bankers and traders who financed export agriculture in Central and Southeast
Asia, using either their own funds or those borrowed from European banks.
● They had a sophisticated system to transfer money over large distances, and even
developed indigenous forms of corporate organisation. Indian traders and
moneylenders also followed European colonists into Africa.
● Hyderabadi Sindhi traders, however, ventured beyond European colonies. From the
1860s they established flourishing emporia at busy ports worldwide, selling local
and imported curios to tourists whose numbers were beginning to swell, thanks to
the development of safe and comfortable passenger vessels.
Indian Trade, Colonialism and the Global System

● Historically, fine cottons produced in India were exported to Europe. With
industrialization, British cotton manufacture began to expand, and industrialists
pressurized the government to restrict cotton imports and protect local industries.
● Tariffs were imposed on cloth imports into Britain. Consequently, the inflow of fine
Indian cotton began to decline.
● The figures again tell a dramatic story. While exports of manufactures declined
rapidly, export of raw materials increased equally fast. Between 1812 and 1871, the
share of raw cotton exports rose from 5 per cent to 35 per cent.
● Indigo used for dyeing cloth was another important export for many decades.
● Opium shipments to China grew rapidly from the 1820s to become for a while
India’s single largest export. Britain grew opium in India and exported it to China
and, with the money earned through this sale, it financed its tea and other imports
from China.
● Britain’s trade surplus in India also helped pay the so-called ‘home charges’ that
included private remittances home by British officials and traders, interest payments
on India’s external debt, and pensions of British officials in India.
The Inter-war Economy

● The First World War (1914-18) was mainly fought in Europe. But its impact was felt
around the world. It plunged the first half of the twentieth century into a crisis that
took over three decades to overcome.
● During this period the world experienced widespread economic and political
instability, and another catastrophic war.
Wartime Transformations
● The First World War was fought between the Allies – Britain, France and Russia (later
joined by the US); and the Central Powers – Germany, Austria-Hungary and Ottoman
Turkey. When the war began in August 1914, many governments thought it would
be over by Christmas.
● It lasted more than four years. The fighting involved the world’s leading industrial
nations which now harnessed the vast powers of modern industry to inflict the
greatest possible destruction on their enemies.
● Most of the killed and maimed were men of working age. These deaths and injuries
reduced the able-bodied workforce in Europe.
● With fewer numbers within the family, household incomes declined after the war.
● During the war, industries were restructured to produce war-related goods. Entire
societies were also reorganised for war – as men went to battle, women stepped in
to undertake jobs that earlier only men were expected to do.
● The war led to the snapping of economic links between some of the world’s largest
economic powers which were now fighting each other to pay for them. So Britain
borrowed large sums of money from US banks as well as the US public.
● Thus, the war transformed the US from being an international debtor to an
international creditor. In other words, at the war’s end, the US and its citizens
owned more overseas assets than foreign governments and citizens owned in the
US.
Post-war Recovery
● Post-war economic recovery proved difficult. Britain, which was the world’s leading
economy in the pre-war period, in particular faced a prolonged crisis.
● While Britain was preoccupied with war, industries had developed in India and
Japan.
○ After the war Britain found it difficult to recapture its earlier position of
dominance in the Indian market, and to compete with Japan
internationally.
○ Moreover, to finance war expenditures Britain had borrowed liberally from
the US.
○ This meant that at the end of the war Britain was burdened with huge
external debts.
● Many agricultural economies were also in crisis.
○ Before the war, eastern Europe was a major supplier of wheat in the world
market.
○ When this supply was disrupted during the war, wheat production in
Canada, America and Australia expanded dramatically.
● But once the war was over, production in eastern Europe revived and created a glut
in wheat output. Grain prices fell, rural incomes declined, and farmers fell deeper
into debt.
Rise of Mass Production and Consumption

● One important feature of the US economy of the 1920s was mass production.
● Pioneer of mass production was the car manufacturer Henry Ford. He adapted the
assembly line of a Chicago slaughterhouse to his new car plant in Detroit.
● He realised that the ‘assembly line’ method would allow a faster and cheaper way
of producing vehicles.
● This was a way of increasing the output per worker by speeding up the pace of
work.
● As a result, Henry Ford’s cars came off the assembly line at three-minute intervals, a
speed much faster than that achieved by previous methods. The TModel Ford was
the world’s first mass-produced car.
● Henry Ford recovered the high wage by repeatedly speeding up the production line
and forcing workers to work ever harder.
● Fordist industrial practices soon spread in the US. They were also widely copied in
Europe in the 1920s. Mass production lowered costs and prices of engineered
goods.
● Thanks to higher wages, more workers could now afford to purchase durable
consumer goods such as cars. Car production in the US rose from 2 million in 1919 to
more than 5 million in 1929.
● There was a spurt in the purchase of refrigerators, washing machines, radios,
gramophone players, all through a system of ‘hire purchase’ (i.e., on credit repaid in
weekly or monthly instalments). The demand for refrigerators, washing machines,
etc. was also fuelled by a boom in house construction and home ownership,
financed once again by loans.
● The housing and consumer boom of the 1920s created the basis of prosperity in the
US. Large investments in housing and household goods seemed to create a cycle of
higher employment and incomes, rising consumption demand, more investment,
and yet more employment and incomes.
The Great Depression

● The Great Depression began around 1929 and lasted till the mid 1930s. During this
period most parts of the world experienced catastrophic declines in production,
employment, incomes and trade. The exact timing and impact of the depression
varied across countries. But in general, agricultural regions and communities were
the worst affected.
● This was because the fall in agricultural prices was greater and more prolonged
than that in the prices of industrial goods. The depression was caused by a
combination of several factors.
○ First: agricultural overproduction remained a problem. This was made worse
by falling agricultural prices.
■ As prices slumped and agricultural incomes declined, farmers tried to
expand production and bring a larger volume of produce to the
market to maintain their overall income. This worsened the glut in
the market, pushing down prices even further. Farm produce rotted
for a lack of buyers.
○ The withdrawal of US loans affected much of the rest of the world.
■ In Europe it led to the failure of some major banks and the collapse
of currencies such as the British pound sterling.
■ In Latin America and elsewhere it intensified the slump in
agricultural and raw material prices.
■ The US attempt to protect its economy in the depression by doubling
import duties also dealt another severe blow to world trade. The US
was also the industrial country most severely affected by the
depression.
● With the fall in prices and the prospect of a depression, US banks had also slashed
domestic lending and called back loans. Farms could not sell their harvests,
households were ruined, and businesses collapsed.
● Faced with falling incomes, many households in the US could not repay what they
had borrowed, and were forced to give up their homes, cars and other consumer
durables.
● Ultimately, the US banking system itself collapsed. Unable to recover investments,
collect loans and repay depositors, thousands of banks went bankrupt and were
forced to close. The numbers are phenomenal: by 1933 over 4,000 banks had closed
and between 1929 and 1932 about 110, 000 companies had collapsed.
India and the Great Depression

● If we look at the impact of the depression on India we realise how integrated the
global economy had become by the early twentieth century.
● In the nineteenth century, colonial India had become an exporter of agricultural
goods and importer of manufactures. The depression immediately affected Indian
trade.
● India’s exports and imports nearly halved between 1928 and 1934. As international
prices crashed, prices in India also plunged.
○ Between 1928 and 1934, wheat prices in India fell by 50 per cent. Peasants
and farmers suffered more than urban dwellers.
○ Though agricultural prices fell sharply, the colonial government refused to
reduce revenue demands. Peasants producing for the world market were the
worst hit.
○ Consider the jute producers of Bengal.
■ They grew raw jute that was processed in factories for export in the
form of gunny bags. But as gunny exports collapsed, the price of raw
jute crashed more than 60 per cent. Peasants who borrowed in the
hope of better times or to increase output in the hope of higher
incomes faced ever lower prices, and fell deeper and deeper into
debt.
■ Across India, peasants’ indebtedness increased.
■ They used up their savings, mortgaged lands, and sold whatever
jewellery and precious metals they had to meet their expenses. In
these depression years, India became an exporter of precious
metals, notably gold.
● The famous economist John Maynard Keynes thought that Indian gold exports
promoted global economic recovery.
○ They certainly helped speed up Britain’s recovery, but did little for the
Indian peasant.
○ Rural India was thus seething with unrest when Mahatma Gandhi launched
the civil disobedience movement at the height of the depression in 1931.
● The depression proved less grim for urban India.
○ Because of falling prices, those with fixed incomes – say town-dwelling
landowners who received rents and middle-class salaried employees – now
found themselves better off. Everything cost less.
○ Industrial investment also grew as the government extended tariff
protection to industries, under the pressure of nationalist opinion.
Rebuilding a World Economy: The Post-war Era

● The Second World War was fought between the Axis powers (mainly Nazi Germany,
Japan and Italy) and the Allies (Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the US). It was a
war waged for six years on many fronts, in many places, over land, on sea, in the air.
● Death and destruction was enormous. At least 60 million people, or about 3
percent of the world’s 1939 population, are believed to have been killed, directly or
indirectly, as a result of the war. Millions more were injured.
● Many more civilians than soldiers died from war-related causes. Vast parts of
Europe and Asia were devastated, and several cities were destroyed by aerial
bombardment or relentless artillery attacks.
● The war caused an immense amount of economic devastation and social
disruption.
Post-war Settlement and the Bretton Woods Institutions

● Economists and politicians drew two key lessons from inter-war economic
experiences.
○ First, an industrial society based on mass production cannot be sustained
without mass consumption.
■ But to ensure mass consumption, there was a need for high and
stable incomes. Incomes could not be stable if employment was
unstable.
■ Thus, stable incomes also required steady, full employment.
■ But markets alone could not guarantee full employment. Therefore,
governments would have to step in to minimise fluctuations of price,
output and employment. Economic stability could be ensured only
through the intervention of the government.
○ The second lesson related to a country’s economic links with the outside
world. The goal of full employment could only be achieved if governments
had power to control flows of goods, capital and labour.
○ The main aim of the post-war international economic system was to
preserve economic stability and full employment in the industrial world.
○ Its framework was agreed upon at the United Nations Monetary and
Financial Conference held in July 1944 at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire,
USA.
● The IMF and the World Bank commenced financial operations in 1947.
○ Decision-making in these institutions is controlled by the Western industrial
powers.
○ The US has an effective right of veto over key IMF and World Bank decisions.
○ The international monetary system is the system linking national currencies
and the monetary system.
● The Bretton Woods system was based on fixed exchange rates.
○ National currencies, for example the Indian rupee, were pegged to the dollar
at a fixed exchange rate.
○ The dollar was anchored to gold at a fixed price of $35 per ounce of gold.
The Early Post-war Years

● The Bretton Woods system inaugurated an era of unprecedented growth of trade
and incomes for the Western industrial nations and Japan.
● World trade grew annually at over 8 per cent between 1950 and 1970 and incomes
at nearly 5 per cent.
● The growth was also mostly stable, without large fluctuations. For much of this
period the unemployment rate, for example, averaged less than 5 per cent in most
industrial countries.
Decolonization and Independence

● When the Second World War ended, large parts of the world were still under
European colonial rule. Over the next two decades most colonies in Asia and Africa
emerged as free, independent nations. They were, however, overburdened by
poverty and a lack of resources, and their economies and societies were
handicapped by long periods of colonial rule.
● The IMF and the World Bank were designed to meet the financial needs of the
industrial countries. They were not equipped to cope with the challenge of poverty
and lack of development in the former colonies. But as Europe and Japan rapidly
rebuilt their economies, they grew less dependent on the IMF and the World Bank.
● From the late 1950s the Bretton Woods institutions began to shift their attention
more towards developing countries. As colonies, many of the less developed
regions of the world had been part of Western empires.
● As newly independent countries facing urgent pressures to lift their populations out
of poverty, they came under the guidance of international agencies dominated by
the former colonial powers. Even after many years of decolonization, the former
colonial powers still controlled vital resources such as minerals and land in many of
their former colonies.
● At the same time, most developing countries did not benefit from the fast growth
the Western economies experienced in the 1950s and 1960s.
○ Therefore, they organised themselves as a group – the Group of 77 (or G-77)
– to demand a new international economic order (NIEO).
○ A system that would give them real control over their natural resources,
more development assistance, fairer prices for raw materials, and better
access for their manufactured goods in developed countries’ markets.
End of Bretton Woods and the Beginning of ‘Globalization’

● Despite years of stable and rapid growth, not all was well in this post-war world.
From the 1960s the rising costs of its overseas involvements weakened the US’s
finances and competitive strength. The US dollar now no longer commanded
confidence as the world’s principal currency.
○ It could not maintain its value in relation to gold.
○ Led to the collapse of the system of fixed exchange rates and the
introduction of a system of floating exchange rates.
● From the mid-1970s the international financial system also changed in important
ways.
● Earlier, developing countries could turn to international institutions for loans and
development assistance.
○ But now they were forced to borrow from Western commercial banks and
private lending institutions.
○ This led to periodic debt crises in the developing world, and lower incomes
and increased poverty, especially in Africa and Latin America.
● The industrial world was also hit by unemployment that began rising from the mid-
1970s and remained high until the early 1990s.
● From the late 1970s MNCs also began to shift production operations to low-wage
Asian countries.
● China had been cut off from the post-war world economy since its revolution in
1949.
● But new economic policies in China and the collapse of the Soviet Union and
Soviet-style communism in Eastern Europe brought many countries back into the
fold of the world economy.
● The relocation of industry to low-wage countries stimulated world trade and capital
flows.
● In the last two decades the world’s economic geography has been transformed as
countries such as India, China and Brazil have undergone rapid economic
transformation.
THE AGE OF INDUSTRIALIZATION

Before the Industrial Revolution
● We associate industrialization with the growth of the factory industry. When we
talk of industrial production we refer to factory production. When we talk of
industrial workers we mean factory workers. Histories of industrialization very often
begin with the setting up of the first factories. There is a problem with such ideas.
● Even before factories began to dot the landscape in England and Europe, there was
large-scale industrial production for an international market. This was not based on
factories. Many historians now refer to this phase of industrialization as proto-
industrialization.
● In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, merchants from the towns in Europe
began moving to the countryside, supplying money to peasants and artisans,
persuading them to produce for an international market.
● With the expansion of world trade and the acquisition of colonies in different parts
of the world, the demand for goods began growing.
● But merchants could not expand production within towns. This was because here
urban crafts and trade guilds were powerful. These were associations of producers
that trained craftspeople, maintained control over production, regulated
competition and prices, and restricted the entry of new people into the trade.
● Rulers granted different guilds the monopoly right to produce and trade in specific
products. It was therefore difficult for new merchants to set up business in towns.
So, they turned to the countryside.
● Within this system a close relationship developed between the town and the
countryside. Merchants were based in towns but the work was done mostly in the
countryside.
○ A merchant clothier in England purchased wool from a wool stapler, and
carried it to the spinners; the yarn (thread) that was spun was taken in
subsequent stages of production to weavers, fullers, and then to dyers. The
finishing was done in London before the export merchant sold the cloth in
the international market.
● London in fact came to be known as a finishing centre. This proto-industrial system
was thus part of a network of commercial exchanges. It was controlled by
merchants and the goods were produced by a vast number of producers working
within their family farms, not in factories.
● At each stage of production 20 to 25 workers were employed by each merchant. This
meant that each clothier was controlling hundreds of workers.
The Coming Up of the Factory

● The earliest factories in England came up by the 1730s. But it was only in the late
eighteenth century that the number of factories multiplied.
● The first symbol of the new era was cotton.
○ Its production boomed in the late nineteenth century.
○ In 1760 Britain was importing 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton to feed its
cotton industry.
○ By 1787 this import soared to 22 million pounds. This increase was linked to
a number of changes within the process of production.
○ A series of inventions in the eighteenth century increased the efficacy of
each step of the production process (carding, twisting and spinning, and
rolling).
○ They enhanced the output per worker, enabling each worker to produce
more, and they made possible the production of stronger threads and yarn.
○ Then Richard Arkwright created the cotton mill.
● Till this time, cloth production was spread all over the countryside and carried out
within village households. But now, the costly new machines could be purchased,
set up and maintained in the mill.
○ Within the mill all the processes were brought together under one roof and
management.
○ This allowed a more careful supervision over the production process, a watch
over quality, and the regulation of labour, all of which had been difficult to do
when production was in the countryside.
The Pace of Industrial Change

● First: The most dynamic industries in Britain were clearly cotton and metals.
Growing at a rapid pace, cotton was the leading sector in the first phase of
industrialization up to the 1840s. After that the iron and steel industry led the way.
○ With the expansion of railways, in England from the 1840s and in the
colonies from the 1860s, the demand for iron and steel increased rapidly.
○ By 1873 Britain was exporting iron and steel worth about £ 77 million, double
the value of its cotton export.
● Second: the new industries could not easily displace traditional industries.
○ Even at the end of the nineteenth century, less than 20 per cent of the total
workforce was employed in technologically advanced industrial sectors.
○ Textiles was a dynamic sector, but a large portion of the output was
produced not within factories, but outside, within domestic units.
● Third: the pace of change in the ‘traditional’ industries was not set by steam-
powered cotton or metal industries, but they did not remain entirely stagnant either.
○ Seemingly ordinary and small innovations were the basis of growth in many
non-mechanized sectors such as food processing, building, pottery, glass
work, tanning, furniture making, and production of implements.
● Fourth: technological changes occurred slowly.
○ They did not spread dramatically across the industrial landscape.
○ New technology was expensive and merchants and industrialists were
cautious about using it.
○ The machines often broke down and repair was costly.
○ They were not as effective as their inventors and manufacturers claimed.
■ Eg: James Watt improved the steam engine produced by Newcomen
and patented the new engine in 1781.
■ His industrialist friend Mathew Boulton manufactured the new model.
But for years he could find no buyers.
● At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were no more than 321 steam
engines all over England. Of these, 80 were in cotton industries, nine in wool
industries, and the rest in mining, canal works and iron works.
● Steam engines were not used in any of the other industries till much later in the
century.
○ Even the most powerful new technology that enhanced the productivity of
the labour manifold was slow to be accepted by industrialists.
Hand Labour and Steam Power
● In Victorian Britain there was no shortage of human labour. Poor peasants and
vagrants moved to the cities in large numbers in search of jobs, waiting for work.
When there is plenty of labour, wages are low.
● So, industrialists had no problem of labour shortage or high wage costs. They did not
want to introduce machines that got rid of human labour and required large capital
investment.
● In many industries the demand for labour was seasonal.
○ Gas works and breweries were especially busy through the cold months.
○ Bookbinders and printers, catering to Christmas demand, too needed extra
hands before December.
○ At the waterfront, winter was the time that ships were repaired and spruced
up.
○ In all such industries where production fluctuated with the season,
industrialists usually preferred hand labour, employing workers for the
season.
● The upper classes – the aristocrats and the bourgeoisie – preferred things produced
by hand. Handmade products came to symbolise refinement and class.
○ They were better finished, individually produced, and carefully designed.
○ Machinemade goods were for export to the colonies.
● In countries with labour shortage, industrialists were keen on using mechanical
power so that the need for human labour can be minimised. This was the case in
nineteenth-century America. Britain, however, had no problem hiring human hands.
Life of the Workers

● The abundance of labour in the market affected the lives of workers. As news of
possible jobs travelled to the countryside, hundreds tramped to the cities.
● The actual possibility of getting a job depended on existing networks of friendship
and kin relations.
○ If you had a relative or a friend in a factory, you were more likely to get a job
quickly.
○ But not everyone had social connections. Many job seekers had to wait
weeks, spending nights under bridges or in night shelters.
● Some stayed in Night Refuges that were set up by private individuals; others went to
the Casual Wards maintained by the Poor Law authorities. Seasonality of work in
many industries meant prolonged periods without work.
○ After the busy season was over, the poor were on the streets again. Some
returned to the countryside after the winter, when the demand for labour in
the rural areas opened up in places.
○ But most looked for odd jobs, which till the mid-nineteenth century were
difficult to find.
● Wages increased somewhat in the early nineteenth century. The average figures
hide the variations between trades and the fluctuations from year to year.
○ When prices rose sharply during the prolonged Napoleonic War, the real
value of wages fell significantly, since the same wages could now buy fewer
things.
○ The income of workers depended not on the wage rate alone. What was
also critical was the period of employment: the number of days of work
determined the average daily income of the workers.
● At the best of times till the mid-nineteenth century, about 10 percent of the urban
population were extremely poor.
○ In periods of economic slump, like the 1830s, the proportion of unemployed
went up to anything between 35 and 75 per cent in different regions.
● After the 1840s, building activity intensified in the cities, opening up greater
opportunities of employment.
○ Roads were widened, new railway stations came up, railway lines were
extended, tunnels dug, drainage and sewers laid, rivers embanked.
○ The number of workers employed in the transport industry doubled in the
1840s, and doubled again in the subsequent 30 years.
Industrialization in the Colonies

The Age of Indian Textiles
● Before the age of machine industries, silk and cotton goods from India dominated
the international market in textiles. Coarser cottons were produced in many
countries, but the finer varieties often came from India.
○ Armenian and Persian merchants took the goods from Punjab to
Afghanistan, eastern Persia and Central Asia.
○ Bales of fine textiles were carried on camel back via the north-west frontier,
through mountain passes and across deserts. A vibrant sea trade operated
through the main pre-colonial ports.
● Surat on the Gujarat coast connected India to the Gulf and Red Sea Ports;
● Masulipatam on the Coromandel coast and Hoogly in Bengal had trade links with
Southeast Asian ports.
● A variety of Indian merchants and bankers were involved in this network of export
trade – financing production, carrying goods and supplying exporters.
○ Supply merchants linked the port towns to the inland regions.
■ They gave advances to weavers, procured the woven cloth from
weaving villages, and carried the supply to the ports.
○ At the port, the big shippers and export merchants had brokers who
negotiated the price and bought goods from the supply merchants operating
inland.
○ By the 1750s this network, controlled by Indian merchants, was breaking
down.
■ The European companies gradually gained power – first securing a
variety of concessions from local courts, then the monopoly rights to
trade.
● This resulted in a decline of the old ports of Surat and Hoogly through which local
merchants had operated.
○ Exports from these ports fell dramatically, the credit that had financed the
earlier trade began drying up, and the local bankers slowly went bankrupt.
○ In the last years of the seventeenth century, the gross value of trade that
passed through Surat had been Rs 16 million. By the 1740s it had slumped
to Rs 3 million.
● While Surat and Hoogly decayed, Bombay and Calcutta grew.
○ This shift from the old ports to the new ones was an indicator of the growth
of colonial power.
○ Trade through the new ports came to be controlled by European companies,
and was carried in European ships.
● While many of the old trading houses collapsed, those that wanted to survive had to
now operate within a network shaped by European trading companies.
What Happened to Weavers?

● The consolidation of East India Company power after the 1760s did not initially lead
to a decline in textile exports from India.
● British cotton industries had not yet expanded and Indian fine textiles were in great
demand in Europe. So the company was keen on expanding textile exports from
India.
● However, once the East India Company established political power, it could assert a
monopoly right to trade.
○ It proceeded to develop a system of management and control that would
eliminate competition, control costs, and ensure regular supplies of cotton
and silk goods.
● This it did through a series of steps.
○ First: the Company tried to eliminate the existing traders and brokers
connected with the cloth trade, and establish a more direct control over the
weaver.
■ It appointed a paid servant called the gomastha to supervise weavers,
collect supplies, and examine the quality of cloth.
○ Second: it prevented Company weavers from dealing with other buyers.
■ One way of doing this was through the system of advances.
● Once an order was placed, the weavers were given loans to
purchase the raw material for their production.
● Those who took loans had to hand over the cloth they
produced to the gomastha. They could not take it to any other
trader.
● Soon, in many weaving villages there were reports of clashes between weavers and
gomasthas.
○ Earlier supply merchants had very often lived within the weaving villages,
and had a close relationship with the weavers, looking after their needs and
helping them in times of crisis.
○ The new gomasthas were outsiders, with no long-term social link with the
village. They acted arrogantly, marched into villages with sepoys and peons,
and punished weavers for delays in supply – often beating and flogging
them.
○ The weavers lost the space to bargain for prices and sell to different buyers:
the price they received from the Company was miserably low and the loans
they had accepted tied them to the Company.
Manchester Comes to India

● In 1772, Henry Patullo, a Company official, had ventured to say that the demand for
Indian textiles could never reduce, since no other nation produced goods of the
same quality.
○ Yet by the beginning of the nineteenth century we see the beginning of a
long decline of textile exports from India.
○ In 1811-12 piece-goods accounted for 33 per cent of India’s exports; by 1850-
51 it was no more than 3 per cent.
● Cotton weavers in India thus faced two problems at the same time: their export
market collapsed, and the local market shrank, being glutted with Manchester
imports.
○ Produced by machines at lower costs, the imported cotton goods were so
cheap that weavers could not easily compete with them.
■ By the 1850s, reports from most weaving regions of India narrated
stories of decline and desolation.
○ By the 1860s, weavers faced a new problem.
■ They could not get sufficient supply of raw cotton of good quality.
■ When the American Civil War broke out and cotton supplies from the
US were cut off, Britain turned to India.
■ As raw cotton exports from India increased, the price of raw cotton
shot up.
■ Weavers in India were starved of supplies and forced to buy raw
cotton at exorbitant prices. In this situation weaving could not pay.
○ Then, by the end of the nineteenth century, weavers and other craftspeople
faced yet another problem.
■ Factories in India began production, flooding the market with
machine- goods.
Factories Come Up
● The first cotton mill in Bombay came up in 1854 and it went into production two
years later. By 1862 four mills were at work with 94,000 spindles and 2,150 looms.
● Around the same time jute mills came up in Bengal, the first being set up in 1855
and another one seven years later, in 1862.
● In north India, the Elgin Mill was started in Kanpur in the 1860s, and a year later the
first cotton mill of Ahmedabad was set up.
● By 1874, the first spinning and weaving mill of Madras began production.
The Early Entrepreneurs
● The history of many business groups goes back to trade with China. From the late
eighteenth century, the British in India began exporting opium to China and took
tea from China to England.
● Many Indians became junior players in this trade, providing finance, procuring
supplies, and shipping consignments.
● Having earned through trade, some of these businessmen had visions of developing
industrial enterprises in India.
○ In Bengal, Dwarkanath Tagore made his fortune in the China trade before he
turned to industrial investment, setting up six joint-stock companies in the
1830s and 1840s.
○ Tagore’s enterprises sank along with those of others in the wider business
crises of the 1840s, but later in the nineteenth century many of the China
traders became successful industrialists.
○ In Bombay, Parsis like Dinshaw Petit and Jamsetjee Nusserwanjee Tata who
built huge industrial empires in India, accumulated their initial wealth partly
from exports to China, and partly from raw cotton shipments to England.
○ Seth Hukumchand, a Marwari businessman who set up the first Indian jute
mill in Calcutta in 1917, also traded with China. So did the father as well as
grandfather of the famous industrialist G.D. Birla.
● As colonial control over Indian trade tightened, the space within which Indian
merchants could function became increasingly limited.
○ They were barred from trading with Europe in manufactured goods, and had
to export mostly raw materials and food grains – raw cotton, opium, wheat
and indigo – required by the British.
○ They were also gradually edged out of the shipping business.
○ Till the First World War, European Managing Agencies in fact controlled a
large sector of Indian industries.
○ Three of the biggest ones were Bird Heiglers & Co., Andrew Yule, and Jardine
Skinner & Co.
■ These Agencies mobilised capital, set up joint-stock companies and
managed them.
■ In most instances Indian financiers provided the capital while the
European Agencies made all investment and business decisions.
■ The European merchant-industrialists had their own chambers of
commerce which Indian businessmen were not allowed to join.
Where Did the Workers Come From?

● Factories needed workers. With the expansion of factories, this demand increased.
In 1901, there were 584,000 workers in Indian factories. By 1946 2,436, 000.
● In most industrial regions workers came from the districts around. Peasants and
artisans who found no work in the village went to the industrial centres in search of
work.
○ Over 50 per cent of workers in the Bombay cotton industries in 1911 came
from the neighbouring district of Ratnagiri, while the mills of Kanpur got
most of their textile hands from the villages within the district of Kanpur.
● Getting jobs was always difficult, even when mills multiplied and the demand for
workers increased.
○ The numbers seeking work were always more than the jobs available. Entry
into the mills was also restricted. Industrialists usually employed a jobber to
get new recruits.
○ Very often the jobber was an old and trusted worker. He got people from his
village, ensured them jobs, helped them settle in the city and provided them
money in times of crisis.
○ The jobber became a person with some authority and power. He began
demanding money and gifts for his favour and controlling the lives of
workers.
The Peculiarities of Industrial Growth

● European Managing Agencies, which dominated industrial production in India, were
interested in certain kinds of products. They established tea and coffee
plantations, acquiring land at cheap rates from the colonial government; and they
invested in mining, indigo and jute.
○ Most of these were products required primarily for export trade and not for
sale in India.
● When Indian businessmen began setting up industries in the late nineteenth
century, they avoided competing with Manchester goods in the Indian market.
○ Since yarn was not an important part of British imports into India, the early
cotton mills in India produced coarse cotton yarn (thread) rather than
fabric. When yarn was imported it was only of the superior variety.
■ The yarn produced in Indian spinning mills was used by handloom
weavers in India or exported to China.
● By the first decade of the twentieth century a series of changes affected the pattern
of industrialization.
○ As the swadeshi movement gathered momentum, nationalists mobilized
people to boycott foreign cloth.
○ Industrial groups organized themselves to protect their collective interests,
pressurizing the government to increase tariff protection and grant other
concessions.
○ From 1906, the export of Indian yarn to China declined since produce from
Chinese and Japanese mills flooded the Chinese market.
■ So, industrialists in India began shifting from yarn to cloth
production. Cotton piece goods production in India doubled between
1900 and 1912. Yet, till the First World War, industrial growth was
slow.
● The war created a dramatically new situation.
○ With British mills busy with war production to meet the needs of the army,
Manchester imports into India declined.
○ Suddenly, Indian mills had a vast home market to supply. As the war
prolonged, Indian factories were called upon to supply war needs: jute bags,
cloth for army uniforms, tents and leather boots, horse and mule saddles and
a host of other items.
○ New factories were set up and old ones ran multiple shifts. Many new
workers were employed and everyone was made to work longer hours.
○ Over the war years industrial production boomed. After the war,
Manchester could never recapture its old position in the Indian market.
● Unable to modernize and compete with the US, Germany and Japan, the economy
of Britain crumbled after the war.
○ Cotton production collapsed and exports of cotton cloth from Britain fell
dramatically.
○ Within the colonies, local industrialists gradually consolidated their position,
substituting foreign manufactures and capturing the home market.
Small-scale Industries Predominate

● While factory industries grew steadily after the war, large industries formed only a
small segment of the economy. Most of them – about 67 per cent in 1911 – were
located in Bengal and Bombay.
○ Over the rest of the country, small-scale production continued to
predominate.
● Only a small proportion of the total industrial labour force worked in registered
factories: 5 per cent in 1911 and 10 per cent in 1931.
○ The rest worked in small workshops and household units, often located in
alleys and bylanes, invisible to the passer-by.
○ This is true even in the case of the handloom sector. While cheap machine-
made thread wiped out the spinning industry in the nineteenth century, the
weavers survived, despite problems.
● In the twentieth century, handloom cloth production expanded steadily: almost
trebling between 1900 and 1940.
○ This was partly because of technological changes.
○ Handicrafts people adopt new technology if that helps them improve
production without excessively pushing up costs. So, by the second decade of
the twentieth century we find weavers using looms with a fly shuttle.
● Weavers and other craftspeople who continued to expand production through the
twentieth century, did not necessarily prosper. They lived hard lives and worked long
hours.
● Very often the entire household – including all the women and children – had to
work at various stages of the production process. But they were not simply remnants
of past times in the age of factories. Their life and labour was integral to the process
of industrialization.
Market for Goods
● British manufacturers attempted to take over the Indian market, and Indian weavers
and craftsmen, traders and industrialists resisted colonial controls, demanded tariff
protection, created their own spaces, and tried to extend the market for their
produce.
● But when new products are produced people have to be persuaded to buy them.
○ One way in which new consumers are created is through advertisements.
○ They try to shape the minds of people and create new needs.
○ From the very beginning of the industrial age, advertisements have played a
part in expanding the markets for products, and in shaping a new consumer
culture.
○ Images of Indian gods and goddesses regularly appeared on these labels. It
was as if the association with gods gave divine approval to the goods being
sold.
■ The imprinted image of Krishna or Saraswati was also intended to
make the manufacture from a foreign land appear somewhat familiar
to Indian people.
○ By the late nineteenth century, manufacturers were printing calendars to
popularise their products.
○ Unlike newspapers and magazines, calendars were used even by people who
could not read.
■ They were hung in tea shops and in poor people’s homes just as much
as in offices and middle-class apartments.
■ And those who hung the calendars had to see the advertisements.In
these calendars, we see the figures of gods being used to sell new
products. Figures of important personages, of emperors and nawabs,
adorned advertisements and calendars.
■ The message: if you respect the royal figure, then respect this
product; when the product was being used by kings, or produced
under royal command, its quality could not be questioned.
Conclusion
● Clearly, the age of industries has meant major technological changes, growth of
factories, and the making of a new industrial labour force. However, hand
technology and small-scale production remained an important part of the industrial
landscape.
PRINT CULTURE AND THE MODERN WORLD

The First Printed Books
● The earliest kind of print technology was developed in China, Japan and Korea. This
was a system of hand printing. From AD 594 onwards, books in China were printed
by rubbing paper against the inked surface of woodblocks.
● As both sides of the thin, porous sheet could not be printed, the traditional Chinese
‘accordion book’ was folded and stitched at the side. Superbly skilled craftsmen
could duplicate, with remarkable accuracy, the beauty of calligraphy.
● By the seventeenth century, as urban culture bloomed in China, the uses of print
diversified.
○ Print was no longer used just by scholar officials. Merchants used print in
their everyday life, as they collected trade information. Reading increasingly
became a leisure activity.
○ The new readership preferred fictional narratives, poetry, autobiographies,
anthologies of literary masterpieces, and romantic plays. Rich women began
to read, and many women began publishing their poetry and plays. Wives of
scholar-officials published their works and courtesans wrote about their lives.
Print in Japan
● Buddhist missionaries from China introduced hand-printing technology into Japan
around AD 768-770. The oldest Japanese book, printed in AD 868, is the Buddhist
Diamond Sutra, containing six sheets of text and woodcut illustrations. Pictures were
printed on textiles, playing cards and paper money.
● In medieval Japan, poets and prose writers were regularly published, and books
were cheap and abundant.
● Printing of visual material led to interesting publishing practices. In the late
eighteenth century, in the flourishing urban circles at Edo (later to be known as
Tokyo), illustrated collections of paintings depicted an elegant urban culture,
involving artists, courtesans, and teahouse gatherings.
● Libraries and bookstores were packed with hand-printed material of various types –
books on women, musical instruments, calculations, tea ceremony, flower
arrangements, proper etiquette, cooking and famous places.
Print Comes to Europe

● In the eleventh century, Chinese paper reached Europe via the silk route. Paper
made possible the production of manuscripts, carefully written by scribes. Then, in
1295, Marco Polo, a great explorer, returned to Italy after many years of exploration
in China.
● China already had the technology of woodblock printing.
○ Marco Polo brought this knowledge back with him. Italians began producing
books with woodblocks, and soon the technology spread to other parts of
Europe.
● Luxury editions were still handwritten on very expensive vellum, meant for
aristocratic circles and rich monastic libraries which scoffed at printed books as
cheap vulgarities. Merchants and students in the university towns bought the
cheaper printed copies.
● As the demand for books increased, booksellers all over Europe began exporting
books to many different countries. Book fairs were held at different places.
Production of handwritten manuscripts was also organised in new ways to meet the
expanded demand.
● Scribes or skilled handwriters were no longer solely employed by wealthy or
influential patrons but increasingly by booksellers as well. More than 50 scribes
often worked for one bookseller.
● There was clearly a great need for even quicker and cheaper reproduction of texts.
○ The breakthrough occurred at Strasbourg, Germany, where Johann
Gutenberg developed the first-known printing press in the 1430s.
Gutenberg and the Printing Press

● Gutenberg learnt the art of polishing stones, became a master goldsmith, and also
acquired the expertise to create lead moulds used for making trinkets.
● Drawing on this knowledge, Gutenberg adapted existing technology to design his
innovation.
○ The olive press provided the model for the printing press, and moulds were
used for casting the metal types for the letters of the alphabet.
● By 1448, Gutenberg perfected the system. The first book he printed was the Bible.
○ About 180 copies were printed and it took three years to produce them.
○ By the standards of the time this was fast production. The new technology
did not entirely displace the existing art of producing books by hand.
● Printed books at first closely resembled the written manuscripts in appearance and
layout. The metal letters imitated the ornamental handwritten styles. Borders were
illuminated by hand with foliage and other patterns, and illustrations were painted.
● In the books printed for the rich, space for decoration was kept blank on the printed
page.
● Each purchaser could choose the design and decide on the painting school that
would do the illustrations.
The Print Revolution and Its Impact

What was the print revolution?
● It was not just a development, a new way of producing books; it transformed the
lives of people, changing their relationship to information and knowledge, and
with institutions and authorities.
● It influenced popular perceptions and opened up new ways of looking at things. Let
us explore some of these changes.
A New Reading Public

● With the printing press, a new reading public emerged. Printing reduced the cost of
books. The time and labour required to produce each book came down, and
multiple copies could be produced with greater ease. Books flooded the market,
reaching out to an ever-growing readership.
● Earlier, reading was restricted to the elites.
● Common people lived in a world of oral culture. They heard sacred texts read out,
ballads recited, and folk tales narrated.
○ Knowledge was transferred orally. People collectively heard a story, or saw a
performance.
● Before the age of print, books were not only expensive but they could not be
produced in sufficient numbers.
● Oral culture thus entered print and printed material was orally transmitted. The line
that separated the oral and reading cultures became blurred. And the hearing public
and reading public became intermingled.
Religious Debates and the Fear of Print

● Print created the possibility of wide circulation of ideas, and introduced a new
world of debate and discussion. Even those who disagreed with established
authorities could now print and circulate their ideas.
● Through the printed message, they could persuade people to think differently, and
move them to action. This had significance in different spheres of life. Not everyone
welcomed the printed book, and those who did also had fears about it.
● Many were apprehensive of the effects that the easier access to the printed word
and the wider circulation of books could have on people’s minds. It was feared that
if there was no control over what was printed and read then rebellious and
irreligious thoughts might spread.
● If that happened the authority of ‘valuable’ literature would be destroyed.
Expressed by religious authorities and monarchs, as well as many writers and artists,
this anxiety was the basis of widespread criticism of the new printed literature that
had begun to circulate.
● In 1517, the religious reformer Martin Luther wrote Ninety-Five Theses criticising
many of the practices and rituals of the Roman Catholic Church. A printed copy of
this was posted on a church door in Wittenberg. It challenged the Church to debate
his ideas.
● This led to a division within the Church and to the beginning of the Protestant
Reformation. Luther’s translation of the New Testament sold 5,000 copies within a
few weeks and a second edition appeared within three months.
● Deeply grateful to print, Luther said, ‘Printing is the ultimate gift of God and the
greatest one.’ Several scholars, in fact, think that print brought about a new
intellectual atmosphere and helped spread the new ideas that led to the
Reformation.
Print and Dissent

● Print and popular religious literature stimulated many distinctive individual
interpretations of faith even among little-educated working people.
● In the sixteenth century, Menocchio, a miller in Italy, began to read books that were
available in his locality.
○ He reinterpreted the message of the Bible and formulated a view of God and
Creation that enraged the Roman Catholic Church.
○ When the Roman Church began its inquisition to repress heretical ideas,
Menocchio was hauled up twice and ultimately executed.
● The Roman Church, troubled by such effects of popular readings and questionings of
faith, imposed severe controls over publishers and booksellers and began to
maintain an Index of Prohibited Books from 1558.
The Reading Mania

● Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries literacy rates went up in most
parts of Europe. Churches of different denominations set up schools in villages,
carrying literacy to peasants and artisans.
● By the end of the eighteenth century, in some parts of Europe literacy rates were as
high as 60 to 80 per cent. As literacy and schools spread in European countries,
there was a virtual reading mania. People wanted books to read and printers
produced books in ever increasing numbers.
● New forms of popular literature appeared in print, targeting new audiences.
○ Booksellers employed pedlars who roamed around villages, carrying little
books for sale.
○ There were almanacs or ritual calendars, along with ballads and folktales.
○ But other forms of reading matter, largely for entertainment, began to reach
ordinary readers as well.
● In England, penny chapbooks were carried by petty pedlars known as chapmen, and
sold for a penny, so that even the poor could buy them.
● In France, were the ‘Bibliotheque Bleue’, which were low-priced small books
printed on poor quality paper, and bound in cheap blue covers.
● Then there were the romances, printed on four to six pages, and the more
substantial ‘histories’ which were stories about the past. Books were of various
sizes, serving many different purposes and interests.
● Similarly, the ideas of scientists and philosophers now became more accessible to
the common people. Ancient and medieval scientific texts were compiled and
published, and maps and scientific diagrams were widely printed.
● When scientists like Isaac Newton began to publish their discoveries, they could
influence a much wider circle of scientifically minded readers. The writings of
thinkers such as Thomas Paine, Voltaire and Jean Jacques Rousseau were also
widely printed and read. Thus, their ideas about science, reason and rationality
found their way into popular literature.
‘Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the world!’

● By the mid-eighteenth century, there was a common conviction that books were a
means of spreading progress and enlightenment.
○ Many believed that books could change the world, liberate society from
despotism and tyranny, and herald a time when reason and intellect would
rule.
● Louise-Sebastien Mercier, a novelist in eighteenth-century France, declared: ‘The
printing press is the most powerful engine of progress and public opinion is the force
that will sweep despotism away.’
○ Convinced of the power of print in bringing enlightenment and destroying the
basis of despotism, Mercier proclaimed: ‘Tremble, therefore, tyrants of the
world! Tremble before the virtual writer!’
Print Culture and the French Revolution

● Many historians have argued that print culture created the conditions within which
the French Revolution occurred.
○ Print popularised the ideas of the Enlightenment thinkers. Collectively, their
writings provided a critical commentary on tradition, superstition and
despotism.
■ They argued for the rule of reason rather than custom, and
demanded that everything be judged through the application of
reason and rationality.
■ They attacked the sacred authority of the Church and the despotic
power of the state, thus eroding the legitimacy of a social order
based on tradition.
■ The writings of Voltaire and Rousseau were read widely; and those
who read these books saw the world through new eyes, eyes that
were questioning, critical and rational.
● There can be no doubt that print helps the spread of ideas. If they read the ideas of
Voltaire and Rousseau, they were also exposed to monarchical and Church
propaganda. They were not influenced directly by everything they read or saw.
○ They accepted some ideas and rejected others. They interpreted things their
own way. Print did not directly shape their minds, but it did open up the
possibility of thinking differently.
The Nineteenth Century

Children, Women and Workers
● As primary education became compulsory from the late nineteenth century,
children became an important category of readers. Production of school textbooks
became critical for the publishing industry.
● A children’s press, devoted to literature for children alone, was set up in France in
1857. This press published new works as well as old fairy tales and folktales.
● The Grimm Brothers in Germany spent years compiling traditional folk tales
gathered from peasants.
○ What they collected was edited before the stories were published in a
collection in 1812.
○ Anything that was considered unsuitable for children or would appear vulgar
to the elites, was not included in the published version. Rural folk tales thus
acquired a new form.
● In this way, print recorded old tales but also changed them.
● Women became important as readers as well as writers. Penny magazines were
especially meant for women, as were manuals teaching proper behaviour and
housekeeping.
● When novels began to be written in the nineteenth century, women were seen as
important readers. Some of the best known novelists were women: Jane Austen, the
Bronte sisters, George Eliot.
○ Their writings became important in defining a new type of woman: a person
with will, strength of personality, determination and the power to think.
Further Innovations
● By the late eighteenth century, the press came to be made out of metal. Through
the nineteenth century, there were a series of further innovations in printing
technology. By the mid-nineteenth century, Richard M. Hoe of New York had
perfected the power-driven cylindrical press.
○ This was capable of printing 8,000 sheets per hour. This press was
particularly useful for printing newspapers.
● In the late nineteenth century, the offset press was developed which could print up
to six colours at a time.
● From the turn of the twentieth century, electrically operated presses accelerated
printing operations.
● A series of other developments followed. Methods of feeding paper improved, the
quality of plates became better, automatic paper reels and photoelectric controls of
the colour register were introduced.
● The accumulation of several individual mechanical improvements transformed the
appearance of printed texts.
India and the World of Print

Manuscripts Before the Age of Print
● India had a very rich and old tradition of handwritten manuscripts – in Sanskrit,
Arabic, Persian, as well as in various vernacular languages. Manuscripts were copied
on palm leaves or on handmade paper.
● Pages were sometimes beautifully illustrated. They would be either pressed
between wooden covers or sewn together to ensure preservation. Manuscripts
continued to be produced till well after the introduction of print, down to the late
nineteenth century.
● Manuscripts, however, were highly expensive and fragile. They had to be handled
carefully, and they could not be read easily as the script was written in different
styles.
Print Comes to India
● The printing press first came to Goa with Portuguese missionaries in the mid-
sixteenth century.
○ Jesuit priests learnt Konkani and printed several tracts.
○ By 1674, about 50 books had been printed in Konkani and in Kanara
languages.
○ Catholic priests printed the first Tamil book in 1579 at Cochin, and in 1713
the first Malayalam book was printed by them.
● By 1710, Dutch Protestant missionaries had printed 32 Tamil texts, many of them
translations of older works.
● The English language press did not grow in India till quite late even though the
English East India Company began to import presses from the late seventeenth
century.
Religious Reform and Public Debates

● From the early nineteenth century, there were intense debates around religious
issues. Different groups confronted the changes happening within colonial society in
different ways, and offered a variety of new interpretations of the beliefs of different
religions.
● Some criticised existing practices and campaigned for reform, while others
countered the arguments of reformers. These debates were carried out in public
and in print. Printed tracts and newspapers not only spread the new ideas, but they
shaped the nature of the debate.
● A wider public could now participate in these public discussions and express their
views. New ideas emerged through these clashes of opinions.
● In north India, the ulama were deeply anxious about the collapse of Muslim
dynasties. They feared that colonial rulers would encourage conversion, change the
Muslim personal laws.
○ To counter this, they used cheap lithographic presses, published Persian and
Urdu translations of holy scriptures, and printed religious newspapers and
tracts.
○ The Deoband Seminary, founded in 1867, published thousands upon
thousands of fatwas telling Muslim readers how to conduct themselves in
their everyday lives, and explaining the meanings of Islamic doctrines.
○ All through the nineteenth century, a number of Muslim sects and
seminaries appeared, each with a different interpretation of faith, each keen
on enlarging its following and countering the influence of its opponents. Urdu
print helped them conduct these battles in public.
● Religious texts, therefore, reached a very wide circle of people, encouraging
discussions, debates and controversies within and among different religions.
● Print did not only stimulate the publication of conflicting opinions amongst
communities, but it also connected communities and people in different parts of
India. Newspapers conveyed news from one place to another, creating pan-Indian
identities.
New Forms of Publication

● Printing created an appetite for new kinds of writing.
○ As more and more people could now read, they wanted to see their own
lives, experiences, emotions and relationships reflected in what they read.
○ The novel, a literary firm which had developed in Europe, ideally catered to
this need. It soon acquired distinctively Indian forms and styles.
○ For readers, it opened up new worlds of experience, and gave a vivid sense
of the diversity of human lives.
● Other new literary forms also entered the world of reading – lyrics, short stories,
essays about social and political matters.
○ In different ways, they reinforced the new emphasis on human lives and
intimate feelings, about the political and social rules that shaped such things.
● By the 1870s, caricatures and cartoons were being published in journals and
newspapers, commenting on social and political issues.
○ Some caricatures ridiculed the educated Indians’ fascination with Western
tastes and clothes, while others expressed the fear of social change.
○ There were imperial caricatures lampooning nationalists, as well as
nationalist cartoons criticising imperial rule.
Women and Print

● Lives and feelings of women began to be written in particularly vivid and intense
ways. Women’s reading, therefore, increased enormously in middle-class homes.
○ Liberal husbands and fathers began educating their womenfolk at home, and
sent them to schools when women’s schools were set up in the cities and
towns after the mid-nineteenth century.
○ Many journals began carrying writings by women, and explained why
women should be educated.
○ They also carried a syllabus and attached suitable reading matter which
could be used for home-based schooling. But not all families were liberal.
○ Conservative Hindus believed that a literate girl would be widowed and
Muslims feared that educated women would be corrupted by reading Urdu
romances.
○ Sometimes, rebel women defied such prohibition.
■ In East Bengal, in the early nineteenth century, Rashsundari Debi, a
young married girl in a very orthodox household, learnt to read in the
secrecy of her kitchen. Later, she wrote her autobiography Amar
Jiban which was published in 1876. It was the first full-length
autobiography published in the Bengali language.
○ In Punjab, too, a similar folk literature was widely printed from the early
twentieth century. Ram Chaddha published the fast-selling Istri Dharm
Vichar to teach women how to be obedient wives.
○ The Khalsa Tract Society published cheap booklets with a similar message.
Many of these were in the form of dialogues about the qualities of a good
woman.
○ In Bengal, an entire area in central Calcutta – the Battala – was devoted to
the printing of popular books.
■ Here you could buy cheap editions of religious tracts and scriptures,
as well as literature that was considered obscene and scandalous.
■ By the late nineteenth century, a lot of these books were being
profusely illustrated with woodcuts and coloured lithographs.
Pedlars took the Battala publications to homes, enabling women to
read them in their leisure time.
Print and the Poor People

● Very cheap small books were brought to markets in nineteenth-century Madras
towns and sold at crossroads, allowing poor people travelling to markets to buy
them. Public libraries were set up from the early twentieth century, expanding the
access to books.
● These libraries were located mostly in cities and towns, and at times in prosperous
villages. For rich local patrons, setting up a library was a way of acquiring prestige.
● From the late nineteenth century, issues of caste discrimination began to be written
about in many printed tracts and essays. Jyotiba Phule, the Maratha pioneer of ‘low
caste’ protest movements, wrote about the injustices of the caste system in his
Gulamgiri (1871).
● In the twentieth century, B.R. Ambedkar in Maharashtra and E.V. Ramaswamy
Naicker in Madras, wrote powerfully on caste and their writings were read by
people all over India.
● Local protest movements and sects also created a lot of popular journals and tracts
criticising ancient scriptures and envisioning a new and just future.
Print and Censorship

● By the 1820s, the Calcutta Supreme Court passed certain regulations to control
press freedom and the Company began encouraging publication of newspapers that
would celebrate British rule.
● In 1835, faced with urgent petitions by editors of English and vernacular newspapers,
Governor-General Bentinck agreed to revise press laws. Thomas Macaulay, a
liberal colonial official, formulated new rules that restored the earlier freedoms.
● After the revolt of 1857, the attitude to freedom of the press changed. Enraged
Englishmen demanded a clamp down on the ‘native’ press. As vernacular
newspapers became assertively nationalist, the colonial government began debating
measures of stringent control.
● In 1878, the Vernacular Press Act was passed, modelled on the Irish Press Laws. It
provided the government with extensive rights to censor reports and editorials in
the vernacular press.
○ From now on the government kept regular track of the vernacular
newspapers published in different provinces.
○ When a report was judged as seditious, the newspaper was warned, and if
the warning was ignored, the press was liable to be seized and the printing
machinery confiscated.

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History NCERT Notes | Class 10

Team Shashank Sajwan

THE RISE OF NATIONALISM IN EUROPE

The Making of Nationalism in Europe

What did Liberal Nationalism Stand for?

The Age of Revolutions: 1830-1848

The Romantic Imagination and National Feeling

Hunger, Hardship and Popular Revolt

1848: The Revolution of the Liberals

The Making of Germany and Italy

The Strange Case of Britain

Visualising the Nation

Nationalism and Imperialism

The First World War, Khilafat and Non-Cooperation

The Idea of Satyagraha

The Rowlatt Act

Differing Strands within the Movement

The Movement in the Towns

Rebellion in the Countryside

Towards Civil Disobedience

How Participants saw the Movement

The Limits of Civil Disobedience

The Sense of Collective Belonging

THE MAKING OF A GLOBAL WORLD

Silk Routes Link the World

Food Travels: Spaghetti and Potato

Conquest, Disease and Trade

The Nineteenth Century (1815-1914)

A World Economy Takes Shape

Late nineteenth-century Colonialism

Indentured Labour Migration from India

Indian Entrepreneurs Abroad

Indian Trade, Colonialism and the Global System

The Inter-war Economy

Rise of Mass Production and Consumption

The Great Depression

India and the Great Depression

Rebuilding a World Economy: The Post-war Era

Post-war Settlement and the Bretton Woods Institutions

The Early Post-war Years

Decolonization and Independence

End of Bretton Woods and the Beginning of ‘Globalization’

THE AGE OF INDUSTRIALIZATION

The Coming Up of the Factory

The Pace of Industrial Change

Life of the Workers

Industrialization in the Colonies

What Happened to Weavers?

Manchester Comes to India

Where Did the Workers Come From?

The Peculiarities of Industrial Growth

Small-scale Industries Predominate

PRINT CULTURE AND THE MODERN WORLD

Print Comes to Europe

Gutenberg and the Printing Press

The Print Revolution and Its Impact

A New Reading Public

Religious Debates and the Fear of Print