Chapter 4 Solutions — The Age of Industrialisation

Even before factories began to dot the landscape in England and Europe, there was large-scale industrial production for an international market that was not based on factories. Historians call this phase proto-industrialisation ('proto' meaning the first or early form of something).

In this system, merchants from the towns moved to the countryside and gave advances to poor peasants and artisans, who produced goods for them within their own family farms rather than in factories. It was part of a network of commercial exchange controlled by merchants: at each stage of production 20 to 25 workers were employed by each merchant, so a single clothier could control hundreds of workers spread across the villages.

In Victorian Britain there was no shortage of human labour — poor peasants and vagrants moved to the cities in large numbers looking for work. When labour is plentiful, wages are low, so industrialists faced no problem of labour shortage or high wage costs and did not want to introduce machines that got rid of workers and required large capital investment.

In many industries the demand for labour was seasonal (gas works, breweries, bookbinding, ship repair). Where production fluctuated with the season, industrialists preferred to employ workers by hand for the season rather than buy expensive machines.

A range of products could be produced only with hand labour. Machines produced uniform, standardised goods, but the market often demanded goods with intricate designs and specific shapes — for instance in mid-nineteenth-century Britain 500 varieties of hammers and 45 kinds of axes were produced, which required human skill, not mechanical technology.

Before the East India Company established political power in Bengal and Carnatic in the 1760s and 1770s, it found it difficult to ensure a regular supply of goods, because the French, Dutch, Portuguese and local traders all competed for cloth, so weavers and supply merchants could bargain and sell to the best buyer.

Once the Company gained political power, it asserted a monopoly right to trade and developed a system of management and control to eliminate competition, control costs and ensure regular supplies. First, it tried to eliminate the existing traders and brokers and establish direct control over the weaver by appointing a paid servant, the gomastha, to supervise weavers, collect supplies and examine the quality of the cloth.

Second, it prevented Company weavers from dealing with other buyers, chiefly through the system of advances: once an order was placed, weavers were given loans to buy raw material, and those who took the loans had to hand over all the cloth they produced to the gomastha and could not take it to any other trader.