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CBSE Class 10 History Notes Chapter 4 - The Age of Industrialisation
CBSE Class 10 History Notes Chapter 4 - The Age of Industrialisation
Industrialisation
Before the Industrial Revolution
1. Proto-industrialisation is referred to the phase which existed even before factories began
in England and Europe.
2. There was large-scale industrial production for an international market not based on
factories.
3. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, merchants from Europe moved to the
countryside, supplying money to peasants and artisans, requesting them to produce
for an international market.
4. Merchants were restricted to expand their production within towns because rulers
granted different guilds the monopoly right to produce and trade in specific products.
5. In the countryside, poor peasants and artisans eagerly agreed so that they could
remain in the countryside and continue to cultivate their small plots.
6. The Proto-industrial system was thus part of a network of commercial exchanges
controlled by merchants.
1. In the 1730s the earliest factories in England were set up, but only in the late
eighteenth century, the number of factories multiplied.
2. Cotton was the first symbol of the new era and its production boomed in the late
nineteenth century.
3. A series of inventions in the eighteenth century increased the efficiency of each step of
the production process.
4. Richard Arkwright created the cotton mill where costly machines were set up and all
the processes were brought together under one roof and management.
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. Steam
engines were not used in any of the other industries until much later in the century.
1. The workers’ lives were affected by the abundance of labour in the market.
2. To get a job, workers should have existing networks of friendship and kin relations in
a factory.
3. Till the mid-nineteenth century, it was difficult for workers to find jobs.
4. In the early nineteenth century, wages were increased.
5. The fear of unemployment made workers hostile to the introduction of new
technology.
6. Spinning Jenny was introduced in the woollen industry.
7. After the 1840s, building activity intensified in the cities, opening up greater
opportunities for employment.
8. Roads were widened, new railway stations came up, railway lines were extended,
tunnels dug, drainage and sewers laid, rivers embanked.
1. In India, silk and cotton goods dominated the international market in textiles, before
the age of machine industries.
2. A variety of Indian merchants and bankers were involved in this network of export
trade – financing production, carrying goods and supplying exporters.
3. By the 1750s this network, controlled by Indian merchants, was breaking down.
4. The European companies came into power – first securing a variety of concessions
from local courts, then the monopoly rights to trade.
5. The shift from the old ports to the new ones was an indicator of the growth of colonial
power.
6. European companies controlled trade through the new ports and were carried in
European ships.
7. Many old trading houses collapsed, and those who wanted to survive had to operate
within a network shaped by European trading companies.
1. After the 1760s, the consolidation of the East India Company did not initially lead to
a decline in textile exports from India.
2. Before establishing political power in Bengal and Carnatic in the 1760s and 1770s,
the East India Company had found it difficult to ensure a regular supply of goods for
export.
3. After the East India Company established political power, it developed a system of
management and control that would eliminate competition, control costs, and ensure
regular supplies of cotton and silk goods.
1. By eliminating existing traders and brokers connected with the cloth trade, and
establishing more direct control over the weaver.
2. By preventing Company weavers from dealing with other buyers.
1. The weavers were granted a loan to buy the raw materials once an order was placed.
2. Weavers who took loans needed to hand over the cloth they produced to the gomastha.
3. Weaving required the labour of the entire family, with children and women all
engaged in different stages of the process.
4. Earlier, supply merchants had a very close relationship with weavers, but new
gomasthas were outsiders with no social link with the village.
5. In many places in Carnatic and Bengal, weavers set up looms in other villages where
they had some family relation.
6. In other places, weavers along with the village traders revolted, opposing the Company
and its officials.
7. Over time many weavers began refusing loans, closing down their workshops and
taking to agricultural labour.
8. By the turn of the nineteenth century, cotton weavers faced a new set of problems.
1. In 1772, Henry Patullo said that the demand for Indian textiles could never reduce
since no other nation produced goods of the same quality.
2. But, unfortunately, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, India witnessed a
decline in textile exports.
3. In the early nineteenth century, exports of British cotton goods increased
dramatically.
4. At the end of the eighteenth century, import of cotton piece-goods was restricted into
India.
Factories Come Up
1. In 1854, the first cotton mill in Bombay set up and went into production two years
later.
2. By 1862 four more mills were set up and around the same time jute mills came up in
Bengal.
3. The first jute mill was set up in 1855 and another one after seven years in 1862.
4. In the 1860s, in north India, the Elgin Mill was started in Kanpur, and a year later
the first cotton mill of Ahmedabad was set up.
5. By 1874, the first spinning and weaving mill of Madras began production.
The Early Entrepreneurs
1. The history of trade started from the late eighteenth century when British in India
began exporting opium to China and took tea from China to England.
2. Some of the businessmen who were involved in these trades had visions of developing
industrial enterprises in India.
3. In Bengal, Dwarkanath Tagore made his fortune in the China trade.
4. In Bombay, Parsis like Dinshaw Petit and Jamsetjee Nusserwanjee Tata built huge
industrial empires in India.
5. Seth Hukumchand, a Marwari businessman set up the first Indian jute mill in
Calcutta in 1917.
6. The opportunities of investments in industries opened up and many of them set up
factories.
7. But due to colonial power, Indians 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.
8. Three of the biggest European Managing Agencies are Bird Heiglers & Co., Andrew
Yule, and Jardine Skinner & Co. who mobilised capital, set up joint-stock companies
and managed them.
Conclusion
1. The age of industries has meant major technological changes, growth of factories, and
the making of a new industrial labour force.
2. Hand technology and small-scale production remained an important part of the
industrial landscape.