The Sunset Empire Shudders and Shakes | 67 comments (67 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: The Sunset Empire Shudders and Shakes (4.00 / 3)

Well, if English textile could out-compete Indian without greater productivity, then it does not hinge on the productivity.

But mainly, you just triggered a pet peeve of mine.

Essentially, this view:

Whose thumbs were cut by the British in indian history? - Yahoo! Answers India

The British didn't cut off thumbs. They didn't need to. Their machine-made products were much cheaper and left the Indian buyers more money to spend on other things - including, eventually, weaving machinery.

Which is just far to common.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

by A swedish kind of death on Mon Sep 2nd, 2013 at 03:47:12 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Sunset Empire Shudders and Shakes (4.00 / 3)

But that has the chronology wrong ... Western Europe was still a semi-peripheral region in the early 1800's, the catching up to and then passing East Asia did not occur until the middle of the 1800's.

Talking about actions of the East India Company in the late 1700's / early 1800's based upon the productivity advantage that English manufacture had developed by the 1850's is just a lazy reading of history, akin to the Eurocentric histories popular in the late 1800's which made the recent emergence of Europe as the core economy of Eurasia into an inevitable thing. Often including paeans to a Free Trade policy that would never have been of any use without the foundation of industrial development laid under the preceding protectionist policies.

The growth of English textiles in the Napoleonic Wars alongside growth in imports from India, and then the tariff protections once wartime demand began to ebb to protect the newly expanded domestic industry was only effective as infant industry industrial development because of the following increases in productivity. In 1813, most of it hadn't happened yet.

Much of this is obscured by the later fight to repeal protectionist policies once they had done their job and the industries that they had protected no longer required that protection.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Mon Sep 2nd, 2013 at 04:51:33 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Sunset Empire Shudders and Shakes (none / 1)

I found contemporary texts discussing the plight of Indian weavers as a consequence of cheaper imports produced with the power-loom. The texts date to the 1830s, and the problems described appeared in the 1810s.

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Mon Sep 2nd, 2013 at 05:34:29 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Sunset Empire Shudders and Shakes (none / 1)

I found one of these sources again: it's in an 1841 newspaper and includes actual numbers on the dramatic decline in Indian exports.

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Mon Sep 2nd, 2013 at 05:39:56 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Sunset Empire Shudders and Shakes (4.00 / 3)

And look at the details:

In 1800, 800,000 pieces of Indian cotton to the US, in 1930, "not 400"

In 1800, 1,000,000 to Portugal, in 1830, only 20,000.

Placing the Indian transition from net exporter of cotton textiles to net importer due to the productivity of English power looms as already having happened by 1813 is quite clearly premature. It happened in the decades after the ending of the Napoleonic Wars.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Mon Sep 2nd, 2013 at 05:48:49 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Sunset Empire Shudders and Shakes (none / 1)

Yes, your point in the diary stands, but I reacted to "the middle of the 1800's" and "by the 1850's": it happened two decades earlier.

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Mon Sep 2nd, 2013 at 06:07:20 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Sunset Empire Shudders and Shakes (none / 0)

But it wasn't an event, it was an extended ongoing process. The evidence you present that it was ongoing several decades earlier does nothing establish that it was completed by the 1830's, which is what you require to contradict my contention that the process was not completed until the 1850's.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Tue Sep 3rd, 2013 at 08:28:01 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Sunset Empire Shudders and Shakes (none / 1)

99.5% and 98% drops in export represent a pretty much finished state.

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Wed Sep 4th, 2013 at 12:06:05 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Sunset Empire Shudders and Shakes (none / 0)

For the Indian domestic economy its only one step to the position that British textiles held in Indian domestic markets by the 1850's. It may have been inevitable once Indian textile exports were no longer a lucrative source of trade incomes for the East India Company, but inevitable or not, a process is not complete until it has played itself out.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Wed Sep 4th, 2013 at 02:23:33 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Sunset Empire Shudders and Shakes (4.00 / 2)

That source, Fleet Papers, was presenting argumentation to British readers dealing with issues such as The Corn Laws and seems to have been misrepresenting, either deliberately or, more likely, through ignorance of the timing of the developments of the British Industrial Revolution, as it tries to claim that the cause of the unemployment of Indian weavers in ca. 1813 was superior British productivity and, worse, that this had been the entire reason for the collapse of Indian cloth manufacture.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Tue Sep 3rd, 2013 at 01:12:30 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Sunset Empire Shudders and Shakes (none / 1)

The Fleet Papers source of 1841 is actually quoting a Dr. John Bowring (MP for Kilmarnock District of Burghs) from a parliamentary hearing on hand-loom weavers on 28 July 1835 (which can be found in full here) and makes no claim about "the unemployment of Indian weavers in ca. 1813". It does claim that the entire reason for the collapse of Indian cloth manufacture between 1800 and 1830 was "the presence of the cheaper English manufacture, the production by the power-loom", which does add up (the manufacture did not collapse under the violently enforced East India Company monopoly half a century earlier).

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Tue Sep 3rd, 2013 at 09:36:13 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Sunset Empire Shudders and Shakes (none / 0)

It would appear that the "violently enforced East India Company monopoly" of ~ 1760-1810 had the effect of sheltering the development of a machine powered cloth industry in England by creating a market for that product in England and its colonies. Other parts of India continued to produce and export cloth to countries such as the US and Portugal until the price and quality of the power loom produced cloth drove them out of business later in the 19th century.

Somewhere in my recent reading of online sources, (keeping track of them through the jumble of comments is getting difficult), it appeared that a description about the cutting of thumbs was by Wilson and followed directly from the quotation of H H Wilson in the 1848 History of British India that both askod and I have cited. This was separate from Chang's quote of the same passage. This would be significant as Wilson had been in India as early as 1808 and learned to read the local languages. Many people who had witnessed the events of 1760 to 1808 were still present, and Wilson, while critical of EIC actions, seems unlikely to have invented or uncritically accepted invented stories.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

by ARGeezer (ARGeezer a in a circle eurotrib daught com) on Tue Sep 3rd, 2013 at 01:33:44 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Sunset Empire Shudders and Shakes (4.00 / 3)

The productivity improvements in textiles was from 1760 through to 1860, and it was in the mid-1860's that 2/3 of British cotton goods and 1/3 of British woolens were exported.

Any comparison of the pressures faced by Indian cotton textile producers that conflates the 1760's, 1810's and 1860's is going to give a deceptive picture.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Mon Sep 2nd, 2013 at 05:42:48 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Sunset Empire Shudders and Shakes (none / 1)

I apologise for this derailment by nitpicking the 1850s; just to be clear: you correctly point out that the guy in the Yahoo! Answers quote tries to explain away thumb-cutting with something that happened after them (whether they happened in the early 19th century or the second half of the 18th century).

_{*Lunatic*, n.

One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

by DoDo on Mon Sep 2nd, 2013 at 06:16:49 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Sunset Empire Shudders and Shakes (4.00 / 2)

Politically speaking, from the late 18th century to the early 19th century the East India Company was more and more government controlled and less and less about (monopolized) trade and more about administration.

So the thump cuttings stories or at least their true core seem to belong in the late 18th century, when the Company was still a trade monopoly, less supervised and indian textile exports still relevant.

by IM on Tue Sep 3rd, 2013 at 12:29:14 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Sunset Empire Shudders and Shakes (4.00 / 2)

Indeed, the Act of 1933 stripped the East India Company of many of its earlier export monopolies, though not opium, and surely it is no coincidence that the period 1815-1835 was the collapse of Indian textile export markets and 1835-1855 the growing dominance of UK textile in domestic Indian textile markets. The Act of 1833 seems to represent in part the East India Company surrendering trade monopolies that were no longer lucrative, with the period 1935-1855 demonstrating their incapacity to operate as the de facto imperial government of the subcontinent.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Wed Sep 4th, 2013 at 02:17:54 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Did it again ... the Act of 1833 (none / 0)

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

by BruceMcF (agila61 at netscape dot net) on Tue Sep 10th, 2013 at 10:44:04 PM EST
[ Parent ]

The Sunset Empire Shudders and Shakes | 67 comments (67 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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