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

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 ]

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

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