Bengal Industries and the British Industrial Revolution (1757–1857) by Indrajit Ray (review)

The goal of this book is to ascertain the effect of the English Industrial Revolution on the industries of the English colony of Bengal. The industrial history of Bengal predates that of England itself. Bengali textiles had been carried by Bengali ships throughout the Asian oceans for hundreds of years before the English arrived on the Indian subcontinent. Bengal is an especially interesting case study of the effect of modern technological advance on indigenous industry because of both the long history of industrialization in the region and the lack of political will, or in some cases power, to protect the region’s industries from encroachment by British goods. This book is of obvious importance to historians interested in the Indian economy. It will also be of interest to anyone trying to understand the response of the periphery to advances in the industrial center. The book consists first of a study of bullion movements in Bengal during the period in question, followed by five industrial case studies. The case studies examine in turn hand-woven cotton textiles, silk reeling and hand-woven silk, salt manufacture, shipbuilding, and indigo dye manufacture. Indrajit Ray has previously published articles presenting his preliminary analyses of these industries and the present book is an extension of those articles.

The industry studies are in all cases confined to Bengal and stay fairly tightly within the period from 1757 to 1857. These are the years the East India Company controlled Bengal; the years lie between the Battle of Plassey, which gave the Company political control of the region, to the beginning of true English colonization following the Sepoy Rebellion. The main contribution of the book is its extensive archival research. The author has scoured the parliamentary paper records and those of the West Bengal Archive for every number which will help him establish the changing levels of employment in each industry, and to try to determine the extent to which relative costs—rather than legislative policies—determined these levels. Cotton and silk were the premier domestic and export industries of Bengal. Salt manufacture was purely for domestic consumption and had been subject to government involvement for centuries before the British came to political dominance. The shipbuilding industry, at least in the period studied here, and the indigo dye industry were creations of British entrepreneurs operating in Bengal.

The estimates of employment ensure that the book addresses the question of deindutrialization—the extent to which exposure to British competition led to industrial retrogression in Bengal. Typically, such analyses focus almost exclusively on cotton textiles, so Ray’s expanded focus is a welcome addition. The inclusion of shipbuilding and dye manufacturing indicates that not all responses to change were defensive, and that there were opportunities as well as challenges in the new era of globalization even for the periphery. The thoroughness of Ray’s analysis ensures that this is the most complete study of the employment effect of the British Industrial Revolution on Bengal in these years.

The issue of India’s deindustrialization has been a focus of Indian economists since Romesh Chunder Dutt published his seminal The Economic History of India Under Early British Rule in 1902. To my mind, however, a more important contribution of the present study is documenting entrepreneurial response to changing international conditions. The study stops in 1857. Calcutta did not die away as traditional industries shrank, but instead in 1857 was beginning a period of major expansion as a modern industrial center. Indian entrepreneurs and European entrepreneurs located in India kept on responding to the challenges and opportunities posed by technological and structural change. This study will be most useful to future scholars as a beginning point to examine the responses—some successful, some not—to the opportunities posed by global change. A good example is the utilization of cheap imported cotton yarn by Indian handloom weavers to maintain competitiveness in the face of the flood of mass produced...