So is there anything new to say about it? According to Prasannan Parthasarathi , there certainly is. He doesn't go so far as to say that other proposed explanations are flat out wrong, it's just that they don't really focus on the narrow forces that, well, forced English business men to innovate in the 18th century.
English textile merchants were getting trounced by imported Indian cotton. They found that they couldn't produce cotton goods in the same way the Indians did for all kinds of reasons. So, they had to create a new, more efficient, production process. Close mobile search navigation Article Navigation. Volume P rasannan P arthasarathi. Jan de Vries Jan de Vries. Oxford Academic. Google Scholar.
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Sign In Forgot password? To make his case stick, Parthasarathi ought perhaps have argued that India? But such arguments are never made, and I suspect for good reason. Parthasarathi is a learned and well-read historian, and he is no-doubt correct in pointing out that scholars have underrated the vitality and strength of the Indian economy in the eighteenth century.
There were enclaves of highly skilled craftsmen and craftswomen in India, and it is easy to overrate the advantage that Britain and Europe enjoyed over Asian countries such as India and China. But in his justifiable indignation over the disrespect shown by? First, he exaggerates the role of the British government in the first Industrial Revolution. There was no real industrial policy except for letting the new industrialists do their thing.
With a few exceptions such as the Longitude Board, the demand for military hardware and royal dockyards, and running a patent office, the government played a remarkably modest role in fostering the Industrial Revolution. On the Continent this role was clearly larger, but even in Belgium and Prussia, the fact that the government supported and abetted the process does not prove that the government was a? What these governments did far more than Westminster was to invest in infrastructure or encourage and subsidize others to do so.
But this is precisely what the British did in India: they invested in its infrastructure. Lord Dalhousie, governor general of India ? One might add the Ganges irrigation canal, the brainchild of a single-minded Briton, Colonel Proby Cautley, was a huge success. The exact dimensions of the impact of the Raj on the Indian economy will remain in dispute.
Did the British extinguish an intellectual community comparable in quality and achievements to the one in eighteenth century Europe? We are told p. It is true that some of the libraries collected by Maharajas were dispersed and looted, but it seems implausible that a handful of British officials and soldiers could have wiped out the human capital of a population of close to million people and reduced them from a vibrant intellectual community to a largely illiterate mass.
The Indian society that emerged in the nineteenth century, Parthasarathi maintains, was radically different from what was there before. There is no question that there is truth to this argument, and that for much of the nineteenth century the British discouraged the formation of human capital and local centers of technology. But it is frustrating that so little is known about Indian progress in the pre-Raj era and that the experts differ so much. Indian science and technology was surely not as primitive as contemporary Western observers described, but was it really at a par with Europe as we are told in this book?
The complexity of the matter is wholly reflected in the writings of the Indian scholar Dharampal not cited by Parthasarathi who conceded that? It is possible that the various sciences and technologies were on a decline in India around and, perhaps, had been on a similar course for several centuries previously?
The difference between that kind of insider science and the growth of public science in eighteenth-century Western Europe, which was at the very core of the Industrial Enlightenment, is symptomatic of the weakness of the argument made in this book. At the very least, Parthasarathi seems to fall into the trap of what Deepak Kumar has called? Part of the book? He closely examines one key industry, cotton, and points out that British consumers were exposed to the high-quality, brilliantly colored calicoes coming from India.
The Act of prohibited the importation and wearing of these textiles and thus stimulated British manufacturers to make their own, thus creating powerful incentives for the invention of machinery in the cotton industry. In this way, the British Industrial Revolution was indebted to India. Perhaps, but the Calico Act had quite a few exemptions, and its enforcement was far from water tight. But more to the point, the Industrial Revolution consisted of improvement on a much broader front than India?
Thus in the woolen textiles? In many other industries there were critical innovations, some of them the result of unscientific serendipity, but at least in some cases they were related to scientific advances. In cotton, the most famous example is of course chlorine bleaching, but Parthasarathi may also find a new book on the British gaslighting industry instructive Leslie Tomory, Progressive Enlightenment: The Origins of the Gaslight Industry, , MIT Press,
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