The industrialization of Britain was a slow and protracted process, but by the early decades of the nineteenth century it was evident that the path of economic development in Western Europe had diverged from that of the Indian subcontinent. With the rise of the British cotton industry the major textile-exporting centers in the world migrated from India to Europe. The growing use of coal and steam revolutionized sources of power as well as transport and dramatically expanded the scale of production and output in the British Isles. Britain had given birth to a new industrial economy.

Introduction

The breakthroughs in cotton spinning, which were complemented by advances in weaving technology from the early nineteenth century, reversed the longstanding trading relationship between Europe and Asia. The new order was first apparent in overseas markets for Indian cloth, where British goods began to displace Indian. By the early nineteenth century, British cotton masters began to market their imitations of Indian goods, often giving them Indian names, in the Americas, West Africa and the eastern Mediterranean and began to supplant Indian products. From the 1820s, British machine-spun yarn began to be exported to the subcontinent itself, commencing the deindustrialization of nineteenth-century India. And from mid-century, the cotton cloth of Lancashire began to be exported in enormous quantities to the Indian subcontinent – the birthplace of cotton.

Introduction

The industrialization of Britain transformed the economic landscape of the world. From the late eighteenth century, British economic success was emulated, initially in Europe, but then around the globe. While historians no longer consider industrialization as a straightforward transplantation of British technology and now view it as a complex amalgamation of foreign and indigenous knowledge, techniques and institutions, there is little doubt that in many parts of the nineteenth-century world there were numerous attempts to introduce British machines and methods. The literature on early French industrialization, for example, is replete with stories of espionage, recruitment of British skilled workers, transfer of British know-how and the importation of British inventions.

Introduction

While Indian competition propelled British innovation in textiles in the eighteenth century, Britain was not the only nation in Europe – nor was Europe the only region in the world – to face the competitive challenge of India. And much as in Europe, cloth producers around the globe began to imitate Indian-made goods. This dynamic of competition and imitation reached great heights in several centers in the Ottoman Empire, where vast quantities of Indian cloth were consumed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Ottoman centers, unlike Lancashire, failed to forge a revolutionary response to the Indian challenge, however. And Ottoman textile manufacturers, in contrast to those in Britain, did not reverse the longstanding east–west flow of cottons and establish a new global manufacturing order. The purpose of this chapter is to answer the question why Britain followed a different path in cotton textiles from the Ottoman Empire as well as its major competitor in Europe, the kingdom of France.

Introduction

In the Wealth of Nations Adam Smith wrote that the nations of Europe were the most prosperous in the world while India and China were exemplars of past greatness, but present-day stagnation. Smith attributed the decline of these Asian regions to social and political institutions that constrained the operation of the market. In drawing this contrast between Europe and Asia, Smith was following a venerable tradition. We know that Smith had read the work of the seventeenth-century French physician François Bernier, whose “acrid account of the Orient exercised a deep influence on subsequent generations of thinkers.” Bernier drew an unflattering portrait of life in the Ottoman and Mughal Empires, where he argued that the inhabitants were oppressed by despotic rulers, denied access to the fruits of their labor, and took little economic initiative as they feared for the security of their property. His vivid descriptions influenced Montesquieu, who in several widely read works described Asia as unchanging (“the laws, customs and manners of the Orient – even the most trivial, such as mode of dress – remain the same today as they were a thousand years ago”), despotic (“power must always be despotic in Asia”) and unfree (“in Asia there reigns a spirit of servitude . . . it is impossible to find a single trait that marks a free soul”).

Beginning in the late eighteenth century economic life in Western Europe was transformed. Revolutionary methods of manufacturing were developed and diffused. Inventors dreamed up new machines that increased by several hundred-fold the productivity of the human hand. New industries took root and expanded in Britain, Belgium, France and Germany. By the mid-nineteenth century, the scale of production in Europe was staggering. The decline in prices for cotton yarn and cloth, iron and other manufactures had no precedent in human history and the export of these goods led to deindustrialization in India, China and elsewhere. By 1850, Western Europe was the undisputed center of a new global manufacturing order.