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‘Useful Knowledge and Industry: Contributions from Tranquebar’
Conference on Medicine, Science and Empire in the Eighteenth Century
University of Kent, Canterbury
8-9 April, 2011
At a time when manufacturing and industrial development was a key issue of state and economy in Europe, political economists, mercantilist writers and enlightened savants debated the role of manufacturing and trade in economic improvement. A part of this debate included much discussion of the recent trade in Asian goods, no longer limited to spices, medical and botanical specimens, but a major trade in manufactured consumer goods, especially cotton textiles and porcelain. A key part of the political economy of Europe, not only in the writings of individuals, but in the wider culture of commercial tracts, encyclopedias and dictionaries of commerce, and
Europe’s many improvement and scientific societies was the topic of Asia. New colonial and projecting policies emerged out of discussions of Asian commodities, policies for adapting these, building European markets for them, and ideas on alternative sources of supply and substitute products.
I argue that this is the period when major export-ware industrial sectors were established, both in Asia and in Europe; designing for and supplying wider world markets became a key priority of economic policy, as well as the manufacturers, merchants projectors and political economy that underlay this.
This leads me into what Joel Mokyr has called the ‘industrial enlightenment’.
Mokyr’s case is that the West developed a very specific ‘useful knowledge’. The real divergence between ‘The West and the rest’ did not arise from differences in resource endowments, but from a ‘knowledge revolution’ that took place in the West and not elsewhere’.
He defined this knowledge revolution as follows:
1. The culture of science, of practice and belief in material progress
2. A pan European industrial enlightenment of travel and translation, and of bridges between intellectuals and producers, between savants and fabricants.
3. Useful knowledge as knowledge of natural phenomena that might be manipulated by human endeavour – encompassed practical and informal knowledge as well as theory and codified formal knowledge
– it included the work of those who collected observations, who compiled dictionaries and encyclopedias of arts and manufactures. It included descriptions of industrial skills and crafts. Earlier historians had assumed this artisan knowledge to be
‘secret’ or unintelligible except by practitioners. He argued that ‘useful

2 knowledge’ was more accessible than historians had previously assumed, and that it was more European.
Malachy Postlethwayt opened the 1774 edition of his Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences with his case for the ‘dependence of the prosperity and trade of this nation on the mechanical and manufactured arts’. The government needed to support these so ‘their industrious ingenuity’ may not be surpassed by any rival nation, especially France. His great dictionary would also address ‘’The commerce of the Chinese, and the East Indies, in general; by what means it was carried on. - Of the excessive cheapness of their arts, mfrs, and produce; whereby all European nations are attracted to trade with them, and resort to them for their productions and mfrs. With pertinent observations to carry on their commerce both in a private and public way, and best to the advantage of Europe.’ p. v
Mokyr, and indeed his critics, Epstein and Allen all believed that this knowledge revolution was Europe’s ‘miracle’ over the rest of the world. Their findings, based on what they knew of Europe led them to make large claims about the rest of the world.
‘Many societies we associate with technological stasis were full of highly skilled artisans, not least of all
Southern and Eastern Asia.’ ‘There is no doubt the Chinese lacked the aggressive curiosity of the Europeans.’
The challenge to global historians is to investigate the connections between knowledge and wealth. How much was the’ improving culture’ claimed by Mokyr a result of Enlightenment, or of sociability and the Republic of Letters. Or was that knowledge and the technology associated with it simply itself an outcome of higher and rising wages in Europe, as has been argued recently by Robert Allen.
The latter explanation does not satisfy me. Nor can I answer questions about alternative knowledge systems in China and India. But what I can do is to turn to
European endeavours to collect the knowledge of manufactures from around to the world. These can be recovered in travellers’ accounts, the surveys of natural historians, and the investigations made by merchants and agents of Europe’s East
India Companies. Those accounts provide us with some access to that knowledge of
‘outsiders’, and perceptions at the time of transfers of skills and knowledge. Through these we can approach that question of ‘How much did Europe learn from Asia?’
We can turn to the recent extensive work of historians of science and medicine, especially those who have written on the history of botany and medicine
–from my colleague, David Arnold, to Richard Grove, and David Chambers, David MacKay,
Richard Drayton, Londa Schiebinger, David Miller, Hal Cook, Sujit Sivasundaram,
Kapil Raj, and a number of my colleagues here today. They have conveyed to us the intense interest of 17 th and 18 th Century savants and botanical collectors in the crops and plants of the wider world. But who collected the knowledge of Asia’s industries – the resources, technologies, work and skill that produced those oriental

3 luxuries sought by Europeans and consumers in other parts of the world, as well as more quotidian and useful products such as iron and steel, soda and saltpetre.
Europeans certainly wanted to learn more about the arts of China. But access to such knowledge was difficult. The 9 octo pages on porcelain of the two volumes of the 1774 edition of Postlethwayts Dictionary relied on Pere d’Entrecolle’s reports from 1712. When Macartney set out on his ambassadorial mission in 1792 he carried the wishes an English King who ‘directed his people to discover new regions of the globe’, ‘to extend knowledge of the world and to find the various productions of the earth’.
At the same time those seeking such knowledge of Asia’s manufactures had greater access to India. This was a key period in the 1780s and 1790s when India not yet de-industrialised, and when Britain in process of industrialization. India’s cotton industry was producing far and away the greatest part of the world’s textiles, but
Britain’s small industry was mechanizing and growing rapidly; Britain’s iron industry , transformed by coal-fired smelting met all challengers apart from the Swedes; her fine metal manufactures were the wonder of the rest of Europe. But her position in the world was uncertain in the wake of the recent loss of those American colonies which had provided what Pomeranz came to call the ‘ghost acres’. They and the increasingly dysfunctional Caribbean colonies had been the laboratories and research centres for an aggressive mercantilist industrial policy of transferring the luxuries of the East to the West – in a whole range of crops and manufactures from coffee, spices, dyes and drugs to silk and cotton, to shipbuilding, potash and saltpetre production.
At this stage there were no certainties on development paths. Manufacturers, industrial spies and technological investigators travelled, collected and translated processes they found across Europe. They also did so in that Asian powerhouse of manufacture, India, which they could access through the East India Companies and through Catholic and Protestant missions.
1. Industries of India
From the18thC. we find a number of EIC agents and other merchants, physicians and plant hunters undertaking systematic investigations of centres and processes of production. A number of natural historians came with the Protestant missions. They learned vernacular languages as well as the language of learning, Sanskrit and
Persian, and integrated with a number of EIC surgeons and physicians, including those working in the Company botanical gardens. There were Baptist missionaries at the Danish colony of Serampore , and the Pietist and Moravian missionaries at the
Danish colony of Tranquebar. Much written recently on their translations, the printing presses they introduced (date for Tranquebar), their acquisition of indigenous medical remedies, and especially their large botanical and zoological herbaria, collections and publications together with those of their close associates in

4 the Company botanical gardens. There was Plantae Malabaricae, commissioned by
August Johann von Hugo and compiled in the later 1730s and 1740s (now in the
University of Göttingen, see Jensen) and Christoph TheodosiusWalther’s Herbarium
Trangambariense (1743), cited in Jensen, pp. 20-21). They were among many herbaria and collections made by members of the group. They connected too with the great project culminating in William Roxburgh’s Plants of the Coast of
Coromandel
(date) and Patrick Russell’s Account of Indian Serpents, Collected on the Coast of Coromandel (1796-1807).
Parallel investigations of handicraft, manufacturing processes and industry engaged some within the group. Jensen cites the work of Benjamin Cnoll (1705-67), medical doctor to the Tranquebar Mission. Cnoll not only took part in the pharmaceutical and botanical endeavours of others in the Mission, but investigated chemical and mineralogical aspects of borax manufacture in the region. Borax was used as a flux in soldering metals, notably gold; it was imported from India, but little was known about it. Cnoll’s accounts first printed in 1743 were published in other European journals and in translations through the 1750s. He was asked at the time also to write on saltpetre and zinc, but these were not processed in the area close to
Tranquebar. (cited in Jensen, pp. 16-18) [Niklas Thode Jensen , ‘Making it in
Tranquebar: Science, Medicine and the Circulation of Knowledge in the Danishj-
Halle Mission, c. 173244’ unpublished paper, 2011]
Cnoll’s account and chemical analysis of borax manufacture coincides with other better-known accounts of the textile dyeing and printing processes along the
Coromandel coast. The dyes and prints on cottons so admired by European merchants and consumers were mysterious, but of enormous interest to investigators. Helenus Scott (EIC surgeon) wrote to Sir Joseph Banks on difficulty of learning the arts of the Indians: ‘It is extremely difficult to learn the arts of the
Indians…for father to son exercises the same trade and the punishment of being excluded from the caste or doing anything injurious to its interests is so dreadful that it is often impossible to find an inducement to make them communicate anything.’
(Riello, p. 116). Members of the French East India Company and the Catholic mission in Pondicherry wrote accounts influential in Europe. Beaulieu produced a mss. description of the production stages in 1734. It included a piece of cloth attached to the mss to show the results after each step. Father Coeurdoux questioned a number of calico painters whom he had converted to Catholicism ‘ I do not know whether the letter I wrote in 1742 on painted cottons in India can prove of any assistance in perfecting the art of dyeing in Europe: that least was the aim I had in mind.’ P. 114 MB –
The Basle chemist, Jean Rhyner consulted both accounts, and concluded:
‘Our theory and principles are almost the same as those of the Indians, but the latter have the advantages of possessing certain herbs…the use of painting rather than printing demands a greater degree of skill, and is much slower, which means that even granted all things equalddd we could never adopt their methods, for we lack skilled

5 craftsmen and could not keep the maintenance costs so low.’ see P&P piece – p.
115
The fascination with Indian technologies and industries continued. The surveys of
Benjamin Heyne in the 1780s and 1790s arising out of the Tranquebar mission and the social networks with EIC surgeons and botanists, James Anderson and William
Roxburgh, show an intense curiosity in dyeing techniques, in the extraction processes of the fabled diamond mines of South India, in the skilled labour that produced fine Indian iron and steel or wootz, and a range of other useful industries from copper to saltpetre and soda manufacture.
How should we approach these surveys? One approach is to wrap them up in those later enterprises of colonial science in India
– the Survey of India – not established until 1878
– or the topographical surveys of Francis Buchanan and Colin McKenzie which started with Buchanan
’s A Journey from Madras Through the Countries of
Mysore, Canara and Malabar (London, W. Bulmer & Co., 1807). We can treat this technological investigators as agents of empire in their enterprises of practical and economic botany following through Sir Joseph Banks ’ search for dyes, drugs, and foodstuffs, and investigating their acclimatization to different parts of the empire. We can look for the underlying orientalist assumptions of the surveys, and the political economy of empire framing their financing and their output. But above all it is important to look at the texts, and the efforts of those at far remove from their
European frameworks to describe, codify and analyse the industrial processes of
India.
2. Benjamin Heyne
Heyne was part of the Protestant Moravian Mission in Tranquebar: Johann Koenig arrived in 1768 as surgeo, and initiated those there in Linnaean methodology, John
Peter Rottler (1749-1836) joined in 1776. Johann Gottfried Klein, born in
Tranquebar in 1766, left as a boy, but returned there in 1791 as Surgeon. Benjamin
Heyne (1770-1819) joined as a physician, at a time similar to Klein. Christoph John, the leader of the mission during his time there, was an avid natural historian and became his mentor . After the end of the Moravian mission in Tranquebar, John arranged for him to become temporary botanist for the EIC at the pepper plantations at Samalkot. There he supervised the introduction of useful trees and plants to the territory above the Coromandel coast , the Northern Circars. The Samalkot plantation closed in 1800, and Clive asked Heyne to find a site in Mysore for a new botanical garden. He chose the former royal garden of the Tipu Sultan at Bangalore
(Desmond, p. 41). He was appointed Botanist and Naturalist at Madras in 1802 and superintendant of a newly established Natural History Museum there. In 1804 he was appointed to the Company’s garden at Bangalore, and in the years following was assigned to assist Buchanan in the Mysore Survey. In 1809 went back to the
Army, and was assigned to the eighth regiment of native cavalry at Talna, the northernmost point of the Madras Army.

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Heyne’s early base in was in Tranquebar, now a place of intense interest among historians of science and medicine. It was not just the location of the
Danish factory, fort and colony, but of the Halle Pietist and later Moravian missions. A key focus of the Protestant Moravian mission was enlightenment natural history.
The agenda of mission and science has been explored in recent years by Sujit Svasundaram in the case of the Serampore Mission in Bengal, another Danish colony, but this time a Baptist mission, and in Michael
Bravo’s work on the Mission Gardens. There were close networks among the physicians and natural historians centred around the botanical gardens. John kept up an intense correspondence, including a close correspondence with the East India Company surgeons and naturalists William Roxburgh and
James Anderson.
Heyne’s accounts of his industrial journeys were sent to Christophe John at the Tranquebar mission as he wrote them, then circulated onward to
William Roxburgh in the early to mid 1790s. A number of them were revised and entered into Reports to the Board of Control, and several were further revised, and finally appeared as chapters in his Tracts, Historical and
Statistical, on India; with Journals of Several Tours through Various Parts of the Peninsula: also an Account of Sumatra in a Series of Letters (London,
Robert Baldwin, Paternoster-Row, 1814).
Heyne took a job as a Company botanist, but his scientific background in chemistry and mineralogy. His interests ranged far wider than flora and fauna. He turned the eye of the observer on the industries of India. At the time there were many surveys of European manufactures, and these were especially popularized in the dictionaries of commerce and encyclopedias of industry and trade. Among these were: The Wonders of Nature and Art
(1750); Richard Rolt’s A New Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1756),
‘Robert Dossie’s The Handmaid of the Arts (1764); Henry Hall’s The New
Royal Encyclopedia, or Complete Modern Dictionary of Arts and Sciences
(1788), and especially Malachy Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1749-1788). These encyclopedias also included some accounts of Asian crafts. They praised Indian crafts and skill, and argued that
Europe’s artisans could learn from India.
Key points arising out of Heyne’s accounts of Indian industries can be grouped around the following themes:
1. Difficulties of travel
2. Secrecy and access to knowledge
3. Descriptions of labour and craft, especially in diamond mines, textile dyeing processes, iron manufacture and saltpetre production.
4. Scientific theory and industrial processes
5. Prospects of development
Difficulties of Travel:

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Heyne described journeys where ‘my suite consisted of near forty persons: twelve palankeen boys for myself, and one massalji (flambeau bearer); six boys and a massalji for my dubash’s duly; four coury culies to carry my baggage and provision,[one carried provisions, for nothing is to be expected on the road, not even rice; not to mention bread and other necessaries, which in Europe are consid’d as absolutely indispensable. Another carried my books and paper for preserving the plants; the third my linen, and th e fourth my dubash’s things.’ – p. 245,248. He also had one draughtsman, two plant collectors, two peons, one servant four invalid sepoys etc…a small guard of armed men is…necessary as a protection from robbers and tigers…People in England have no conception of the labour and expense which it costs to obtain a box of insects or plants…’(Tracts, p. 248)
Secrecy:
In the relatively wealthy country of the zamindar, Nasareddy he found the
‘bazaar is large and well provided tho’ such is the jealously of powers that a stranger cannot get anything without the zemindar’s particular leave even not a pan of rice or a pot which I affirm from melancholy experience having been starved there a whole day in the midst of plenty.’ (Roxburgh Mss. Eur D809 – notes p. 1)
He fo und superior copper in the mines of Callastry, Venkatygherry and Nellore ‘but everyone…seemed anxious to keep us ignorant of these mines’. (Tracts, p. 111)
There were similar accounts about limestone deposits.
‘This strange conduct originated in both places from the same cause: the mandate of the Rajah to conceal everything, as far as possible, from the prying eyes of an
European.’ (Tracts, p. 112)
At the diamond mines near Cuddapah which had been worked for several hundred years. A group of labourers wo rking a new mine ‘were offended at my coming on horseback near the mines……saying that Ammawāru ( the sanguinary goddess of riches) would not allow such liberties to be taken, at a place under her particular influence…were soon pacified on being assured that I had come among them by leave of her ladyship.’ (Tracts, p. 95)
His Reports on the Diamond Mines sent to the Board of Control in 1796 admired the secret knowledge of finding the diamond deposits. …’it may appear strange that the inhabitants of the hills, along should possess the knowledge of so curious and important circumstance…I am inclined to think that the extraordinary skill of the
People in the discovery of Diamond mines might almost afford a persuasion, that their mountainous retreats, abound with minerals and precious stones, the knowledge of which, they have always been very tenacious in keeping to themselves as much as possible.’ (Board of Control F/4/1, p. 135)
Descriptions of Labour and Craft
Heyne ’s accounts demonstrated an intense interest in the labour and skills involved in industries producing both luxury goods and in those which paralleled the wider

8 industrial base then transforming in Europe. He thus visited diamond mines and iron works, textile centres and areas manufacturing saltpetre and soda.
The fabled diamond mines of Golconda had long declined by 1790. The focus of
Europe’s trade in diamond had shifted after the mid eighteenth-century to producers in Brazil, but the mines in surrounding areas continued on a smaller scale, and so
Heyne explored the diamond mines of Mellavilly, south west of Ellore. He provided detailed accounts of the diamond beds and how the mines were worked..
‘Sixteen persons, men and women, are employed in each mine, and each received one pagoda of wages per month. Half of them are employed in mining and the other half in carrying on the subsequent operations. These people are inhabitants of the neighbouring villages, suders, who from their infancy, are brought up to this work, and with the ideas necessary for the undertaking, they pride themselves on their honesty to their employers.’ (Tracts, p. 101)
His earlier account found people from the age of 12 working in the mines. The men ‘dig the ground… the women and children carry in baskets on their heads the several strata of earth to the places allotted for each sort.’ (MsEur.D809 – Report of an Excursion to the Diamond Mines at Mallavilly and Iron Works at
Ramanakapellah near Ellore, p. 11) The men removed the stones with gravel and earth, and women and boys cleared them from the earth. Then men picked through the gravel for larger, then smaller stones in a series of stages.
Knowledge was based in long practice.
Heyne ’s present of a gold fanam to the headman made him very communicative. He
‘pointed out a variety of small stones that were thrown away…and assured me they always indicated the presence of diamonds when they occur in beds at some depth underground.’ (Tracts, p. 97). At another point he gave a morose servant of the
Rajah two yards of scarlet broadcloth and he lightened up a bit. He ‘told me it was his business to search in the river Hebe after the rains for red earth washed down from the mountains in which earth diamonds were always found. (MsEur809, p. 11)
He wrote of labour forces that ‘are not guarded, and do not seem to be under any control. Everything is left implicitly to their good faith; which at all times is, perhaps the best way to ensure fidelity. ‘ (Tracts, p. 96)
Heyne thought the diamonds were still well worth pursuing…’the country is by no means exhausted, and that abundance of diamonds might be procured should an increased demand for them arise’. Those diamonds excavated and cleaned were bought by merchants who traded them in Madras. ‘The larger crystals would, I conceive, an swer the European market, and might be cut into brilliants.’ (Tracts, p.
101, 107)

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Visiting the fabled diamond mines, seeking to understand the secret knowledge that revealed the stones, and writing about the organization of labour that yielded them up al so led Heyne to another of India’s recognized industries, its iron manufacture.
After an earlier report on the iron works at Lechemporam he wrote ‘my attention to this branch of science or rather Indian Manufactures has been raised as that I could not be avail myself of the first opportunity that offered to see works of the kind at other places’. He had a ‘hope of becoming useful by rendering myself enabled to point out a place , where iron works of consequence might be erected with a full prospect of su ccess…’(Eur809, p. 24).
He watched iron being smelted at Yeragutty, near to Satghur, where three workmen from three separate families smelted iron in the diriest season, that is from
January to March; they collected the ore during the wet season. He set out the process, and included his drawing – see picture
They smelted three times a day making 360 pieces, selling at 40 rupees. ‘This is all that they get for their labour and skill, and all that they have for the support of three families during the cours e of a year.’ (Tracts, p. 190) He found the iron smelterers of the Northern Circars equally poor. A group of 8 or 9, miners, smelters, wood cutters and labourers could produce ‘considerable iron…’the finest in every respect for tools, razors etc…the demand for it is great.’(Tracts, p. 218)…These smelting works however, notwithstanding their diminutive scale, attract the attention of every curious observer, on account of the simplicity of every part of the process and the goodness of the iron obtained.’ (Tracts, p. 219).
At the Iron works at Ramanakapetta he found ten furnaces where once there had been forty. Each employed nine men, chiefly employed in working the bellows. He described the Indian processes as ‘rude and imperfect’ ‘Yet they are characterised by a degree of simplicity which shows an air of interest about them. The good quality of their iron obviously depends upon the goodness of their ores, and upon the purity of the charcoal which they employ in their processes.’ (Tracts, p. 225
Like his earlier to mid eighteenth-century predecessors, Heyne was fascinated by the Indian dyeing processes. He spent a long period watching, then describing the processes of dyeing yarn red in a process distinctive to the Coromandel coast from
Cape Commorin to Palliacotah, and unknown in the northern Circars and in Bengal.
By the time of his return to England and the publication of his Tracts he was aware that the Levant methods of dying cotton red had made their way into the chemical treatises of Chaptal and Berthollet, and that Indian processes were known of, but claimed a priority in his account of the processes in the late 1780s or early 1790s.
He provided a long and detailed description prefaced by his assessment;
‘Though the methods of Indian dyers are exceedingly tedious and complicated, and though they are utterly unable to explain the rationale of their processes, yet the beauty of their colours cannot fail to be admired, and must inspire us with the opinion that a knowledge of their methods might improve the

10 processes of the European dyers, and might enable them to make some advantageous changes in the art at present practised…’ (Tracts, p. 204) (See also ‘Directions for Printing or Dyeing Cotton Cloth into Red, as practised at
Madras, October, 1788 with Heyne Reports in Roxburgh Eur D809)
Scientific Theory and Industrial Processes
Heyne attempted where possible to connect his formal scientific knowledge to the processes he witnessed.
At the diamond mines of Mallavilly he discussed Bergman’s di ssertation on the Earth of Gems, and debates over Boyle’s theories on gems. ‘This is a subject on which I have made some experiments, read much and thought not a little. I may hereafter find time to collect my inferences.’ (Eur809, Report on
Diamond Mines of Mallavilly… p. 18). He assayed the ores in the copper mines of
Ayricondalah, heated these in a crucible with a flux, but found the experimentation process in the field inconclusive. (Heynes, Cursory Observations made on a Tour from the Banks of the Kistna to Timmericatah,Ms.Eur D809).
Prospects for Development
Finally, what was the purpose of Heyne’s industrial surveys? The surveys were made in the 1780s and 1790s, some probably during the period when he was at the
Tranquebar mission, and others later while he was Acting Botanist at Samulcotah.
He did not set out with the kind of agenda set by Wellesley for Francis Buchanan in his Surveys of Mysore.
What points did Heyne make on prospects for development of the industries he described, and of benefits for British trade and investment? He concluded that diamond mining and processing, though much reduced from its former times, was still viable. He admired the quality of iron produced by artisan smelters, but what were its prospects? At several different points he praised the quality of the iron ore and the skill of the smelters, but regretted the lack of coal, and hence the cast iron then leading the British iron industry. Ramanakapetta offered possibilities; there was ore there in any quantity wanted, and labour ‘happy to be employed at a business which under their own management, yields but a scanty subsistence.’ (Tracts, p.
226) Large iron manufactures, set up by the EIC in different parts of India might reduce the need for importing iron from Europe, but rea lisitically ‘I think it probable that the iron manufactories of England are in possession of such advantages that no other country is in a capacity to compete with them…Swedish iron excepted, which on account of its superior qualities will always find its market and bring its price.’
(Tracts, p. 223)
Steel, however, was another matter. The highly-regarded Indian crucible steel or wootz, long used in weapons manufacture, was highly specialised and expensive.
Heyne thought there was much to be gained in promoting the manufacture, for
English steel ‘is worse in quality than it was some thirty or forty years ago’. ‘If the steel makers of India were made acquainted with a more perfect method of fusing the metal, and taught to form it into bars by tilt hammers, it might then be delivered

11 here at a price not much exceeding that of cast steel.. I am of opinion it would prove a source of considerable Revenue to the country…’ (Tracts, p. 364)
Wootz was already the subject of great admiration and experimentation at the time of his travels. George Pearson’s paper to the Royal Society in 1795 reported on specimens sent by Dr. Scott of Bombay, and experiments by Stodart, and the prevailing view that ‘wootz is superior for many purposes to any steel used in this country.’ (George Pearson, ‘Experiments and Observations to Investigate The
Nature of a Kind of Steel, Manufactured at Bombay and there called Wootz’, Read before the Royal Society, June 11, 1795, p. 5). Also see David Mushet,
‘Experiments on Wootz’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 95, 1805, pp. 163-
75; J. Stodart and M. Faraday, ‘On the Alloys of Steel’,
Philosophical Ransactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 112, 1822, pp. 253-
70)
There were admirable qualities in Indian iron and steel, but indigenous artisanal smelting declined with entry of British and Swedish iron into India in the 19thC. Local iron making faced a precarious existence: larger scale workshops declined after facing scarcities of wood fuel, and high costs also dogged EIC backed ironworks such as Porto Novo in the early nineteenth century. There were major obstacles to factories which by the mid 19thC. would need to build railways and canals & acquire land and mines.(Tirthankar Roy). This 19 th Century decline of one of India’s industries and products much admired in the 18 th Century was to be short lived. In
1907 J.N. Tata was established in a factory town in North East India, and by the
1920s it produced three quar ters of the country’s steel requirements. By the end of the 20 th Century it owned not just the former British Steel, but the ango-Dutch consortium, Corus which took over British Steel, and had become the world’s fifth largest steel producer.
Conclusion:
The Heynes industrial surveys were written at this crucial period of Britain’s own industrial expansion, but before the onset of India’s de-industrialization. They provide a case study of a wider view of industrial enlightenment. They surveys conveyed an admiration for resources, skills and quality products. Those later surveys of which we have better knowledge turned to land and agricultural accounts whose key purpose was to assess potential taxation revenues with little attention to capital investmen t in India’s industries.