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The Knowledge of Manufactures: Industrial Surveys in
Eighteenth-Century India
Seminar on ‘Society, Culture and Belief, 1500-1800’
Institute of Historical Research, London
18 November, 2010
Introduction:
My work in recent years, and the project on which I am now
embarking with a team of postdocs and PhD students has been
addressed to the impact of 17th and 18thC trade with Asia in luxury
and consumer goods on Europe’s consumer and industrial
revolutions.
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 major 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 new 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.
The size of the Asian export –ware sector and its impact on
Europe should not be underestimated. This was no small trade in
preciosities for elites and courts. Jan de Vries has estimated
recently that Europeans by the late 18thC. brought in about 50,000
tons a year of goods from Asia, including tea, raw materials,
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medicines and manufactures; they consumed an average of one
pound of Asian goods per year during the eighteenth century. The
VOC alone imported 43 million pieces of porcelain between th
beginning of the 17th C. and the end of the 18thC. The EIC
imported nearly 3 million pieces of textile in the hundred years
between 1670 and 1760.
There was good reason for keen interest and investigation of how
these goods were produced and distributed, and many projects for
developing or extending them.
Today, there I will discuss how that export-ware sector and Indian
industry more generally was investigated and written about by
European savants in the later 18th C.
Adam Smith in Book IV of the Wealth of Nations argued that ‘the
discovery of a passage to the East Indies, by the Cape of Good
Hope,’ opened a ‘a still more extensive range to foreign commerce
than even that of America, notwithstanding the greater
distance…the empires of China, Indostan, Japan, as well as
several others in the East Indies….were in every other respect
much richer, better cultivated, and more advanced in all arts and
manufactures than either Mexico or Peru.’
He continued that ‘Europe, however, has hitherto derived much
less advantage from this commerce with the east Indies, than from
that with America.’ He explained this by the exclusive privileges of
the East India Companies. ‘The English, French, Swedes and
Danes have all followed their [the Dutch] example, so that no great
nation in Europe has ever yet had the benefit of a free commerce
to the East Indies.’ (WN IV, I, 499)
Despite these limits posed by monopolies, the trade, as we have
seen was extensive. It provoked vigorous debate among economic
thinkers, improvers and state policy makers.
In addition to debate there was also considerable European travel
and investigation centres of Asian craft goods, and detailed
analysis of production processes. There has in recent years been
extensive research on travel literature in Asia and on botany and
other scientific and medical practices. But few have turned their
discussion to European curiosity, investigation and analysis of
Asian industry.
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There are several frameworks within which we might set the
industrial surveys I will discuss:
1st. An orientalist literature. This literature conveyed a land of
artisans and husbandmen living in perpetual misery, and exploited
by merchants, princes and noblemen. Max Weber described
oriental merchants as mere pedlars. Orme Historical Fragments of
the Mogul Empire (1783) described unchanging processes in
textiles passed on through families for generations. This literature
contrasted hereditary and static work process along with degraded
workforces with the dynamism and enterprise of European
artisans.
2nd A postcolonialist literature that posed the decline of Indian
industry and technology with colonialism. This research argued
that colonialism displaced Indian indigenous knowledge with
programmes of Western science and technologies ‘useful to the
imperialists’.
3rd. A case for the ‘great divergence’. Pomeranz’s ‘great
divergence’ was mainly about China and Europe. It focussed
moreover on land and resources. China was much less wellendowed with land and coal than was Europe, and had to adapt
accordingly. Debates since on divergence in paths of economic
growth between India and Europe have focussed on costs of
capital and labour. Robert Allen, for instance, has argued that
India’s highly labour-intensive processes did not induce innovation,
and that China’s low wages and high energy costs led it to
concentrate on energy-saving rather than labour-saving
processes. The result did not induce mechanisation.
A recent article in the Journal of Global History by Tirthankar Roy
has outlined a more sophisticated institutional approach, arguing
there was less experimentation on capital goods in India.
Institutional settings of caste and craft communities limited artisan
movement among groups with different, but complementary skills.
4th The enlightenment project of ‘useful knowledge’.
Global histories have given much less attention to what have come
to be called ‘knowledge economies’. What part did ‘useful
knowledge’ play in leading Europe, and especially Britain into
industrialization? This question has led Joel Mokyr in his recent
The Enlightened Economy into the study of the public culture of
knowledge which he claimed in Europe connected ‘savants’ to
‘fabricants’. A major part of his source material for this claim were
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the many surveys of manufactures especially popularized in the
dictionaries of commerce and encyclopedias of industry and trade.
But thus far there has been a disjuncture between studies of trade,
colonialism and empire and those of manufacture, industry and
technology in Europe. It is time to bring these worlds of
scholarship together. I want to start this process today by setting
out recent hypotheses and findings on connections between the
knowledge economy and industrialization in Europe, and then to
investigate parallel attempts among European (in the case of this
paper, mainly British) natural historians and industrial surveyors to
gather Indian ‘useful knowledge’ for presentation to East India
Companies, European readers and manufacturers.
My purposes today will be the limited one of identifying a particular
set of literatures of ‘useful’ knowledge, and of connecting these to
that European enlightenment project.
There are, however, much further directions in which we might
take this. We might ask, for instance,
1. Are there connections to be drawn between the ‘useful
knowledge’ gathered in India by Europeans and the ‘useful
knowledge’ which contributed to the industrialization of the
British cotton industry?
2. Were Eastern knowledge systems similarly codified to
Europe’s ‘codified’ useful knowledge?
3. Was there dialogue between ‘savants’ and fabricants?
4. did the great migrations and mobility of Asia’s craftsmen
provide conduits of knowledge transmission in the way that
Europe’s did?
Let us look first at new findings on connections between ‘useful
knowledge’ and British Industrialization. What do recent economic
historians mean by ‘useful knowledge’?
• Simon Kuznets 1965:‘useful knowledge’ was the source of
modern economic growth. (Kuznets, Simon, Economic
Growth and Structure: Selected Essays (New York, 1965).
This argument has been taken up anew in very recent years as a
key to the explanation of Western industrialization. It extends far
beyond science, to include what historians, Joel Mokyr, S.R.
Epstein and Robert Allen refer to as tacit and codified knowledge.
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Now the issues are the role of human skills and ‘tacit’ knowledge
and of ‘codified’ knowledge which extends far beyond the old
boundaries of history of science.
Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena (2002); The Enlightened Economy
(2009)
Mokyr defined Useful knowledge to include knowledge of what;
and knowledge of how. He argued that the West developed a very
specific ‘useful knowledge’, and concluded that the ‘great
divergence’ between the West and the rest of the world did not
arise from differences in resource endowments, but from a
‘knowledge revolution’ that took place in the West and not
elsewhere.’
Mokyr argued that the roots of industrial growth lay in a peculiarly
European industrial Enlightenment, a culture of science, of practice
and belief in material progress. This included a
• Pan-European industrial enlightenment – travel and
translation
• Urbanization and technological change.
• multicentrism of European knowledge
Mokyr defined useful knowledge as knowledge of natural
phenomena that might be manipulated by human endeavour. This
includes not just what is now recognized as science, but practical
and informal knowledge. It encompasses the work of those who
collected observations, who compiled dictionaries and
encyclopedias of arts and manufactures as well as scientific
hypotheses and investigations. 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 knowledge’ was more accessible than
historians had previously assumed, and that it was more
European.
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.’
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‘there is no doubt the Chinese lacked the aggressive curiosity of
the Europeans.’
Knowledge and the Challenge to Global History
Kuznet’s ‘wealth and knowledge’ thus provides the new challenge
to global historians.
First – the surveys of manufactures and many publications,
dictionaries and encyclopedias of industry which have provided
historians with their knowledge of European advances were not
confined to Europe.
We certainly need to investigate how knowledge was codified,
collected and transmitted within India and China.
But my concerns today are the more limited ones of investigating
the wider world surveys of manufactures and industry made by
European travellers, natural philosophers and natural historians,
by merchants and by agents of the East India Companies.
The first is the attempts of British naturalists and officials to give an
account of the manufacturing processes they encountered in India.
Some of these believed that the Indian knowledge tradition was
wholly an oral one. Helenus Scott wrote to Joseph Banks in a
series of letters 1790-1801,
‘As their knowledge of the arts is never communicated by writing
nor printing nor their experience reduced to general laws by theory
the difficulty of information is again increased.’
All of the accounts I have thus far read understood the tacit and
local framework of the knowledge they encountered, yet they tried
to describe the processes at length, and frequently deployed
diagrams to do so.
The group of accounts based in India on which I have been
working recently was clustered especially in the 1780s and 1790s.
It described technologies in industries ranging from iron
processing, salt petre and soda manufacture to diamond mining
and refining; it included many detailed accounts of fine cotton and
silk manufacture, indigo and cotton cultivation and processing,
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attempts to establish cochineal production, and other dyeing
processes. Some of these writers were naturalists, also
corresponding with William Roxburgh and Christophe John– they
included Benjamin Heyne and James Anderson. Others were Dr.
Anton Hove, and John Taylor.
These individuals were not all British – Anton Hove was Polish, but
had worked in Britain for some time before his expedition, and had
close connections with Joseph Banks.
Father Christophe John (1747-1813) was a Danish missionary,
and the leader of the Halle-Moravian mission in Tranquebar.
Benjamin Heyne was also a member of the mission. This group of
pietist missionaries was skilled in South Indian languages and
Sanskrit, and formed a serious centre for the study of natural
history in South India. Its members maintained close connections
with a number of British surgeons in Madras, and especially with
the botanist, William Roxburgh who went eventually to direct the
Botanic Garden in Calcutta. This group collected information and
experimented on plants, some were informed on animals, they
wrote on local customs and culture, and notably they investigated
Indian industry, and were especially interested in economic
botany. They corresponded widely in India and in Europe.
While some have written on these individuals as botanists or as
missionaries, I want to approach them as industrial investigators.
They viewed Indian skills and knowledge through the prisms of
European priorities and comparisons. But they were also curious,
and keen to understand and to extend industrial crops and
processes, and to adapt and transfer these to Europe or to other
global settings. They were, above all, attempting to codify the tacit
and local knowledge they were witnessing.
Today I will look at industrial accounts among two different groups
and settings:
1. Industry in South India. I have found these accounts
particularly through correspondence with the Tranquebar Mission
during the 1780s and 1790s.
2. Dr. Anton Hove’s survey of cotton cultivation and manufacture in
Gujarat in 1787
The group of accounts I cover today does not include the
extremely detailed and very fine account by John Taylor of the
Dacca muslin manufacture. Taylor was the Commercial Resident
of Dacca. His detailed accounts were sent to the Board of Trade
in Calcutta in 1792 and 1800. A version of his reports was
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published in 1850 in preparation for the Great Exhibition, and
these reports have been extensively used by historians of Bengal,
especially Sushil Chaudhury. Nor does it include another set of
accounts of the textile manufacture of Surat was gathered in a
survey in 1795, and reported as the Chief’s Minute to the
Commercial Board.
Surveys of Manufacture in South India:
Several recently have written of the medical and botanical
advances of the Pietist missionaries fromHalle, Saxony and later
the Moravians at the Danish factory at Tranquebar in 1702. Over
the period up to 1803 when the mission was abandoned, it
attracted a number of surgeons and natural historians. These
were not only missionaries and local practitioners, but maintained
close contacts and correspondence with like-minded natural
historians in the other South Indian factories, especially Madras,
but also far beyond this to Europe, and to South East Asia, the
Cape, and many other sites of botanic gardens and plantations.
The Halle missionaries believed that it was education and science
which would bring Christianity to India, and they started intensive
collection of knowledge of South India – nature, medical practices,
language, religious texts, custom and culture, and industry and
agriculture. [ Hanco Jürgens, ‘On the Crossroads: Pietist, Orthodox
and Enlightened Views on Mission in the Eighteenth Century’, in
Andreas Gross, Y.V. Kumaradoss, H.Liebau, Halle and the
Beginning of Protestant Christianity in India (2006) The Moravians
followed the Halle Lutherans to Tranquebar in the middle of the
18thC., and included a remarkable group of surgeons and
botanists including Johann Koenig, Christoph John, John Peter
Rottler, Johann Klein and Benjamin Heyne. They corresponded
closely with EIC botanists and surgeons including William
Roxburgh, George Campbell and James Anderson, and notably
with Joseph Banks.
Benjamin Heyne is the figure who most interests me. Heyne
joined the mission at Tranquebar in 1791, but after a time did not
find it to his temperament, and intended to return to Europe. John,
hoping to keep his talents in India, asked Roxburgh if he might be
employed on the pepper plantations at Samalkot, and he became
a temporary botanist for the EIC. During the 1790s while in this
post he conducted surveys on iron processing, copper
manufacture, salt petre production, soda manufacture, diamond
mining, madder and indigo cultivation and processing. These took
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him all over South India where he reported the difficulties of travel
and access to knowledge, as well as well-informed observation of
processes and context, both local geography and scientific theory
and experiment.
He described journeys where ‘my suite consisted of near forty
persons: twelve palankeen boys for myself, and one massalji
(blambeau bearer); six boys and a massalji for my dubash’s duly;
four coury culies to carry my baggage and provision, one
draghtsman, 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. 245)
He frequently found great difficulties of access to the information
he sought:
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 found superior copper in the mines of Callastry, Venkatygherry
and Nellore ‘but everyone…seemed anxious to keep us ignorant of
these mines’. 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)
The saltpetre he found in the district of Bellumondah was ‘superior
to any I think I have ever seen in India…it may become a matter of
attention and speculation for the Europe market.’
During his report on his excursion to the diamond mines at
Mallavilly he discussed debates over Boyle’s theories on gems.
(Roxburgh MS D809, p. 18) He provided great detail on the soda
manufacture along the Coromandel coast and its use in bleaching
and glass manufacture. He also described a number of
experiment he made and processes through to bleaching cotton
clothes ‘in a way superior to what can be done in other
countries…’it remains now to be determined, whether soda would
fit the Europe market in the state in which it is sold in the bazaar –
and if it be sufficiently cheap, to bear all expenses of
merchandise.’ (Remarks on the Soda Prepared from an Earth
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Common on the Coast of Coromandel, Roxburgh Mss EUr D809 –
notes p. 13).
Heyne sent his draft reports to Christophe John who sent them on
to William Roxburgh. In their final form they ended up in the
reports sent to the Board of Control of the East India Company.
Heyne went on in 1793 to Madras, and from there to run
Roxburgh’s pepper and opuntia plantations in Samulcottah. In
1818 he published Tracts, Historical and Statistical, on India and
Sumatra. This brought together some of these accounts of India’s
natural resources with his studies of plants and medicines.
James Anderson (1738-1809) Physician General at Madras also
corresponded closely with Christophe John, sending him many
reports of his campaigns to cultivate sugar cane and American
cotton and coffee, and to establish plantations of mulberry trees
and Opuntia to establish silk and cochineal industries in India.
John’s very close networks with William Roxburgh were cemented
through Roxburgh boarding his son with John who educated him in
botany and other sciences, and John’s insistent gratitude for many
gifts of textiles.
‘Mrs. John and I are most anxiously waiting for the kindly promised
long cloth & chintz & if we don’t get them soon, we must return to
the primitive state of Adam & Eve…’ (Sept. 29, 1789)
‘The chints for my family & the Hyderabad seeds are not yet
arrived. Pray by what conveyance have you sent them? .. In my
last letter I had mentioned some samples of cloth & chints for Mrs.
John, which the wind or another accident had carried away during
my writing…’ (20 June, 1791)
In return John sent to Roxburgh ‘all the books & publications on
botanics you want’ (24 Nov. 1789).
My next accounts take us to the other side of the country – to
Gujarat and Surat. These accounts form part of the process of
information gathering on Indian textiles in Surat, Bombay and
Gujarat during the early period of mechanisation of the industry in
Britain.
2. Cotton Cultivation and Processing in Gujarat, Surat and Bombay
We can look to the reports on Surat and Gujarat as recounted in
Dr. Anton Hove’s Journal of 1787. First we must be aware of the
special circumstances of these reports. The textile industry
providing the trade from Surat was of rising interest to the East
India Company in the 1780s and 1790s. This is recounted in
recent works by Lakshmi Subramaniam and Ghulam Nadri.
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Surat emerged as a major centre for the production of textiles
during the 1780s; by the early 1790s the city boasted 15,777
looms worked by specific weaving groups.
There was a great demand for the cloth produced there, but along
with this concern over access to quality products: ‘a very small
proportion of the weavers in Surat could manufacture the kind of
goods that the company specified...”only the young and strong
could reach the excellence of the Company’s fabric whereas old
men, women and children can make such goods as foreigners and
native merchants will purchase.”
The authority of the East India Company in the area was more
limited than in other territories, most notably Bengal. The
Company faced the threat of the Marathas, and also of a range of
European private trades, especially the Portuguese, and the
strength of groups of Indian merchants. (Subramaniam, p. 269)
The expanding trade of Europeans especially by private
Portuguese merchants – encouraged weavers to turn out inferior
cloth and to sell to the highest bidder.
The big problem in the 1780s and 1790s was one of deficiencies in
quality and measurement
Another background was British concerns over access to adequate
supplies of raw cotton at a time of disruptions in trade with the
Americas and the Levant in the wake of the American Revolution
and of conflicts with the French. A new interest in raw cotton
cultivation, and prospects for transferring fine grades of cotton to
the Caribbean prompted the expedition of Dr. Anton Hove, a Polish
doctor, savant and naturalist who became one of Joseph Banks’s
collectors and agents.
Banks’ letter hiring him came with confidential documents:
‘the real object of your mission is to procure for the W. Indies
seeds of the finer sorts of cotton with which the Ahmood Country
[in the Broach District, Gujarat State] where you are ordered to
reside abounds, to make yourself master of the manner in which it
is cultivated, & transmit from time to time your observations upon
the soil & mode of cultivation; you are continually to keep that in
view as your main object, & consider the collections for His
Majesty’s garden as secondary to it.’ [Banks to Hove, 7 Jan. 1787,
B.M. (N.H.) D.T.C. vol. 5, folios 124-7)
He set off for Surat on the Warren Hastings from Gravesend on
the 3 April, 1787. He arrived at Bombay on the 29th of July,
meeting a frosty reception from the Company in Bombay; he
received no financial support, and eventually raised a loan from a
Parsee merchant.
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His detailed reports and diaries were no bare-boned botanical
compendium. They recount the recount the trials and tribulations
of the industrial traveller. Forced to take a palankeen, retainers
and 17 horsemen, this was not his preferred method of collecting
information. He recounted the hostility of the people in some of
the districts he passed through. Seeking the Rajah’s permission,
and indeed presenting him with a fine shawl, to visit Tanapoor,
where the finest cotton is produced he met with frustration.
– ‘this was what I ardently wished, for as the people behave rather
unruly on our first passing here I hoped that the Rajah’s
association with me would have a check on them for any future
insults’. – but it rained and he did not go further than the village –
(notes p. 622)
By November he was camping in the Broach cotton district and
conducting a detailed survey of the fine cotton and indigo
plantations.
He encountered secrecy in his attempt to gather specimens and
seeds:
In Serapoor, where the finest cotton grew he went to the overseer
with a reward asking for a little for medical purposes: ‘accordingly
after binding me to secrecy of not telling it, which was what I
wishes, he gave me the quantity that is marked under No. 8 and
promised me some seeds as son as the cotton in cleared off.’
(Home Miscellaneous 374, pp. 641-2)
Broach he described as a place where ‘every street swarms with
different casts,- Arabs, Moguls, and the many tribes of
Gentoos…Their manufacture is cloth of various kinds, as Bafta,
Daria, Czarhany. Bafta is the finest of all, coming near the muslin
of Bengal; Czahany and Daria are the striped muslins which the
ladies wear in England. Duty comes near the Madras long cloth,
and is exported to different parts of India to great advantage.’
Hove then went on to investigate spinning and weaving in
Serapoor.
‘Today I sent my interpreter to enquire and find out the places at
what part of the town the weavers and carders resided who gave
me on his return a very unsatisfactory report – that this branch is
chiefly performed by women, who cannot be seen by any other
person but their own caste. I therefore desired him to bring me a
machine, but in this I was likewise disappointed, and the cause
has been ascribed to me for the superstition with which the women
are prepossessed, that they could never spin so well if their work
came to the light of a stranger. However they did not scruple
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selling it, of which I could have purchased in any quantity, but to
part with their implements, they would not on any account.’
Hove conveyed great admiration for the skills he witnessed
investigated the division of labour in the crafts, and commended
the practices and customs to English manufacture:
Dr. Hove wrote
‘This country method of weaving would do very well in England,
the country so much more favourable on account of its moderate
climate which in this country the weavers are obliged to moderate,
by artifice however; only in large manufactories where every one
could mind his own Branch, which in the time of a year would
become to him fine spinning and weaving as familiar as the coarse
cloth is to him at present.
the weavers live here separately from the rest of the mechanics,
and none of them ever interfere with his neighbour’s branch solely
minding his own, and so quits it to his posterity. I am confident if
the weavers in England would be persuaded of imitating this
country agreement they would soon be convinced and find their
mutual interest of containing in the separate branches.’
Hove described Surat during this period of the later 1780s as place
of vibrant and growing trade ‘it not only pays and defrays its own
great expense, but likewise furnishes Bombay with three to four
lacs of rupees per year’. He found a new shipbuilding industry
there, building ships from teakwood for use in private trade. The
exports he noted from Surat included fine cotton, indigo,
Ahmedbad carpets, silks, kinkobs, Ilachu or satin and cotton cloth.
There were imports of coffee, sugar, spices, and of iron, copper
and ivory.
Hove’s wonderful account of cotton cultivation and processing was
duly delivered to Joseph Banks. It was said that no copy of it was
ever lodged in the India Office, though much of it can be found as
‘Extracts from Dr. Hove’s Journal in Home Miscellaneous. An
edited version of the Journal was finally published in 1857.
Indeed the East India Company in Bombay after his chilly
reception thwarted his efforts to return home, which he only
achieved by buying passage for himself and his collection on a
Danish ship.
These issues of procurement and of quality of both raw cotton and
cotton fabrics which lay behind these intensely detailed enquiries
into local conditions of the textile manufacture were also vital in
attempts to gather ‘useful knowledge’ in an emerging cotton textile
industry 4,500 miles from Surat and Bombay.
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The mechanisation of the British cotton textile industry was
proceeding through the 1780s and 1790s drawing on lessons of
quality and also those of division of labour derived from the Indian
products with which they competed.
The classic textile machinery was introduced to compete with
Indian skills, and the first histories of the British cotton manufacture
focussed on the new yarn qualities produced by machines such as
Crompton’s mule that now made it possible to compete with India.
Robert Peel and Samuel Oldknow in Lancashire and Oberkampf in
Mulhouse set out to produce for London and Paris fashion
markets, and to compete with Indian quality manufactures. To this
end, they both attended the EIC auctions to witness the style and
quality of goods coming, to watch how they sold, and to take away
ideas for their own products.
They faced the fierce competition of hand-painted Indian textiles,
hand-made muslins; they realized the advantage of these Indian
fabrics lay in quality and price. In a highly-charged atmosphere of
competition and high demand workshops then factories in
Lancashire and Mulhouse now produced quality goods, rapid
design change, and prices afforded by the middling then labouring
classes.
The merchants prepared a history of the rise and progress of the
British muslin and calico manufacture for the Lords of the Council
for Trade in 1786. They claimed ‘the object they [the inventors]
grasped was great indeed – to establish a Manufacture in Britain
that should rival in some measure the Fabrics of Bengall’. The
challenge was great ‘there are more India Goods coming into the
Market than has been known of these many years in so short a
time.’ (ibid).
‘in the invention of the mule may be found one of the chief causes
of the transference of the seat of an industry to the Western from
the Eastern world, where it had been situated from time
immemorial.’
The context of Europe’s account of its own industries and
technologies as a part of the wider Enlightenment project of human
betterment and economic progress needs to be set alongside
another context of Europe’s wider exploration and accounts of the
industries, technologies and crafts of wider parts of the world.
While an export-ware sector in Asia provided Europe with its
quality consumer and luxury goods, just how much curiosity was
there in the resources, crafts and secret processes that made
these goods?
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As we have seen intense surveys of manufactures and of industrial
crops were conducted by Europe’s savants and Company officials
and agents; these provided an extensive ‘useful knowledge’ from
which Europe learned. Among those lessons were quality and
skill; even more important were predictability on quality,
measurements and design and reliability on delivery dates and
quantities.
The British soon developed their own export-ware sector in cotton
textiles. New designs from their own machines, factories and
warehouses found a seemingly endless market in North America
and the West Indies as well as Europe. They produced by 1790
15 or 16 million yards of coloured piece goods, a large proportion
of which went to these new markets.
Kuznet’s ‘wealth and knowledge’ provides the new challenge to
global historians just as David Landes’s Wealth and Poverty of
Nations did in the 1990s. Mokyr’s Enlightened Economy brings us
the multicentrism of European knowledge, but it situates ‘useful
knowledge’ in the West. We can ask if all the factors he includes
in ‘useful knowledge’ are enough to explain why a knowledge
revolution happened in the West but not the East.
If his European story of invention based in reconfiguring existing
stores of knowledge and adapting the tacit knowledge transmitted
through artisan skill, then this invention also drew on interchanges
with Eastern objects and processes. While some industries drew
their technological capacity and impetus to change from across
Europe, others responded to the trade with China, Japan and India
which brought objects, fine porcelain and lacquerware or high
quality printed textiles. As Epstein put it, ‘Imported Chinese
porcelain could prove that something thought impossible could be
done’.i
i
Epstein, ‘Transferring Technical Knowledge’, p. 28