Glimpses of World History

by Jawaharlal Nehru

  In France the position was even worse, and led to the Revolution. In England the king was unimportant and more people shared the power. Besides, there was no such development of political ideas in England as in France. So England escaped a big outburst and the changes came to it more gradually. Meanwhile the rapid changes made by industrialism and the new economic structure forced the pace.

  Such was the political background in England in the eighteenth century. In home industries England had forged ahead chiefly by the immigration of foreign artisans. The religious wars on the Continent forced many Protestants to leave their countries and homes and take refuge in England. At the time when the Spaniards were trying to crush the revolt in the Netherlands, large numbers of artisans fled from the Netherlands to England. It is said that 30,000 of them settled in the east of England, and Queen Elizabeth made it a condition of allowing them to settle that each house should employ one English apprentice. This helped England to build up her own cloth-making industry. When this was established, the English people prohibited the fabrics of the Netherlands from coming to England. Meanwhile the Netherlands were still in the midst of their fierce war for freedom, and their industries suffered. So it happened that while previously numerous vessels laden with the fabrics of the Netherlands went to England, soon after, not only was this stopped, but an opposite flow of English fabrics to the Netherlands began and increased in volume.

  Thus the Walloons from Belgium taught the English cloth-making. Later came the Huguenots—Protestant refugees from France—and they taught the English silk-weaving. In the latter half of the seventeenth century large numbers of skilled workers came over from the Continent, and the English learned many trades from them, such as the making of paper, glass, mechanical toys, clocks and watches.

  So England, which had so far been a backward country in Europe, grew in importance and wealth. London also grew, and became a fairly important port with a thriving population of merchants and traders. There is an interesting story which shows us that London was a considerable port and trading centre early in the seventeenth century. James I, the King of England, who was father of Charles I who lost his head, was a great believer in the autocracy and the divine right of kings. He did not like Parliament or the upstart merchants of London and, in his anger, threatened the citizens of London with the removal of his Court to Oxford. The Lord Mayor of London was unmoved by this threat, and he said that he hoped “His Majesty would be graciously pleased to leave them the Thames”!

  It was this rich merchant class of London that backed Parliament and gave it a great deal of money during the struggle with Charles I.

  All these industries that had grown up in England were what is called cottage or home industries. That is to say, the artisans or craftsmen usually worked in their own houses, or in small groups. There were guilds or associations of craftsmen in each trade, not unlike many castes in India, but without the religious element in caste. The master craftsmen took apprentices and taught them their craft. Weavers had their own looms, spinners their own spinning-wheels. Spinning was quite widespread, and was the spare-time industry of girls and women. Sometimes there were small factories where a number of looms were collected and the weavers worked together. But each weaver worked separately at his loom, and there was really no difference between his working at this loom at home or at some other place in company with other weavers and their looms. The small factory was wholly unlike the modern factory, with its big machinery.

  This cottage stage of industry flourished not only in England then, but all over the world, in every country where there was industry. Thus in India these cottage industries were very advanced. In England cottage industries have almost completely disappeared, but in India there are still many of them. Both the big machine and the cottage loom still flourish side by side in India, and you can compare and contrast the two. As you know, the cloth we wear is khadi. It is hand spun and hand woven, and is thus entirely a product of the cottages and mud-huts of India.

  New mechanical inventions, however, made a great deal of difference to cottage industries in England. Machines did more and more the work of man, and made it easier to produce more with less effort. These inventions began in the middle of the eighteenth century, and we shall consider them in our next letter.

  I have referred briefly to our khadi movement. I do not wish to say much about it here. But I should like to point out to you that this movement and the charkha1 are not meant to compete with the big machine. Many people fall into this mistake, and imagine that the charkha means a going back to the Middle Ages, and the discarding of machines and all that industrialism has brought us. This is all wrong. Our movement is decidedly not against industrialism as such or machines and factories. We want India to have the best of everything, and as rapidly as possible. But having regard to existing conditions in India, and especially the terrible poverty of our peasantry, we have urged them to spin in their spare time. Thus not only do they better their own conditions a little, but they help in lessening our dependence on foreign cloth, which has taken so much wealth out of our country.

  98

  The Industrial Revolution Begins in England

  September 27, 1932

  I must now tell you of some of the mechanical inventions which made such a tremendous difference in methods of production. They seem simple enough when we see them now in a mill or factory. But to think of them for the first time and to invent them was a very difficult matter. The first of these inventions came in 1738, when a man named Kay made the flying shuttle for cloth-weaving. Before this invention the thread in the shuttle in the weaver’s hand had to be carried slowly across and through the other threads placed lengthwise, called the warp. The flying shuttle quickened this process, and thus doubled the weaver’s output. This meant that the weaver could consume much more yarn. Spinners were hard put to it to supply this additional yarn, and they tried to find some way of increasing their output. This problem was partly solved by the invention by Hargreaves in 1764 of the spinning-jenny. Other inventions by Richard Arkwright and others followed; water-power was used and later steam-power. All these inventions were first applied to the cotton industry, and factories or cotton-mills grew up. The next industry to take to the new methods was the woollen industry.

  Meanwhile, in 1765, James Watt made his steam engine. This was a great event, and the use of steam in factory production followed from it. Coal was now wanted for the new factories, and the coal industry therefore developed. The use of coal led to new methods of iron-smelting—that is, the melting of the iron ore to separate the pure metal. The iron industry thereupon grew fast. New factories were built near the coal-fields, as coal was cheaper there.

  Thus three great industries grew up in England—textile, iron and coal—and factories sprung up in the coal areas and other suitable places. The face of England changed. Instead of the green and pleasant countryside, there grew up in many places these new factories with their long chimneys belching forth smoke and darkening the neighbourhood. They were not beautiful to look at, these factories surrounded by mountains of coal and heaps of refuse. Nor were the new manufacturing towns, growing around the factories, things of beauty. They were put up anyhow, the only object of the owners being to get on with the making of money. They were ugly and large and dirty, and the starving workers had to put up with these as well as with the terribly unwholesome conditions in the factories.

  You may remember my telling you of the squeezing out of the small farmers by the big landowners and the growth of unemployment, resulting in riots and lawlessness in England. The new industries made matters worse to begin with. Agriculture suffered and unemployment increased. Indeed, as each new invention came it resulted in replacing manual labour by mechanical devices. This often led to workers being discharged, and caused great resentment among them. Many of them came to hate the new machines, and they even tried to break them. The machine-wreckers, these people were called.

  Machine-wrecking has quite a
long history in Europe, going back to the sixteenth century, when a simple machine loom was invented in Germany. In an old book written by an Italian priest in 1679 it is stated about this loom that the Town Council of Danzig “being afraid that the invention might throw a large number of the workmen on the streets, had the machine destroyed, and the inventor secretly strangled or drowned”! In spite of this summary way of dealing with the inventor, this machine appeared again in the seventeenth century, and there were riots all over Europe because of it. Laws were passed in many places against its use, and it was even publicly burned in the market-place. It is possible that if this machine had come into use when it was first invented, other inventions would have followed, and the machine age would have come sooner than it did. But the mere fact that it was not used shows that conditions were not then ripe for it. When these conditions were ripe, then machinery established itself in spite of numerous riots in England. It was natural for the workers to feel resentment at the machine. Gradually they came to learn that the fault did not lie with the machine, but with the way it was used for the profit of a few persons. Let us go back, however, to the development of the machine and of factories in England.

  The new factories swallowed up many of the cottage industries and the private workers. It was not possible for these home-workers to compete with the machine. So they had to give up their old crafts and trades and seek employment as wage-earners in the very factories they hated, or to join the unemployed. The collapse of the cottage industries was not sudden, but it was rapid enough. By the end of the century— that is, by about 1800—the big factories were much in evidence. About thirty years later steam railways began in England with Stephenson’s famous engine named the Socket. And so the machine went on advancing all over the country and in almost all departments of industry and life.

  It is interesting to note that all the inventors, many of whom I have not mentioned, came from the class of manual workers. It is from this class also that many of the early industrial leaders came. But the result of their inventions and the factory system that followed was to make the gulf between the employer and the worker wider still. The worker in the factory became just a cog in a machine, helpless in the hands of vast economic forces he could not even understand, much less control. The craftsman and the artisan first sensed that something was wrong when they found that the new factory was competing with them and making and selling articles far cheaper than they could possibly make them with their simple and primitive tools at home. For no fault of theirs they had to shut up their little shops. If they could not carry on with their own crafts, much less could they succeed with a new one. So they joined the army of the unemployed and starved. “Hunger”, it has been said, “is the drill-sergeant of the factory owner,” and hunger ultimately drove them to the new factories to seek employment. The employers showed them little pity. They gave them work indeed, but at a bare pittance, for which the miserable workers had to pour out their life-blood in the factories. Women, and little children even, worked long hours in stifling, unhealthy places till many of them almost fainted and dropped down with fatigue. Men worked right down below in the coal-mines the whole day long and did not see the daylight for months at a time.

  But do not think that all this was just due to the cruelty of the employers. They were seldom consciously cruel; the fault lay with the system. They were out to increase their business and to conquer distant world-markets from other countries, and in order to do this they were prepared to put up with anything. The building of new factories and the purchase of machinery cost a lot of money. It is only after the factory begins to produce and these goods are sold in the market that the money comes back. So these factory-owners had to economize in order to build and, even when money came by sale of goods, they went on building more factories. They had got a lead over the other countries of the world because of their early industrialization, and they wanted to profit by this—and, indeed, they did profit. So, in their mad desire to increase their business and make more money, they crushed the poor workers whose labour produced the sources of their wealth.

  Thus the new system of industry was particularly adapted to the exploitation of the weak by the strong. Right through history we have seen the powerful exploiting the weak. The factory system made this easier. In law there was no slavery, but in fact the starving worker, the wage-slave of the factory, was little better than the old slave. The law was all in favour of the employer. Even religion favoured him and told the poor to put up with their miserable lot here in this world and expect a heavenly compensation in the next. Indeed, the governing classes developed quite a convenient philosophy that the poor were necessary for society, and that therefore it was quite virtuous to pay low wages. If higher wages were paid the poor would try to have a good time, and not work hard enough. It was a comforting and useful way of thinking, because it just fitted in with the material interests of the factory-owners and the other rich people.

  It is very interesting and instructive to read about these times. One learns so much. We can see what tremendous effect the mechanical processes of production have on economics and society. The whole social fabric is upset; new classes come to the front and gain power; the artisan class becomes the wage-earning class in the factory. In addition to this, the new economics moulds people’s ideas even in religion and morals. The convictions of the mass of mankind run hand in hand with their interests or class-feelings, and they take good care, when they have the power to do so, to make laws to protect their own interests. Of course all this is done with every appearance of virtue and with every assurance that the good of mankind is the only motive at the back of the law. We, in India, have enough of pious sentiments from English viceroys and other officials in India. We are always being told how they labour for the good of India. Meanwhile they govern us with ordinances and bayonets and crush the life-blood out of our people. Our zamindars tell us how they love their tenants, but they do not scruple to squeeze and rack-rent them till they have nothing left but their starved bodies. Our capitalists and big factory-owners also assure us of their good-will for their workers, but the good-will does not translate itself into better wages or better conditions for the workers. All the profits go to make new palaces, not to improve the mud hut of the worker.

  It is amazing how people deceive themselves and others when it is to their interest to do so. So we find the English employers of the eighteenth century and after resisting all attempts to better the lot of their workers. They objected to factory legislation and housing reform, and refused to admit that society had any obligation to remove the causes of distress. They comforted themselves with the thought that it was the idle only who suffered, and in any event they hardly looked upon the workers as human beings like themselves. They developed a new philosophy which is called laissez-faire—that is, they wanted to do just what they liked in their business without any interference from government. By having started factories to make things before other countries had done so, they had got a lead, and all they wanted was a free field to make money. Laissez-faire became almost a semi-divine theory which was supposed to give an opportunity to everybody if he could but take advantage of it. Each man and woman was to fight the rest of the world to go ahead, and if many fell in the struggle, what did it matter?

  In the course of these letters I have told you of the progress of co-

  operation between man and man, which had been the basis of civilization. But laissez-faire and the new capitalism brought the law of the jungle. “Pig philosophy”, Carlyle called it. Who laid down this new law of life and business? Not the workers. The poor fellows had little to say in the matter. It was the successful manufacturers at the top who wanted no interference with their success in the name of foolish sentiment. So in the name of liberty and the rights of property they objected even to the compulsory sanitation of private houses and interference with the adulteration of goods.

  I have just used the word capitalism. Capitalism of a kind had existed in a
ll countries for a long time—that is to say industry was carried on with accumulated money. But with the coming of the big machine and industrialism far larger sums of money were required for factory production. “Industrial capital” this was called, and the word capitalism is now used to refer to the economic system which grew up after the Industrial Revolution. Under this system capitalists—that is, owners of capital—controlled the factories and took the profits. With industrialization capitalism spread all over the world, except now in the Soviet Union and perhaps one or two other places. From its earliest days capitalism emphasized the difference between the rich and the poor. The mechanization of industry resulted in much greater production, and therefore it produced greater wealth. But this new wealth went to a small group only—the owners of the new industries. The workers remained poor. Very slowly the workers’ standards improved in England, largely because of the exploitation of India and other places. But the workers’ share in the profits of industry was very small. The Industrial Revolution and capitalism solved the problem of production. They did not solve the problem of the distribution of the new wealth created. So the old tussle between the haves and the have-nots not only remained, but it became acuter.