The Industrial Revolution in England accelerated the decline of traditional Indian handicrafts and cottage Industries. Critically examine the factors responsible for this decline and its …

The English side. Mechanised spinning and weaving in Lancashire from the 1780s created an output that had to find markets. India, which had supplied the world with cotton textiles for centuries, was converted from a competitor into a market and a supplier of raw cotton — the classic colonial reversal.

The mechanism of decline.

• Asymmetric tariffs. After the Charter Act of 1813 opened India to private British trade, British manufactures entered at nominal duties while Indian textiles met prohibitive rates in Britain. India was denied protective tariffs until the 1920s.
• Cost competition. Machine yarn and cloth undercut the handloom, whose weaver also faced rising input prices as raw cotton was exported.
• Market penetration. Railways from 1853 carried British cloth into the interior and raw materials out, dissolving the handloom's protected local markets.
• Loss of patronage. Annexation destroyed the courts that had sustained fine crafts.

Impact on the economy.

• Deindustrialisation in the strict sense — a falling share of the workforce in manufacturing, and India's share of world manufacturing output collapsing over the nineteenth century.
• Ruralisation. Displaced artisans had no factory to move to, so they returned to the land, raising the proportion dependent on agriculture and depressing productivity per head.
• Commercialisation without capitalisation. Cash crops expanded while investment in irrigation and industry did not.

Impact on society.

• The decline of the old manufacturing towns — Dacca, Murshidabad and Surat contracted sharply as their weaving economies failed.
• Pauperisation of artisan castes, whose skills were hereditary and not transferable, so the loss was generational rather than temporary.
• Pressure on land deepened tenancy, indebtedness and vulnerability to famine, and pushed migration, including indentured emigration to plantation colonies.

The critical qualification. Morris D. Morris and Tirthankar Roy show that decline was uneven — spinning was destroyed but weaving partly survived on imported yarn and coarse cloth — and that some crafts adapted. The overall direction, and the failure to replace lost employment, are not disputed.