Status Of Artisans And Craftsman During British

The British adopted economic policies that quickly transformed India's economy into a colonial economy whose nature and structure were dictated by the needs of the British economy. In this regard, the British conquest of India was unlike any other foreign conquest before it. The previous conquerors had overthrown Indian political powers but had made no fundamental changes to the country's economic structure; they had gradually integrated themselves into Indian life, both political and economic. 

 

•    The peasant, artisan, and trader had continued to live in the same way they had before.

 

•    The basic economic pattern of self-sufficiency in rural areas had been maintained. Changes in rulers had merely resulted in personnel changes among those who appropriated the peasant surplus. 

 

•    The British conquerors, on the other hand, were quite different. They completely upended the Indian economy's traditional structure. 

 

•    Furthermore, they were never fully integrated into Indian culture. They were always foreigners in the country, exploiting Indian resources and taking India's wealth as a form of tribute. 

 

•    The consequences of subordinating the Indian economy to British trade and industry were numerous and varied.

 

•    The urban handicrafts industry, which had made India's name a byword in the markets of the entire civilised world for centuries, collapsed suddenly and dramatically.

 

•    Competition from cheaper imported machine-made goods from Britain was a major factor in the company's demise. We know that after 1813, the British imposed a one-way free trade policy on India, which was followed by an invasion of British manufactured goods, particularly cotton textiles. 

 

•    Indian goods produced on a mass scale by powerful steam-powered machines could not compete with goods produced on a mass scale by powerful steam-powered machines.

 

•    Once the railways were built, the destruction of Indian industries, particularly rural artisan industries, accelerated even faster. British manufacturers were able to reach and uproot traditional industries in the country's most remote villages thanks to the railways. “The armour of the isolated self-sufficient village was pierced by the steel rail, and its life blood ebbed away,” wrote American writer D.H. Buchanan.

 

•    Cotton weaving and spinning took the brunt of the damage. Silk and woollen textiles fared no better, and the iron, pottery, glass, paper, metals, guns, shipping, oil-pressing, tanning, and dyeing industries all suffered similar fates.

 

•    Apart from the influx of foreign goods, other British conquest-related factors also contributed to the demise of Indian industries. 

 

•    During the second half of the eighteenth century, the East India Company and its servants oppressed Bengali craftsmen, forcing them to sell their goods below market price and hire their services for less than the prevailing wage, forcing a large number of them to abandon their ancestral professions. 

 

•    In a normal situation, the Company's encouragement of Indian handicraft export would have benefited them, but the oppression had the opposite effect.

 

•    During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, high import duties and other restrictions on the import of Indian goods into Britain and Europe, combined with the development of modern manufacturing industries in Britain, led to the virtual closure of European markets to Indian manufacturers after 1820.

 

•    The disappearance of Indian rulers and their courts, who were the primary buyers of the handicrafts produced, dealt a serious blow to these industries. “For example, in the production of military weapons, the Indian states were completely reliant on the British.”

 

•    All of the British military and government stores were purchased in the United Kingdom. Furthermore, Indian rulers and nobles were replaced as the ruling class by British officials and military officers who almost exclusively patronised their own home-produced goods. 

 

•    Handicrafts became more expensive as a result, and their ability to compete with imported goods was harmed.

 

•    The decline of Indian handicrafts was mirrored in the decline of towns and cities known for their production. Cities that had survived the ravages of war and plunder were destroyed by the British conquest. 

 

•    Dhaka, Surat, Murshidabad, and a slew of other thriving industrial cities were depopulated and razed. By the end of the nineteenth century, urban residents accounted for only 10% of the total population.

 

He said, “The misery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India.” 

 

•    The tragedy was compounded by the fact that, unlike in Britain and Western Europe, the decline of traditional industries was not accompanied by the growth of modern machine industries.  As a result, the ruined artisans and handicraftsmen were unable to find alternative work. They had no other option but to crowd into agriculture.

 

•    Furthermore, British rule disrupted the economic balance in the villages. The gradual abolition of rural crafts shattered the rural economy's union between agriculture and domestic industry, contributing to the demise of the self-sufficient rural economy. 

 

•    On the one hand, millions of peasants who had supplemented their income by part-time spinning and weaving were forced to rely solely on cultivation; on the other hand, millions of rural artisans lost their traditional livelihoods and became agriculturists or petty tenants with small plots. They increased the pressure on the land.

 

•    As a result of the British conquest, the country became de-industrialized, and the people became more reliant on agriculture. There are no figures for the earlier period, but according to Census Reports, the percentage of the population dependent on agriculture increased from 63.7 percent to 70% between 1901 and 1941. 

 

•    One of the major causes of extreme poverty in India during British rule was the increasing pressure on agriculture. In fact, India was transformed into an agricultural colony of manufacturing Britain, which required raw materials for its industries. The change was most noticeable in the cotton textile industry. While India had been the world's largest exporter of cotton goods for centuries, it had now been transformed into a buyer of British cotton products and a seller of raw cotton.