DBQ Sources: The Industrial Revolution in Britain and India
OER PROJECT: WH 1750 / LESSON 3.4 ACTIVITYDBQ SOURCES: THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN AND INDIA Unless otherwise noted, this work is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Credit: “DBQ Sources: The Industrial Revolution in Britain and India”, OER Project, https://www.oerproject.com/1PurposeUse a variety of primary and secondary sources to deepen your understanding of the similarities and differences between industrialization in Britain and India between 1750 and 1914 CE.Process Analyze the following sources. If you are using these sources to respond to an essay prompt, you should underline or highlight any evidence that will support your claim. You can also use the Quick Sourcing Tool.Document 1
OER PROJECT: WH 1750 / LESSON 3.4 ACTIVITYDBQ SOURCES: THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN AND INDIA 2Source: “Percentage Distribution of the World’s Manufacturing Production, 1870 and 1913” from League of Nations, Industrialization and World Trade (1945), reproduced by the Fordham University Modern History Sourcebook (Tables Illustrating the Spread of Industrialization), https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/indrevtabs1.asp.
OER PROJECT: WH 1750 / LESSON 3.4 ACTIVITYDBQ SOURCES: THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN AND INDIA 3Document 2This is a writing by Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917), a founding member of the Indian National Congress and also the first Indian Member of Parliament in the British House of Commons.British theorists talk of India’s population increase caused by British peace, but they ignore the destruction caused by the British drain on India. The British talk of the operations of economic laws, but they forget that there is no such thing as natural economic law withinIndia due to British imperialism. It is the pitiless perversion of economic laws that is destroying India, by the sad bleeding to which India is subjected. Why blame poor Nature when the fault lies at your own door? If you let natural and economic laws have their full and fair day, then India will become another England, with far greater benefits to England herself than at present.The English do not allow India to produce what it can produce, and the people are not allowed to enjoy what they can produce, and India is forcibly deprived of its means and capital. The political drain up to this time, from India to England, is above 500 million pounds without interest. The famines have been within the power of the British to prevent if they had done their duty, as a good and intelligent government. Source: Dadabhai Naoroji, “Memorandum No. 2 on the Moral Poverty in India and Native Thoughts on the Present British Indian Policy,” in Voices of Indian Freedom Movement: Voice of Nascent and Resurgent Nationalism, Volume 1, ed. J.C. Johari (New Delhi: Akashdeep Publishing, 1993), 100-102.
OER PROJECT: WH 1750 / LESSON 3.4 ACTIVITYDBQ SOURCES: THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN AND INDIA 4Document 3Source: Gross domestic product per capita between 1500 and 1950 as measured in 1990 International Dollars considering purchasing power parity. This data is taken from economist Angus Maddison’s book, Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 AD. Essays in Macro-Economic History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 382, Table A.7. See also this reproduction https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maddison_GDP_per_capita_1500-1950.svg.
OER PROJECT: WH 1750 / LESSON 3.4 ACTIVITYDBQ SOURCES: THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN AND INDIA 5Document 4This account is by an English miner named Betty Harris (37 years of age). Harris was a “drawer” in the “colliery” or coal mine. Drawers were usually women and children who transported coal through the mines in a small basket or cart chained around the drawer’s waist and dragged along passages too small to fit most adults.“[I] work from 6 in the morning to 6 at night. ... I have two children, but they are too young to work. I worked at drawing when I was in the family way [pregnant]. I know a woman who has gone home and washed herself, taken to her bed, delivered of a child, and gone to work again [in less than a] week.I have a belt round my waist, and a chain passing between my legs, and I go on my hands and feet through the mine. The road is very steep, and we have to hold on by a rope; and when there is no rope, by anything we can catch hold of. There are six women and about six boys and girls in the pit I work in; it is very hard work for a woman. ... My clothes are wet through almost all day long. ... I am very tired when I get home at night; I fall asleep sometimes before I get washed. I am not so strong as I was, and cannot stand my work so well as I used to. ... The belt and chain is worse when we are in the family way. My feller [partner/husband] has beaten me many a times for not being ready. ... I have known many a man [supervisor] beat his drawer. I have known men take liberties with the drawers, and some of the women have bastards.” Source: “Women Miners in the English Coal Pits,” United Kingdom, Parliamentary Papers, vol. XV (1842), 84 and vol. XVII (1842), 108. Reproduced by the Fordham University Modern History Sourcebook https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1842womenminers.asp.
OER PROJECT: WH 1750 / LESSON 3.4 ACTIVITYDBQ SOURCES: THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN AND INDIA 6Document 5Andrew Ure (1778–1857) was a Scottish economic theorist.When the first water-frames for spinning cotton were erected mankind was little aware of the mighty revolution which the new system of labor was destined to achieve, not only in the structure of British society, but in the fortunes of the world at large.The goal of the modern manufacturer is, through the union of capital and science, to reduce the task of his workers to the exercise of vigilance and dexterity. These faculties, when focused on one process, are speedily brought to perfection in children.Every improvement in machinery helps to replace human labor altogether, or to reduce its cost, by substituting the work of women and children for that of men; or that of ordinary laborers for trained artisans. In most of the mills, the spinning is entirely managed by females of sixteen years and upwards. The effect of substituting the automatic mule for the common mule, is to discharge the greater part of the men spinners, and to retain adolescents and children.Source: Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of the Manufacturers (London: Chas. Knight, 1835), reproduced in the Fordham University Modern History Sourcebook https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1835ure.asp.
OER PROJECT: WH 1750 / LESSON 3.4 ACTIVITYDBQ SOURCES: THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN AND INDIA 7Document 6Source: Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru participate in a “charkha” demonstration in 1946. © Underwood Archives/Getty Images. This is a photograph of Mohandas Gandhi spinning yarn while addressing a crowd.
OER PROJECT: WH 1750 / LESSON 3.4 ACTIVITYDBQ SOURCES: THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN BRITAIN AND INDIA 8Document 7This excerpt is by University College, London economic historian and Indian civil servant, Romesh C. Dutt (1848–1909).[T]he intensity and frequency of recent famines are greatly due to the resource-less condition and the chronic poverty of the cultivators, caused by the over-taxation of the soil, on which they depend for their living. ... Land revenue is the most important item of the Indian revenues, and ... the taxation falls heavily on the cultivators of the soil, reducing them to chronic poverty. They can save nothing in years of good harvest, and so every year of drought is a year of famine.There is no doubt that these famines are caused by the failure of the annual rains, over which man has no control. But it is equally certain that the intensity of these famines could be lessened by lowering the land tax, by constructing irrigation works, and by reducing public debt and India’s expenditures. Source: Romesh C. Dutt, Open Letters to Lord Curzon on Famines and Land Assessment in India (London: Trübner, 1900), 17-18 and xiv.