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Knowledge and divergencefrom the perspective of early modern India*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2008

Tirthankar Roy
Tirthankar Roy
Affiliation:
Economic History Department, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK E-mail: t.roy@lse.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article explores the origins of divergent technological pathways in the early modern world, and the role that artisanal knowledge played in this process. It rejects older explanations based on societal differences in entrepreneurial propensities and incentives, and a more modern one based on factor cost. It argues instead for the importance of conditions that facilitated transactions between complementary skills. In India, the institutional setting within which artisan techniques were learned had made such transactions less likely than in eighteenth-century Europe. The cost of acquiring knowledge, therefore, was relatively high in India.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , November 2008 , pp. 361 - 387
Copyright
Copyright © London School of Economics and Political Science 2008

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References

1 Irfan Habib considers ‘the existence of a very numerous class of artisans ... able to live at very low wages’ to be one of the ‘retarding factors’ in the way of development of capital goods in medieval India: ‘The technology and economy of Mughal India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 17, 1, 1980, pp. 1–34. See ‘institutions’ below for further discussion on relative wages.

2 Prasannan Parthasarathi discusses this perspective, earlier statements of which lean on Fernand Braudel and some Indian writers, in ‘Rethinking wages and competitiveness in the eighteenth century: Britain and South India’, Past and Present, 158, 1998, pp. 79–109. The demonstration effect of Indian textiles on British practice was undeniably important. See, for example, the chapter on India in Edward Baines, History of the cotton manufacture in Great Britain, London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1835.

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15 See Bray, ‘Technics’.

16 See Kapil Raj, Relocating modern science: circulation and the construction of scientific knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ‘Introduction’ in Habib and Raina, Social history of science, proposes that the task of the historian is to explore how science travels from one intellectual context to another. The assimilation process is seen as a problem of epistemology as well as a problem in political history. This historiography deals mainly with the uneasy relation between the state and the research scientist.

17 Deepak Kumar, ‘Science and society in colonial India: exploring an agenda’, Social Scientist, 28, 5/6, 2000, pp. 24–46; Ashis, Nandy, Science, hegemony, and violence, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990.Google Scholar With science in context, the relationship between colonial rule and colonial modernity is explored in Gyan Prakash, Another reason: science and the imagination of modern India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. For a survey of the historiography of colonial science in relation to the modernization project, see David, Arnold, Science, technology and medicine in colonial India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.Google Scholar

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23 See, for example, Trevor Griffiths, Philip A. Hunt, and Patrick K. O'Brien, ‘Inventive activity in the British textile industry, 1700–1800’, Journal of Economic History, 52, 4, 1992, pp. 881–906.

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27 Irfan Habib, ‘Pursuing the history of Indian technology: pre-modern modes of transmission of power’, Social Scientist, 20, 3/4, 1992, pp. 1–22. See also idem, ‘Potentialities of capitalistic development in the economy of Mughal India’, The Journal of Economic History, 29, 1, 1969, pp. 32–78; idem, ‘The peasant in Indian history’, Social Scientist, 11, 3, 1983, pp. 21–64; idem, ‘Akbar and technology’, Social Scientist, 20, 9/10, 1992, pp. 3–15; and idem, ‘Technology and economy’.

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32 Shireen Moosvi, ‘The Mughal encounter with Vedanta: recovering the biography of “Jadrup”’, Social Scientist, 30, 7/8, 2002, pp. 13–23.

33 See C. M. Cipolla, ‘The diffusion of innovations in early modern Europe’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 14, 1, 1972, pp. 46–52, on medieval Europe; and Douglas E. Haynes and Tirthankar Roy, ‘Conceiving mobility: weavers’ migrations in pre-colonial and colonial India’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 36, 1, 1999, pp. 35–67, on India.

34 Habib, ‘Technology and economy’, p. 8.

35 Vijaya, Ramaswami, ‘The genesis and historical role of the master weavers in south Indian textile production’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 28, 3, 1985, pp. 294–325.Google Scholar Sakis Gekas discusses several other changes in textile technology in pre-colonial India: ‘The organization of Indian textile technology before and after the European arrival’, paper prepared for the Global Economic History Network, London, 2006.

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39 ‘One misses in India even that curiosity which the Chinese literati and the Greek and Roman citizenry displayed in the techniques of the crafts’: Habib, ‘Pursuing the history’, p. 15. According to Jesuits, Akbar had artisanal skills, and showed off his knowledge of carpentry and building trades before master artisans. Whether the masters looked upon these displays as entertainment or education is not known.

40 This engagement of the state in irrigation projects was not of a kind that might justify characterizing the state as ‘despotic hydraulic’, a point of which Karl Wittfogel was aware: see Oriental despotism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957, p. 45. South Asian states tended to be innovative, and engaged in both hydraulic projects and hydro-agricultural ones, that is, large-scale construction works that needed central coordination of labour as well as decentralized technologies; on the distinction, see ibid., p. 3.

41 Siddiqui, I. H., ‘Water works and irrigation system in India during pre-Mughal times’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 29, 1, 1986, pp. 52–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Aniruddha Ray, Madhyajuger Bharatiya shahar (Medieval Indian cities), Calcutta: Ananda, 1999.

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47 See Satpal Sangwan, ‘Level of agricultural technology in India (1757–1857)’, Asian Agri-History, 11, 1, 2007, pp. 5–25.

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51 On the analytical discussion on caste, see Dipankar Gupta, ed., Social stratification, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 23–7. Modern discourse on the social history of caste has concerned itself with the origins of hierarchy and pollution, the major debate in historiography relating to the influence of colonialism on restructuring hierarchy. See especially Susan, Bayly,Caste, society and politics in India from the eighteenth century to the modern age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.Google Scholar

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71 Scudamore, Iron and steel, p. 8.

72 See, for example, Hegde, ‘Model for understanding’; and Bennet Bronson, ‘Metals, specialisation, and development in early eastern and southern Asia’, in Bernard Wailes, ed., Craft specialization and social evolution: in memory of V. Gordon Childe, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996, pp. 180–1.

73 Between 1770 and 1880, ‘at least seventeen attempts’ were made to manufacture charcoal iron on a relatively large scale, usually with integrated rolling mill, foundry, and forge. All of them failed. See R. S. Rungta, The rise of business corporations in India, 1851–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, pp. 276–8. The cost remained high. None of these firms seemed to use local knowledge, or succeed by doing so. Wood fuel was not a sustainable option after demand for wood in railways, ships, and bridges exploded from the mid nineteenth century and forests were protected. The next successful round of domestic steel-making had to await large-scale mining of coal.

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