Bengal Industrial Revolution

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Deleted member 67076

So, how can we (if we can) get an industrial revolution in the Bengal region? To me it seems like a good place to kick off the industrial revolution. Its got plenty of easy waterways, its an insanely fertile region with a high population density throughout history, got reasonable access to coal via eastern India (and the region itself), good agricultural techniques, etc.

What PODs would be needed to get the ball rolling, and what effects would an industrial revolution centered around the Bengal region have on the world?

Feel free to rip this argument apart of course.
 
But does it have capital and a bourgeoisie capable of investing in the precursor systems to industrialism? That is more necessary than the resources per se -- you need the money and society capable of inventing and funding industrial processes
 

Deleted member 67076

But does it have capital and a bourgeoisie capable of investing in the precursor systems to industrialism? That is more necessary than the resources per se -- you need the money and society capable of inventing and funding industrial processes
I have no idea.

I know the manufacturing per capita was the largest in the world during the mid 1700s, and they were using village and guild based manufacturing. Now, within those villages there might have been plenty of corporations, but that may or may not be corporations as we know them.
 

longsword14

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A prosperous region based on thriving local industries is possible, based mostly on small enterprises. It would also be necessary to go back and change certain things during Mughal rule to change things radically.
Even then a 'revolution' in the European sense will be hard to do, cheap labour, lesser literacy, scarce sources of coal close to the surface etc.
 
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But does it have capital and a bourgeoisie capable of investing in the precursor systems to industrialism? That is more necessary than the resources per se -- you need the money and society capable of inventing and funding industrial processes
It really does, Indian credit and banking system was highly advanced. The East India Companies actually relied heavily on it.

You have two issues: if you want it to start there, you just have too many people. It's not worth investing in machines if hiring 50 more people is cheaper.

If you want to export it there, the Brita made efforts to cripple the local industry to reinforce native English industry.
 
You have two issues: if you want it to start there, you just have too many people. It's not worth investing in machines if hiring 50 more people is cheaper.

If you want to export it there, the Brita made efforts to cripple the local industry to reinforce native English industry.

Ah, the Song Dynasty problem... manual labor was cheaper. And then, of course, the British.
 
Ah, the Song Dynasty problem... manual labor was cheaper. And then, of course, the British.
Well there's a point in there. There are a lot of people in India and the country wasn't at full carrying capacity. At least in the Early modern period, we have reports saying most of the land was uncultivated.

There was a lot of people so no particular need to find ways to make industry cheaper. Bengali industry was however quite efficient and was producing an humongous share of manufactured goods globally in the XVIIIth century
 
Whereas Europe, just like with exploration, was poor or rather inefficient enough to need to industrialize in order to maximize the production of goods...
 
along with coal and water power, you need iron for a real industrial revolution... does Bengal have iron ore deposits?
 

Deleted member 67076

along with coal and water power, you need iron for a real industrial revolution... does Bengal have iron ore deposits?
Not that I'm aware of, but Eastern India around Orissa has significant deposits of iron that can be accessed.
 
From when Indian Industrial Revolutions have been discussed before, I believe that the coal in India is not of a form or at a depth where it can be accessed through early modern mining techniques, although @Flocculencio can probably provide more details.

More broadly, part of the problem with discussing alternative industrial revolutions is that we only really have the example of one successful Industrial Revolution to choose from, and maaaybe one or two also-rans (Southern Song being mentioned a lot, for instance). This makes it hard to know what's necessary for an Industrial Revolution in the British style, versus what just happened to be there, and whether there's other paths to industrialisation which are unlike what was followed in OTL.

Given what we know of British conditions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Bengal was missing a lot of what was present. It has low wages, while Britain had high wages, which are often cited as encouraging mechanisation. Bengal did have a decent financial system afaik, but did not have anything like the scale of coal mining and exports which Britain relied on. As far as I know, it also didn't have an equivalent system of rewarding inventors (patent protection) which rewarded people for developing new inventions while still allowing that knowledge to spread. Without some form of doing so - though there are alternative systems to patent protection - then the natural inclination is to keep inventions secret to profit from them, which makes it harder for others to build on them.

Of course, this is just describing factors which were present in Britain, it doesn't necessarily mean that they were essential to an industrial revolution. It also still leaves potential other paths to industrialisation, too. You can see aspects of that in OTL. For instance, the chemical side of the Industrial Revolution shifted to Germany in large part, and France managed a form of industrialisation without using much coal (with electricity substituting). Sweden also had a thriving iron production without using coal in a meaningful way, in their case because they could rely on very high quality iron ore and abundant forests so that they could use charcoal instead.

Perhaps Bengal could follow another path entirely. I wouldn't rule it out. But a Bengali industrial revolution probably wouldn't look much like the one we know.
 
The main issue is access to fossil fuels. There was some coal mining carried out in Bengal during the colonial period but from what I understand it was pretty deep. Not the sort of easily explpitable deposits that helped build mining expertise in Europe.
 

Deleted member 67076

The main issue is access to fossil fuels. There was some coal mining carried out in Bengal during the colonial period but from what I understand it was pretty deep. Not the sort of easily explpitable deposits that helped build mining expertise in Europe.
What about using water instead as a source of power?
 
What about using water instead as a source of power?

Well to be honest, Bengal, at least, was already up to par with Europe just before the Industrial Revolution. There were thriving cottage industries, protoindustries and a reasonably robust financial system- IOTL it was the EIC which comprehensively choked this off by flooding the market with industrial manufactures.

But I think to make the leap to full industrialisation you do need fossil fuels. The energy burden is just too much, otherwise. I'm not an expert by any means but I've tried to develop a lot of TLs where Indian states industrialise and the fossil fuels are the bottleneck. Given a different political syituation (where Britain is unable to dominate the subcontinent and hence Indian states can shop around among different European states) you could see Indian states later industrialising on the basis of imported European techniques. But the geology makes that initial leap difficult because there's just no easy access to cheap energy, and no effective global market for fuel (like today's petroleum market).
 
What about using water instead as a source of power?
Water power is quite limited by geography, viz, you need a steep enough gradient to take advantage of water power. Flat or nearly-flat land doesn't work very well. While there are certainly parts of India which have the required gradient, Bengal's geography could be described as "flat with overtones of flood".
 
Water power is quite limited by geography, viz, you need a steep enough gradient to take advantage of water power. Flat or nearly-flat land doesn't work very well. While there are certainly parts of India which have the required gradient, Bengal's geography could be described as "flat with overtones of flood".
Also a good point. Actually I was toying with a TL where Kerala in SW India moved towards using water power. It's a fairly narrow coastal plain squeezed between the sea and the Western Ghats, with lots of short rivers that drop pretty steeply.
 
Also a good point. Actually I was toying with a TL where Kerala in SW India moved towards using water power. It's a fairly narrow coastal plain squeezed between the sea and the Western Ghats, with lots of short rivers that drop pretty steeply.
There might be scope to rework that into a form of industrialisation with textiles.

What was local cotton production like there? If they aren't growing cotton, then there might be a niche for weaving cotton exported from elsewhere in India. Separating the production regions from the manufacturing regions would be helpful, since that places more of an emphasis on improving weaving techniques rather than growing more cotton.

Kerala had a thriving merchant class and shipping trade, if I remember right, due to exports of pepper in particular. If you can play around with European power politics enough to stop them interfering in the Indian Ocean trading networks, then you can continue to generate a high-wage region within Kerala. If they have a weaving industry in a high wage environment, that's the kind of setting where mechanisation starts to become very useful.

Water power would be plenty to start industrialisation in this context. After all, even in OTL most of the early textiles industry used water power, they only switched later to steam engines and fossil fuels later. It would be more limited than the industrial revolution of OTL, with no fossil fuels (yet), but it's a good start.
 
There might be scope to rework that into a form of industrialisation with textiles.

What was local cotton production like there? If they aren't growing cotton, then there might be a niche for weaving cotton exported from elsewhere in India. Separating the production regions from the manufacturing regions would be helpful, since that places more of an emphasis on improving weaving techniques rather than growing more cotton.

Not that much local production, but just over the Ghats (accessible through the pass at the Pallakad Gap) is Tamil Nadu which does and did have a lot of textile production

Kerala had a thriving merchant class and shipping trade, if I remember right, due to exports of pepper in particular. If you can play around with European power politics enough to stop them interfering in the Indian Ocean trading networks, then you can continue to generate a high-wage region within Kerala. If they have a weaving industry in a high wage environment, that's the kind of setting where mechanisation starts to become very useful.

Yes, an Industrious Revolution to lay the base for an Industrial one. Playing the the European power politics isn't too much of a problem- also Kerala has a track record here, the Kingdom of Travancore was the only Indian polity to actually fight an European power to a stalemate (Dutch-Travancore War).

Water power would be plenty to start industrialisation in this context. After all, even in OTL most of the early textiles industry used water power, they only switched later to steam engines and fossil fuels later. It would be more limited than the industrial revolution of OTL, with no fossil fuels (yet), but it's a good start.

Yeah I was thinking of something like that. The problem is the population centres are on the coastal plain while the water power isn't. Although I'm presuming this would possibly see a population shift towards towns in the lower hills. The distances aren't far enough for crop transport to be a problem.

Long shot- maybe linen? Flax likes swampy lowlands right? Might be a bit warm though.
 
Not that much local production, but just over the Ghats (accessible through the pass at the Pallakad Gap) is Tamil Nadu which does and did have a lot of textile production
That would be useful, or alternatively transport by sea if there's a mercantile network in place. Cotton transports very well by sea, after all.

Yes, an Industrious Revolution to lay the base for an Industrial one. Playing the the European power politics isn't too much of a problem- also Kerala has a track record here, the Kingdom of Travancore was the only Indian polity to actually fight an European power to a stalemate (Dutch-Travancore War).
I was thinking in broader terms about keeping the European trading powers out (or mostly out) of the Indian Ocean trading network. Kerala can do a good job of keeping the Europeans out of their immediate homeland, but there will still be problems if the Europeans have good trade access elsewhere in India. If the Europeans have taken over the distribution of most of the other Indian textile-producing regions, and are selling them around the Indian Ocean, then that will severely affect Kerala's profit margins.

What works best is if Kerala and other Indian powers still do most of the distribution, since that means a greater share of the profits flowing back into Kerala, at first to drive up wages at home, which then in turn encourages mechanisation since that reduces the high labour cost. If this cycle is maintained, mechanisation allows better profit margins on textiles, which in turn are reinvested in more efficient production, and in time it allows Kerala to undercut other Indian competitors and thus allowing them to keep undercutting the other Indian competitors, and then the cheaper textiles allows more to be sold, expanding the market, etc. The challenge lies in the initial set up, since if Europeans take over a lot of the distribution then the share of the profits which goes back to Kerala is much lower, and it makes it harder to build and maintain the high-wage environment.

[QUTOE]Yeah I was thinking of something like that. The problem is the population centres are on the coastal plain while the water power isn't. Although I'm presuming this would possibly see a population shift towards towns in the lower hills. The distances aren't far enough for crop transport to be a problem.[/QUTOE]
Certainly if the initial mechanisation can get started, there will be a population shift, I'd imagine. It doesn't need a particularly large population to get started with the weaving, in itself, although whether there's an equivalent of the outworker system in Britain would be interesting. There are other conceivable ways of having a textile weaving industry develop other than the outworker system, it's just (as always) that the outworker system was the one we know worked in OTL.

Long shot- maybe linen? Flax likes swampy lowlands right? Might be a bit warm though.
I don't know if flax can grow in Kerala, but the bigger problem is that cotton textiles are usually preferred for export purposes to linen. It's much easier to build an export market with cotton, especially since if Kerala is focusing on linen it just means that other parts of India will be supplying cotton textiles in abundance.
 
Water power is quite limited by geography, viz, you need a steep enough gradient to take advantage of water power. Flat or nearly-flat land doesn't work very well. While there are certainly parts of India which have the required gradient, Bengal's geography could be described as "flat with overtones of flood".
A problem shared by Holland.
How did OTL 19th century Holland industrialize?
 
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