Q: Less British India = Curbed Industrial Revolution ?

[John Fredrick Parker]

Let’s say that the Carnatic Wars in the mid 18th Century go differently from OTL, with the effect that Britain does not emerge as the dominant power in the subcontinent (France isn’t kicked off, Bengal isn’t turned into a privatized kingdom, etc).

My question here - how does this affect prospects for the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and in the world at large? I ask because the case has been made that it would massively curb perhaps the single most important economic development in human history:

And this would be a total game changer because, without India as a giant captive market for its industrial exports, Britain would never become the industrial superpower that it became OTL thanks to India from the 1770's on.

Britain will still be the main innovator, the one that defines economic evolution. But it will be far less profitable because contrary to british India, french or independant India won't freely accept to destroy its own craft factories.

It means the industrial revolution will be slower and different too. There will probably be less specialization as theorized by David Ricardo. Britain pushed the logic of specialization much further than most other economic powers did.

This also means Britain will be forced to be much more compromising on the industrial stage than it was OTL. Because it won't have the Indian milkcow to pay for its wars. It won't be able to support such a big Navy nor to wage all-out wars for so many years as it did OTL in the revolutionary and napoleonic wars.

 

[Optical_Illusion]

Firstly, no British Raj is far too late to curb the Industrial Revolution (an entity that begins in 1858 cannot be responsible for a process that begins in 1760).

Secondly, "captive markets", any active efforts to sabotage or limit cottage industry in India*, massive revenue transfers to fund the British state or wars, a role for colonial profits in funding nascent industry or machinery, are all, I believe, largely without academic credibility. The Industrial Revolution may be averted or moved from the English North and Midlands without a Britain in India, but not through these channels.

*which would be bizarre in the first instance anyway because British trade active in India brought Indian textiles and sold them at profit in Europe, and there would be no incentive for them to undermine their own revenue stream.

 

[mad orc]

He probably means rule of the east India company

 

[Thoresby]

While a captive market, deliberate destruction of Indian "factories", massive revenue transfers into the British Treasury and India funding the Royal Navy are all largely myths without any real credible evidence colonial profits did pay a key role in financing the industrial revolution. The East India Company was consistently the biggest dividend payer in Britain throughout the 18th and early 19th century, without that steady flow of money the British banking system would be smaller and less sophisticated and without that the Industrial Revolution would be a slower.

 

[mcdo]

If you want to explore the impact on the British balance of trade, I think one potential PoD would be for the British to not control the parts of India where they had farmers grow opium. If Britain can't export huge amounts of opium to China, then they lose a massive revenue stream in silver that they received in OTL.

 

[Thoresby]

If you want to explore the impact on the British balance of trade, I think one potential PoD would be for the British to not control the parts of India where they had farmers grow opium. If Britain can't export huge amounts of opium to China, then they lose a massive revenue stream in silver that they received in OTL.

Though they still might be able to buy opium in India and use the Royal Navy to forcibly open the Yangtze meaning the revenue stream could still exist absent a "British India"

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

It should also be remembered that the inventions that defined the first part of the Industrial Revolution likely still happen -- the Watt steam engine, the Cort iron making process, the power loom, and even the cotton gin, since there's no reason any of them wouldn't still be invented TTL. So England will still have the ability to manufacture goods en masse, if nothing else; so it comes down to whether a different global trade regime, without Britain or her companies effectively controlling trade (and eventually economic) policy for pretty much the entire subcontinent, is going to overall diminish markets for this kind of production (both in access to materials and customers).

I’ll admit, I’m not sure I agree with @Matteo anymore on this, but I am curious if anyone had more analysis.

 

[Matteo]

While a captive market, deliberate destruction of Indian "factories", massive revenue transfers into the British Treasury and India funding the Royal Navy are all largely myths without any real credible evidence colonial profits did pay a key role in financing the industrial revolution. The East India Company was consistently the biggest dividend payer in Britain throughout the 18th and early 19th century, without that steady flow of money the British banking system would be smaller and less sophisticated and without that the Industrial Revolution would be a slower.

It is quite odd calling a myth the fact that one of the main aspects of colonization was imp’ementation, although never totally, of what was called colonial exclusive.

Now you take a nation with around 10 million people by 1800 : Britain.

And you give it control of a nation or of a galaxy, call it the way you estimate more accurate since India was not then yet a nation, whose population is around 200 million people, or only 100 million if you just take into account the part of I dia that was under direct British administration.

Now you go to an assembly and seriously claim that such a situation was not an enormous economic advantage for the first one that was industrializing and that led a mercantilist policy of shutting down or destroying any competitor.

And if someone in the audience objects by asking « why then did Britain impose burden on local Indian production and turn India into a raw materials purveyor ? », you will answer « this is not proven », I wish you good luck.

 

[Tanc49]

*which would be bizarre in the first instance anyway because British trade active in India brought Indian textiles and sold them at profit in Europe, and there would be no incentive for them to undermine their own revenue stream.

Recenues for the BEIC yes, but at the cost of destroying English manufacture of wool.
That's why the lobbies forbid the importation of printed cotton, so they could import white or raw cotton and transform it in Britain

 

[Salvador79]

The big picture is "lots of cash in the hands of British/English private market participants" and a culture of "anything goes" with regards to enriching oneself.

British failure in India may or may not be sufficient to derail this; it would be a severe blow, but as long as the socio-economic climate is not yet fundamentally altered (making it more akin to, say, that of Spanish society, for example), the necessary momentum may still exist and kickstart the IR, from which point onwards it may take different courses, specialize on other products etc. without British India, but capitalism's internal dynamics will break through everywhere once they're out of the bottle.

 

[Gloss]

It is quite odd calling a myth the fact that one of the main aspects of colonization was imp’ementation, although never totally, of what was called colonial exclusive.

Now you take a nation with around 10 million people by 1800 : Britain.

And you give it control of a nation or of a galaxy, call it the way you estimate more accurate since India was not then yet a nation, whose population is around 200 million people, or only 100 million if you just take into account the part of I dia that was under direct British administration.

Now you go to an assembly and seriously claim that such a situation was not an enormous economic advantage for the first one that was industrializing and that led a mercantilist policy of shutting down or destroying any competitor.

And if someone in the audience objects by asking « why then did Britain impose burden on local Indian production and turn India into a raw materials purveyor ? », you will answer « this is not proven », I wish you good luck.

There is a difference between closing a market and destryoing your competition purposefully, the thing is that the Indian economy started declining prior to British control of the continent, even if the takeover was coincidentally happening during the same time the British started expanding in Bengal, but it's not surprising considering the cause of the decline and British takeover were the same, plus there were also the various famines happening all over the continent during the mid to late 18th century(not caused by Britain)

 

[PuffyClouds]

My hunch, my reaction is that this might encourage greater emigration from Britain.

 

[PuffyClouds]

A less extrospective, less cash flush Britain might result in greater internal pressures, Britain pushes greater immigration as a way to alleviate potential labor issues.

 

[Thoresby]

The big picture is "lots of cash in the hands of British/English private market participants" and a culture of "anything goes" with regards to enriching oneself.

British failure in India may or may not be sufficient to derail this; it would be a severe blow, but as long as the socio-economic climate is not yet fundamentally altered (making it more akin to, say, that of Spanish society, for example), the necessary momentum may still exist and kickstart the IR, from which point onwards it may take different courses, specialize on other products etc. without British India, but capitalism's internal dynamics will break through everywhere once they're out of the bottle.

The Carribbean Slave Economy had much a bigger impact than India in the crucial run up to the IR in encouraging the development of more sophisticated business structures, the growth and stability of the British Banking system, a culture of entrepreneurial risk taking and an export focus. So while a little less cash flowing in from the EIC will slow things it won't stop them. However in the absence of British India the Atlantic will remain the main focus for the British exports which would probably reduce the textile industry a bit and benefit heavier industry. So a richer Sheffield and a poorer Manchester.

 

[123456789blaaa]

There is a difference between closing a market and destryoing your competition purposefully, the thing is that the Indian economy started declining prior to British control of the continent, even if the takeover was coincidentally happening during the same time the British started expanding in Bengal, but it's not surprising considering the cause of the decline and British takeover were the same, plus there were also the various famines happening all over the continent during the mid to late 18th century(not caused by Britain)

This is highly contested. While the traditional scholarly view (promoted by people like Irfan Habib) has been to say that the 18th c was a time of economic decline and "anarchy" in India, this has been vigorously contested over the last two decades by a group of "revisionist" scholars like Chris Bayly and Burton Stein. Om Prakash puts it well:

The death of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb in 1707 was the symbolic beginning of the process of the collapse of the centralized Mughal empire, the rise of the so-called successor states in provinces such as Awadh, Hyderabad and Bengal, and eventually the takeover of large parts of the country by the English East India Company, beginning with Bengal where it was officially recognized by the Mughal emperor as the diwan of the province in 1765. How did the successor states fare during the eighteenth century both politically and economically? According to scholars such as Irfan Habib and M. Athar Ali, the successor states were not quite able to cope with the changing situation and there was in all probability a general decline in the standard of economic performance. Habib sums up the eighteenth century as a period of ‘reckless rapine, anarchy and foreign conquest’11.


This view has been challenged over the last two decades or so by several of the so-called ‘revisionist’ historians, notably Chris Bayly and Burton Stein. In the words of Stein, most of these scholars “agree that the rural economy over most of the eighteenth century India enjoyed substantial, if uneven, growth notwithstanding both the destructive wars culminating in those which won the subcontinent for the British, and the supposed political disorder in many areas. It is claimed that new, smaller states with efficient tax gathering procedures replaced the Mughal military imperial order, that market networks proliferated and became to a degree interlinked, that a more prosperous agriculture came into being with increased commodity production as a result of rural investments by the revenue farmers of the time, that all of this was buoyed up by an ever-increasing level of international trade in which Indian artisans, merchants and especially bankers played key and lucrative roles, and that this phase of political economy obtained until the first quarter of the nineteenth century”12.


According to Chris Bayly, the chief beneficiaries of economic expansion seem to have been groups between the imperial nobility or their successors, on the one hand, and the vast mass of those who cultivated the land or worked in the towns, on the other. He describes them as “a range of intermediate entities” who were situated between the “revenue-based state and the mass of agrarian society”. Local gentry with military or administrative skills, merchants and financiers were all given opportunities to profit from the new states’ needs, to obtain employment for themselves under them, and to enjoy the patronage that they offered. We noted above the availability of a sophisticated network of finance and credit in the economy. This was made full use of by the successor states. Underwriting the revenue system by enabling the renters to pay on time, and the money to be remitted by bill from where it had been collected to the rulers’ capital or wherever else it was needed was one of the essential services of bankers to the new states.


11 Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556-1707 (Bombay 1963) p.351.

12 Burton Stein, ‘A Decade of Historical Efflorescence’, South Asia Research 10/2 (November 1990), pp.132-33.

From Burton Stein:

During the past few years, several studies have begun to probe the complexities of the late pre-colonial regimes of South Asia. These studies share certain dispositions which, whatever their differences, require that they be considered as a new historiographical view. I am referring to the recent work of C. A. Bayly, D. A. Washbrook, and F. Perlin.2 The departure points that they share are the following. Each considers the century or so from I750 to I850 as a period of transition from the extant old regimes in the various parts of the subcontinent to the colonial regimes which were to dominate Indian history for the next century; each also considers the eighteenth century as a time of economic vigor, even development, and reject the conventional characterization of the time as one of chaos and economic decline; each, finally, sees early colonial regimes as continuations of prior indigenous regimes of the sub- continent. All also reject the postulate-shared alike by previous nationalist and imperialist historians-that the fact of British rule in the late eighteenth century constitutes a fundamental break with prior historical developments.3

Frankly, I'm more inclined to believe the revisionists as their observations accord with other recent scholarly work I've read. The processes of extensive "military-fiscalism" in 18th c India meshes with the sustained process of natural monetization and increasing economic sophistication that was transforming the 18th c Indian economy. One example from David Washbrook:

As noted, in the river valleys, the predominant form of property was kaniachi (later mirasi) right linked to "ancient" privileges derived from connection to the community which had originally cleared the land. But as such rights were effectively bought by "outsiders" merchant Chetties, entrepreneurial members of lower castes?corporate cohesion could come under threat. Noticeably, for example, by the 1770s when the East India Company took control of the Chingleput Jaghir behind Madras city, only half of its villages still practised periodic re-distribution of land among their "shareholders."61 Also, many other rights were starting to be bought and sold in peculiar ways. Palaiyakarrar rights involved the payment of fees in return for "protection." But, by the mid eighteenth century, these were being acquired by people? such as the French Company's dubash, Ananda Ranga Pillai who were from non martial castes (Pillai was an Idayan, shepherd) and had no means of providing protection.62 In effect, and in ways similar to France at the end of the ancient regime, market forces were penetrating and eating away at the rationale of an erstwhile "feudal" law.

In terms of the negative effects of British rule on India, it's important to avoid painting the entire period with the same brush. The nature of EIC rule in Bengal in 1770 was very different to that of EIC rule in 1840 which is very different to British rule in 1890. For example, scholars have noted that there were significant changes in EIC rule by the 1820's specifically in moving towards a more typically "colonial" style oriented towards the British metropole rather than simply being a region ruled by a company.

One thing that's very interesting to point out is that in modern times, you can actually predict which regions of India are doing better based on borders from conquered 18th century states that largely ceased to exist in the early 19th century. See the absolutely fascinating dissertation Ancient Polities, Modern States :

Political science is concerned with the study of polities. However, remarkably few scholars are familiar with the polities of the premodern era, such as Vijayanagara, Siam, Abyssinia, the Kingdoms of Kongo or Mutapa, or the Mysore or Maratha empires. This dissertation examines the legacies of precolonial polities in India, during the period from 1707 to 1857. I argue that, contrary to the widespread perception that the Indian subcontinent was a pre-state society, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a time of rapid defensive modernization across the subcontinent, driven by the requirements of gunpowder weaponry and interstate warfare among South Asian regimes and against European colonial powers. These changes included the broadening and deepening of the tax base, consolidation of territorial control, reorganization of domestic militaries to use infantry and gunpowder weapons, rationalization of the administration through use of accounts and printed records , and the professionalization and functional differentiation of the executive branch.

I then trace the boundaries of precolonial eighteenth-century South Asian polities, in order to show that districts of India that lie narrowly within the boundary lines of historically centralized states perform significantly better today on a wide variety of district-level indicators of state effectiveness than those narrowly outside these boundaries, despite the fact that these borders largely ceased to exist in the early nineteenth century. These estimated effects are robust to a wide variety of controls, placebo tests for border displacement, the exclusion of individual polities, and controls for the boundaries of India’s contemporary federal states. I verify the persistent legacy of precolonial states using a combination of archival research, district-level colonial data on taxation and public goods from 1853 to 1901, and a field test of bureaucratic responsiveness conducted in the state of Karnataka. Using extensive archival research on the fiscal and bureaucratic structure of Indian states in the eighteenth century, I show that following the decline of the Mughal Empire, warfare between “challenger states” prompted an accumulation of bureaucratic and fiscal capacity at the local level, and that this capacity has persisted through the colonial era to the present day. In contrast to “bottom-up” theories of state capacity which root institutional strength in societal characteristics such as ethnic homogeneity, social capital, or land equality, it is argued that government effectiveness is cumulatively built through long-term historical investments in state capacity, and that, in India, an important phase of investment occurred during the warring states period of the eighteenth century.

Finally, I show that this relationship exists beyond the South Asian context, both in cross-country regressions of the effect of state antiquity on contemporary state capacity, and by conducting a subnational historical analysis within districts of the Former Soviet Union. I conclude that augmenting the state’s power to tax, regulate, or conscript is, in Weber’s phrase, “a long and slow boring of hard boards”, and the resources required in order to attain a functioning state - bureaucratic infrastructure, norms of compliance, and affective loyalty - are accumulated only very gradually. Yet where long-extant political regimes were successful in monitoring, coercing, and mobilizing citizens towards state goals they generate a reservoir of legitimacy and compliance, that is essential for making states work in the world today.

Given that British colonial rule strangled and reversed this kind of military fiscalism and institutional development (sometimes to the point of actually turning the subject state into a failed state-see Awadh), I really don't think the question of the effects of negative British rule can simply be brushed off.

 

[The Professor]

Re British India, I think one needs to distinguish saying "British rule had negative effects on local industry" from "all negative effects on local industry were due to British rule".

Regarding the OP I think I agree that a smaller British India would mean a slower British IR due to a smaller (and later captive) market but I don't think it's easy to say it would be proportional. Especially if a smaller India means more focus on other markets. It's entirely possible the IR stays the same just that the negative/positive effects shift locations.

 

[John Fredrick Parker]

It's entirely possible the IR stays the same just that the negative/positive effects shift locations.

If that is the case, I would be very interested in what that shift would look like, and how it, in itself, would change the course of history.

 

[Salvador79]

Difficult. The only two other places of comparable promise would be China and the Ottoman Empire.

 

[Optical_Illusion]

One thing that's very interesting to point out is that in modern times, you can actually predict which regions of India are doing better based on borders from conquered 18th century states that largely ceased to exist in the early 19th century. See the absolutely fascinating dissertation Ancient Polities, Modern States

Really seems difficult to test that properly; seems like you'd want to test it by modeling whether older measures, 15th-16th century and 13th-14th century, etc. have the same predictive value, and if 17th-18th century states outperform, is this to a larger degree than comparing the two earlier time series (e.g. is 17th-18th>15th-16th more so or less to than larger degree than 15th-16th over 13th-14th?).

If you don't have a large superiority of 17th-18th century measures relative to the time series, then you end up with a "boring" anthropic explanation - e.g. what existed in the past tends to persist in the present. If we're just in a situation of going "17th-18th century state formation measures predict present day political variables, but we're not going to test whether these reflect deeper trends", then it seem hard to make a positive case that the 17th-18th period specifically is important.

 

[123456789blaaa]

Really seems difficult to test that properly; seems like you'd want to test it by modeling whether older measures, 15th-16th century and 13th-14th century, etc. have the same predictive value, and if 17th-18th century states outperform, is this to a larger degree than comparing the two earlier time series (e.g. is 17th-18th>15th-16th more so or less to than larger degree than 15th-16th over 13th-14th?).

If you don't have a large superiority of 17th-18th century measures relative to the time series, then you end up with a "boring" anthropic explanation - e.g. what existed in the past tends to persist in the present. If we're just in a situation of going "17th-18th century state formation measures predict present day political variables, but we're not going to test whether these reflect deeper trends", then it seem hard to make a positive case that the 17th-18th period specifically is important.

Sorry, what do you mean by "older measures"?