1 - Introduction

Summary

The questions

Two sets of problems motivated this study on traditional industry, or the artisans, in colonial India. The first arises in South Asian historiography, and the second in comparative development. The experience of the artisan has long been used to illustrate opinions about the impact of British rule on the economy of India and, therefore, has been a controversial topic in Indian historiography. The evidence on the artisan, however, is ambiguous. There are too many variations by region, industry and period to permit easy or uniform generalizations. The question remains: can a sufficiently general and convincing account of the artisanate be found? The book is primarily an attempt to answer this question. The answer proposed here leads to a desire to see South Asia in a larger context. The book suggests that traditional industry modernized and played a creative role in Indian industrialization. That traditional industry can play such a role is a familiar theme in the economic and social history of early modern Europe and prewar East Asia. A question naturally follows: which elements in the South Asian story are special to the region, and which shared with industrialization in general?

The period of the study is, roughly, from the 1870s to the 1930s. Occasionally, more recent trends will be cited for comparison. The raw material consists of descriptions of industries in which artisan enterprise was significant in this period, and remained so beyond the period.