1 Headrick, Daniel R., The tentacles of progress: technology transfer in the age of imperialism, 1850–1940, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988Google Scholar; MacLeod, Roy and Kumar, Deepak, eds. Technology and the Raj: Western technology and technical transfers to India, 1700–1947, New Delhi: Sage, 1995.Google Scholar

2 See especially MacKenzie, Donald and Wajcman, Judy, eds. The social shaping of technology: how the refrigerator got its hum, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985Google Scholar; Bijker, Wiebe E., Hughes, Thomas P., and Pinch, Trevor J., eds. The social construction of technological systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987Google Scholar; Bijker, Wiebe E., Of bicycles, bakelites, and bulbs: towards a theory of sociotechnical change, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.Google Scholar

3 Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch, Social construction, p. 3.

5 Bayly, C. A., The birth of the modern world, 1780–1914: global connections and comparisons, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, pp. 1–2Google Scholar; Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.Google Scholar

6 Andrew Godley, ‘The global diffusion of the sewing machine, 1850–1914’, Research in Economic History, 20, 2001, pp. 1–45; idem, ‘Selling the sewing machine around the world: Singer’s international marketing strategies, 1850–1920’, Enterprise and Society, 7, 2, 2006, pp. 266–313.

7 Davies, Robert Bruce, Peacefully working to conquer the world: Singer sewing machines in foreign markets, 1854–1920, New York: Arno Press, 1976, p. vGoogle Scholar. See also Brandon, Ruth, Singer and the sewing machine: a capitalist romance, London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1977.Google Scholar

8 Davies, Peacefully working, pp. 5–7, 25, 78.

9 Ibid., p. 99.

10 Godley, ‘Global diffusion’, pp. 22–3.

11 Pioneer (Allahabad), 1 January 1905, p. 34.

12 Andrew Gordon, ‘Selling the American way: the Singer sales system in Japan, 1900–1938’, Business History Review, 82, 4, 2008, p. 694, table 1.

13 Report of the Indian Tariff Board on the sewing machine industry, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1947, p. 12.

14 Price data from Annual statement of the sea-borne trade and navigation of British India, Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India (published annually by the Government of India) for the given years.

15 Doyley, Charles, The European in India: from a collection of drawings, London: Edward Orme, 1813, pl. 13Google Scholar; Saloni Mathur, ‘Wanted native views: collecting colonial postcards of India’, in Burton, Antoinette, ed. Gender, sexuality and colonial modernities, London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 104–5Google Scholar.

16 On Victorian representations of Indian labour, see Barringer, Tim, Men at work: art and labour in Victorian Britain, London: Yale University Press, 2005.Google Scholar Judith C. Coffin, ‘Credit, consumption, and images of women’s desires: selling the sewing machine in late nineteenth-century France’, French Historical Studies, 18, 3, 1994, p. 759, notes how, by the late nineteenth century, European men were rarely shown using sewing machines: ‘a man at a sewing machine became a kind of anthropological flash card; instantly recognizable as foreign’.

17 Sinha, Mrinalini, Colonial masculinity: the ‘manly Englishman’ and the ‘effeminate Bengali’ in the late nineteenth century, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.Google Scholar

18 There is a particularly repugnant depiction of the darzi in E. H. A. [Edward Hamilton Aitken], Behind the bungalow, 7th edition, Calcutta: W. Thacker, 1900, pp. 105–13.

19 Steel, F. A. and Gardner, G., The complete Indian housekeeper and cook, 7th edition, London: William Heinemann, 1909, p. 97.Google Scholar

20 Parker, Rozsika, The subversive stitch: embroidery and the making of the feminine, London: Women’s Press, 1996.Google Scholar

21 Doyley, European in India, p. G2; Campbell, James M., ed. Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency: vol. 9, part 1: Gujarat population: Hindus, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1901, p. 18.Google Scholar

22 Allen, Charles, ed. Plain tales from the Raj: images of British India in the twentieth century, London: André Deutsch, 1975, p. 107.Google Scholar

23 See, for instance, the photograph of J. P. Wildeblood and his household servants at Bareilly, c.1892, reproduced in Bayly, C. A., ed., The Raj: India and the British, 1600–1947, London: National Portrait Gallery, 1990, p. 257.Google Scholar

24 Baines, Athelstane, Ethnography (castes and tribes), Strasburg: Trübner, 1912, p. 97Google Scholar; Rose, H. A., comp. A glossary of the tribes and castes of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province, Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1911, p. 223.Google Scholar

25 This argument for the adaptation and transformation of ‘traditional’ working practices in a modern economy parallels that made for the handloom weaving industry: Roy, Tirthankar, Traditional industry in the economy of colonial India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 Playne, Somerset, comp. The Bombay Presidency, the United Provinces, the Punjab, etc.: their history, people, commerce, and natural resources, London: Foreign and Colonial Compiling and Publishing Company, 1920, pp. 156, 165.Google Scholar

27 Adyanthaya, N. K., Report of an enquiry into the family budgets of industrial workers in Madras city, Madras: Superintendent, Government Press, 1938, pp. 44–7.Google Scholar

28 J. Masselos, ‘The discourse from the other side: perceptions of science and technology in western India in the nineteenth century’, in Wagle, N. K., ed. Writers, editors and reformers: social and political transformations of Maharashtra, 1830–1930, New Delhi: Manohar, 1999, p. 122.Google Scholar

29 Rudyard Kipling, Kim, London: Macmillan, 1981 (first published 1901), p. 214.

30 Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable, New Delhi: Penguin, 2001 (first published 1935), p. 35.

31 Census of India, 1911, vol. 14, Punjab, part 1, report, Lahore: Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1912, p. 507.

32 Government of Bengal, Report on the survey of cottage industries in Bengal, 2nd edition, Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1929, p. 102.Google Scholar

33 Read, Margaret, From field to factory: an introductory study of the Indian peasant turned factory hand, London: Student Christian Movement, 1927, p. 22.Google Scholar

34 Baines, Ethnography, p. 98.

35 Marx, Leo, The machine in the garden: technology and the pastoral ideal in America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1964.Google Scholar

36 Vernède, R. E., An ignorant in India, Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1911, p. 131Google Scholar; Mathews, Basil, India reveals herself, London: Oxford University Press, 1937, p. 176.Google Scholar

37 Feaver, George, ed. The Webbs in Asia: the 1911–12 travel diary, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992, pp. 217, 289.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 Rao, D. Narayana, Report on the survey of cottage industries in the Madras Presidency, Madras: Superintendent, Government Press, 1929, p. 205.Google Scholar

39 Bengal, Report, pp. 52, 78.

40 Census of India, 1911, vol. 14, part 1, p. 507.

41 Watson, J. Forbes, The textile manufactures and the costumes of the people of India, London: W. H. Allen, 1867, pp. 3–4.Google Scholar

42 Ibid., p. 12. Watson’s claim was often repeated: e.g. Russell, R. V., The tribes and castes of the Central Provinces of India, London: Macmillan, 1916, vol. 2, p. 467Google Scholar. Godley, ‘Global diffusion’, p. 29, similarly remarks that ‘in both South Africa and India the majority of the population had little use for a sewing machine; typical native clothing required little machine stitching’.

43 There is a striking contrast here with Japan where, according to Gordon, ‘Selling’, sewing machines were regarded as unsuitable for making indigenous clothing and were largely restricted to the growing adoption of Western dress.

44 Punjab district gazetteers, vol. 30A: Lahore district, Lahore: Superintendent, Government Printing, Punjab, 1916, p. 149.

45 Suniti Kumar Chatterji, ‘Dress in India’, March of India, 8, 5, 1956, p. 41.

46 Himani Bannerji, ‘Textile prison: the discourse of shame (lajja) in the attire of the gentlewoman (bhadramahila) in colonial Bengal’, South Asia Research, 13, 1, 1993, pp. 27–45. There is a growing literature on consumerism in India: see Haynes, Douglas E., McGowan, Abigail, Roy, Tirthankar, and Yanagisawa, Haruka, eds. Towards a history of consumption in South Asia, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010.Google Scholar

47 Hardgrave, Robert L., The Nadars of Tamilnad: the political culture of a community in change, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969, pp. 59–70.Google Scholar

48 Karlekar, Malavika, Voices from within: early personal narratives of Bengali women, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 165–6.Google Scholar

49 Marx, Karl, Capital: an abridged edition, ed. David McLellan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 283–5.Google Scholar

50 Karin Hausen, ‘Technical progress and women’s labour in the nineteenth century: the social history of the sewing machine’, in Iggers, Georg, ed. The social history of politics: critical perspectives in West German historical writing since 1945, Leamington Spa: Berg, 1985, pp. 259–81; Coffin, ‘Credit’, pp. 749–83.Google Scholar

51 Brandon, Singer, pp. 122–5; Tim Putnam, ‘The sewing machine comes home’, in Burman, Barbara, ed. The culture of sewing: gender, consumption and home dressmaking, Oxford: Berg, 1999, pp. 269–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52 On the importance of Singer’s marketing practices, see Godley, ‘Selling’, pp. 266–313. Gordon, ‘Selling’, also demonstrates the difficulties that this attempt at uniformity might entail in specific national markets such as Japan.

53 Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, WI, Singer Archive (hereafter SA), box 89/3, John Mitchell, Bombay, to Singer, London, 20 April 1888.

54 SA, box 88/8, D. Davidson, Madras, to George R. McKenzie, 20 May 1884.

55 SA, box 89/3, Mitchell, ‘Statement’ (1887).

56 Bannerji, ‘Textile prison’, p. 35.

57 Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, SIL10–679-001. On Singer’s ‘civilizing mission’, see Davies, Peacefully working, pp. 97–9.

58 SA, box 89/1, Patell to McKenzie, 5 January 1887. See Dobbin, Christine, Urban leadership in western India: politics and communities in Bombay city, 1840–1885, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972Google Scholar, for his uncle, Framji Nasarvanji Patell.

59 The phrase was Patell’s: SA, box 88/8, Patell to McKenzie, 17 November 1881. The connection between sewing machines and bicycles, in terms of manufacturing and retail sales, has often been remarked upon: e.g. Coffin, ‘Credit’, pp. 767–8.

60 SA, box 88/8, Patell to McKenzie, 11 January 1884. In 1864 only 214 of the city’s tailors were Parsis: Kulke, Eckehard, The Parsis in India: a minority as agent of social change, New Delhi: Vikas, 1974, p. 53.Google Scholar

61 SA, box 88/8, Patell to McKenzie, 17 November and 15 December 1881, 18 July 1882.

62 SA, box 88/8, Patell to McKenzie, 3 July 1883.

63 In 1887 Singer sold 1,093 machines (599 of them to Indian customers), compared to 1,508 offered on hire purchase (885 to Indians): SA, box 89/3, Mitchell, Bombay, to Singer, London, 20 April 1888.

64 Campbell, Gazetteer, pp. 182–3; Haynes, Douglas E., Rhetoric and ritual in colonial India: the shaping of a public culture in Surat city, 1852–1928, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991, pp. 68–70.Google Scholar

65 SA, box 89/3, Mitchell’s notes (1888); SA, box 89/4, Patell to Singer, New York, 31 January 1890; SA, box 89/5, Patell to Singer, New York, 7 November 1901.

66 SA, box 88/8, Patell to Singer, New York, 12 July 1886; SA, box 89/7, Singer, Bombay, ‘List of offices in India, Burma and Ceylon’, 1905. For the sewing machine in Ceylon, see Wickramasinghe, Nira, Dressing the colonised body: politics, clothing and identity in Sri Lanka, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2003, pp. 54–7.Google Scholar

67 SA, box 89/8. For Urdu and Tamil instruction books, see the Smithsonian Institution catalogue.

68 SA, box 88/8, Edward M. Lang, Bombay, to Singer, London, 17 July 1883; Lang, Rangoon, to McKenzie, 10 August 1883; Davidson, Calcutta, to McKenzie 1883.

69 Fisher, Fred B., India’s silent revolution, New York: Macmillan, 1919, p. 45.Google Scholar

70 SA, box 88/8, Patell to McKenzie, 20 November 1883.

71 SA, box 88/8, Patell to McKenzie, 15 July 1884.

72 SA, box 88/8, Davidson to McKenzie, 29 December 1883; Patell to McKenzie, 16 January 1885.

73 As Godley, ‘Selling’, p. 269, notes, Singer’s international success had less to do with advertising than with ‘its direct selling organization knocking on people’s doors all around the world’.

74 SA, box 88/8, Patell to McKenzie, 16 January 1885.

75 Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, SIL10–679-001.

76 Bombay Chronicle, 20 December 1947, p. 10.

77 Parker, Subversive stitch.

78 I am grateful to Clare Anderson for alerting me to a photograph of Bhantu women at work on their Singers in the Andamans from the Centre of South Asian Studies, Cambridge, Ferrar collection, album 1, p. 57.

79 Rose, Glossary, pp. 378–9; cf. Sandria Freitag, ‘Sansiahs and the state: the changing nature of “crime” and “justice” in nineteenth-century British India’, in Anderson, Michael R. and Guha, Sumit, eds. Changing concepts of rights and justice in South Asia, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 82–113.Google Scholar

80 Jang, Anees, Unveiling India, New Delhi: Penguin, 1987, pp. 95–9.Google Scholar

81 H. D. Shourie, ‘Homes for the unattached’, March of India, 4, 3, 1952, pp. 23–4.

82 Dube, S. C., India’s changing villages: human factors in community development, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958, pp. 54, 78, and pl. 12 facing p. 96Google Scholar.

83 Jaffrey, Madhur, Climbing the mango trees: a memoir of a childhood in India, London: Ebury Press, 2005, p. 143Google Scholar. For tailors and their machines in middle-class households, see also Mehta, Ved, Face to face, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978, p. 97.Google Scholar

84 Dutt, G. S., A woman of India: being the life of Saroj Nalini, 2nd edition, London: Hogarth Press, 1929, pp. 77, 88–109, 126–8, 134.Google Scholar

85 Malhotra, Anshu, Gender, caste, and religious identities: restructuring class in colonial Punjab, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 137.Google Scholar

86 Karen Offen, ‘“Powered by a woman’s foot”: a documentary introduction to the sexual politics of the sewing machine in nineteenth-century France’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 11, 2, 1988, pp. 93–101; Coffin, ‘Credit’, pp. 766–79. The moral and educational value of sewing and sewing-machine use for women was invoked in many other Asian and Middle Eastern societies, including in Japan and Egypt: see Gordon, ‘Selling’, p. 688; Russell, Mona L., Creating the new Egyptian woman: consumerism, education, and national identity, 1863–1922, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, chs. 6 and 8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

87 Mehta, Face, p. 96.

88 Sharma, Ursula, Women’s work, class, and the urban household: a study of Shimla, north India, London: Tavistock Publications, 1986, p. 66.Google Scholar

89 Chandra, Bipan, The rise and growth of economic nationalism in India: economic policies of Indian national leadership, 1880–1905, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1966Google Scholar; Gadgil, D. R., The industrial evolution of India in recent times, 1860–1939, 5th edition, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1972Google Scholar; Ray, Rajat K., Industrialization in India: growth and conflict in the private corporate sector, 1914–47, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982.Google Scholar

90 Sarkar, Sumit, The Swadeshi movement in Bengal, 1903–1908, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973.Google Scholar

91 Tripathi, Amales, The extremist challenge: India between 1890 and 1910, Bombay: Orient Longman, 1967, p. 111.Google Scholar

92 M. Gandhi, ‘Discussion with G. Ramachandran’, in Collected works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 25, New Delhi: Publications Division, 1967, p. 251.

93 Joshi, Arun, Lala Shri Ram: a study on entrepreneurship and industrial management, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1975, pp. 277–83.Google Scholar

94 Ibid., pp. 286–9; Ministry of Commerce, Report of the Indian Tariff Board on the machine tools industry, Simla: Government of India Press, 1948.Google Scholar

95 Joshi, Lala Shri Ram, pp. 285–6.

96 Indian Tariff Board (1947), pp. 2–4; Report of the Indian Tariff Board on the continuance of protection to the sewing machine industry, New Delhi: Manager of Publications, 1950.

97 Indian Tariff Board (1947), p. 13.

98 M. Narayanaswami and V. Sri Ram, The garment industry in India, New Delhi: Economic and Scientific Research Foundation, n.d. (1972), pp. 44–5.

99 Indian Tariff Board (1950), p. 11.