Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T20:12:29.077Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

SKILL, CRAFT AND HISTORIES OF INDUSTRIALISATION IN EUROPE AND ASIA*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2014

Maxine Berg
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

It is time to reexamine craft and small-scale manufacture within our histories of industrialisation, both West and East, and to reflect on the long survival and adaptation of artisanal production even within our globalised world of production and consumption. Historians since the 1950s have addressed craft, skill and labour-intensive production in historical frameworks such as ‘the rise of the factory system’, ‘proto-industrialisation’ and ‘flexible specialisation’. More recently, they have devised other concepts which include labour and skill-intensive production such as ‘industrious revolution’, ‘the great divergence’, ‘knowledge economies’, ‘East Asian development paths’ and ‘cycles of production’. This paper surveys this historiography of craft and skill in models of industrialisation. It then reflects on small-scale industrial structures in current globalisation, emphasising the continued significance of craft and skill over a long history of global transitions. It gives close examination to one region, Gujarat, and its recent industrial and global history. The paper compares industrial production for East India Company trade in the eighteenth century to the recent engagement of the artisans of the Kachchh district of Gujarat in global markets. It draws on the oral histories of seventy-five artisan families to discuss the past and future of craft and skill in the industry of the global economy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 24 , December 2014 , pp. 127 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

The author wishes to thank the European Research Council, under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2103) ERC Grant Agreement no. 249362.

References

1 Berg, Maxine, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy 1815–1848 (Cambridge, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 The image ‘A Tremendous Sacrifice’ by George Cruikshank was published in Our Own Times in 1846. The illustration was accompanied by the text: ‘The monster steam swallowed up whole districts of spinners and weavers as he strode over the land. Every sort of manufactured article fell in price as the great magician…caused the supply to exceed the demand…A very large class of the public, therefore, eagerly demand products from human labour at prices as low as those sent forth by machinery.’

3 Berg, Maxine, ‘Global History: Approaches and New Directions’, in Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the Twenty-first Century, ed. Berg, Maxine (Oxford, 2011), 1–18, at 11Google Scholar.

4 Pomeranz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000)Google Scholar. Also see Vries, Jan de, ‘The Great Divergence after Ten Years: Justly Celebrated yet Hard to Believe’, Historically Speaking, 4 (2011), 10–25Google Scholar.

5 Allen, Robert, Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2011), 37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Ibid., 51.

7 Parthasarathi, Prasannan, Why the West Grew Rich and Asia Did Not (Cambridge, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Pomeranz, Kenneth, ‘Is there an East Asian Development Path? Long Term Comparisons, Constraints and Continuities’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 44, 3 (2001), 322–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kaoru Sugihara, ‘The European Miracle in an East Asian Perspective’, in Writing the History of the Global, ed. Berg, 129–44.

9 Cannadine, David, ‘The Present and the Past in the English Industrial Revolution 1880–1980’, Past and Present, 103 (1984), 131–72, at 132CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Ibid., 154. See Kuznets, Simon, ‘Towards a Theory of Economic Growth’, in National Policy for Economic Welfare at Home and Abroad, ed. Lekachman, Robert, Columbia University Bicentennial Conference Series (New York, 1955)Google Scholar; Rostow, W. W., The Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge, 1960)Google Scholar.

11 Landes, David, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, 1969)Google Scholar.

12 See Paul Sweezy et al., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, introduction by R. H. Hilton (1976).

13 Marglin, Stephen, ‘What Do Bosses Do’, Review of Radical Political Economics, 6, 2 (1974), 60–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Part ii, Review of Radical Political Economics, 7, 1 (1975), 20–37.

14 See Berg, Maxine, Hudson, Pat and Sonenscher, Michael, ‘Manufacture in Town and Country before the Factory’, in Manufacture in Town and Country before the Factory, ed. Berg, Maxine, Hudson, Pat and Sonenscher, Michael (Cambridge, 1983), 1–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Ogilvie, Sheilagh and Cerman, Markus, ‘The Theories of Proto-industrialization’, in European Proto-industrialization, ed. Ogilvie, Sheilagh and Cerman, Markus (Cambridge, 1996), 1–11, at 9–10Google Scholar.

16 Jűrgen Schlumbohm, ‘Proto-industrialization – A Balance Sheet’, in European Proto-industrialization, ed. Ogilvie and Cerman, 12–22, at 21.

17 Perlin, Frank, ‘Proto-industrialization and Pre-colonial South Asia’, Past and Present, 98 (1983), 30–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Vries, Jan de, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Jones, E. L., Growth Recurring: Economic Change in World History (Oxford, 1988), ch. 9Google Scholar.

20 Berg, Maxine, The Age of Manufacture: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain 1700–1820 (1985; 2nd edn, Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar.

21 Sewell, William, ‘The Empire of Fashion and the Rise of Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France’, Past and Present, 206 (2010), 81–120, at 101–4, 110–13, 116CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Sabel, Charles and Zeitlin, Jonathan, ‘Historical Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets and Technology in Nineteenth Century Industrialization’, Past and Present, 108 (1985), 133–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Piore, M. J. and Sabel, C. F., The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities of Prosperity (New York, 1984)Google Scholar.

23 Frőbel, Folker, Heinrichs, Jűrgen and Kreye, Otto, The New International Division of Labour: Structural Unemployment in Industrialized Countries and Industrialization in Developing Countries (Cambridge, 1980)Google Scholar.

24 Mokyr, Joel, The Gifts of Athena. Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, 2002)Google Scholar; Mokyr, Joel, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1850 (New Haven, 2010)Google Scholar.

25 Epstein, S. R., ‘Craft Guilds, Apprenticeship and Technological Change in Pre-industrial Europe’, in Guilds, Innovation and the European Economy, 1400–1800, ed. Epstein, S. R. and Prak, M. (Cambridge, 2008), 52–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Parthasarathi, Why the West Grew Rich, 187; Roy, Tirthankar, ‘Knowledge and Divergence from the Perspective of Early Modern India’, Journal of Global History, 3 (2008), 361–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Washbrook, David, ‘India in the Early Modern World Economy: Modes of Production, Reproduction and Exchange’, Journal of Global History, 2 (2007), 87–112CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Kaoru Sugihara, ‘The East Asian Path of Economic Development: A Long-Term Perspective’, in The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150 and 50 Year Perspectives, ed. Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita and Mark Selden (2003), 78–123. Also see Sugihara, ‘The European Miracle in an East Asian Perspective’.

28 Amsden, Alice, The Rise of ‘the Rest’: Challenges to the West from Late-Industrializing Economies (Oxford, 2001), 1, 15–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 32.

29 Ibid., 135–8.

30 McGowan, Abigail, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India (New York, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haynes, D., Small Town Capitalism in Western India: Artisans, Merchants, and the Making of the Informal Economy, 1870–1960 (Cambridge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty, 136–44. Also see the discussion of displaying and collecting Indian craft skills in silk manufacture in international exhibitions from the mid-nineteenth century in King, Brenda M., ‘Exhibiting India’, in Silk and Empire ed. King, Brenda M. (Manchester, 2005), ch. 6Google Scholar.

31 See P. Parthasarathi, ‘The History of Indian Economic History’, unpublished paper, 2012, to be published in Globalizing Economic History. Multiple Roads from the Past, ed. Francesco Baldizzoni and Pat Hudson, forthcoming; Morris, M. D., ‘Towards a Reinterpretation of Nineteenth-Century Indian Economic History’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 5 (1968), 1–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Raychaudhuri, T., ‘A Reinterpretation of Nineteenth-Century Indian Economic History?’, Indian and Economic and Social History Review, 5 (1968), 77–100Google Scholar; Simmons, C., ‘“De-industrialization”, Industrialization and the Indian Economy, c. 1850–1947’, Modern Asian Studies, 19 (1985), 593–622CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Bagchi, A. K., “De-industrialization in India in the Nineteenth Century: Some Theoretical Implications’. Journal of Development Studies, 12 (1976), 135–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Habib, Irfan, ‘Studying a Colonial Economy – Without Perceiving Colonialism’, Modern Asian Studies, 19, 3 (1985), 355–81, at 360–1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Parthasarathi, ‘The History of Indian Economic History’. See Sarkar, Sumit, ‘The Many Worlds of Indian History’, in Sarkar, , Writing Social History (Delhi, 1997), 1–49, at 37Google Scholar.

34 Roy, Tirthankar, Traditional Industry in the Economy of Colonial India (Cambridge, 1999), 3–6, 232–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Ibid., 7.

36 Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, ‘Industrialization in India before 1947: Conventional Approaches and Alternative Perspectives’, Modern Asian Studies, 18, 3 (1985), 623–68, at 640–1, 668Google Scholar.

37 Ibid., 638–9.

38 Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay 1900–1940 (Cambridge, 1994), 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Ibid.; Haynes, D., Small Town Capitalism in Western India: Artisans, Merchants, and the Making of the Informal Economy, 1870–1960 (Cambridge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism, 74–9.

41 Ibid., 245–9.

42 Ibid., 261–5.

43 Ibid., 267–71.

44 Ibid., 277, 271.

45 Haynes, Small Town Capitalism, 265, 272–7, 311.

46 Ibid., 6.

47 Ibid., 24–36.

48 Liebl, M. and Roy, T., “Handmade in India: Preliminary Analysis of Crafts Producers and Crafts Production’, Economic and Political Weekly, 37 (27 Dec. 2003), 5366–76Google Scholar.

49 The current name of the region is Kachchh. The name during the colonial and early post-colonial period was Kutch. Both names are used here; Kachchh when referring to the region now, and Kutch when referring to it in the colonial period.

50 Arjun Appadurai refers to this in his more recent work. See, for a brief introduction, ‘How Histories Make Geographies: Circulation and Context in a Global Perspective’, Transcultural Studies, 1 (2010), 4–13.

51 See Gerritsen, Anne, ‘Ceramics for Local and Global Markets: Jingdezhen's Agora of Technologies’, in Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History, ed. Schaefer, Dagmar and Bray, Francesca (Leiden, 2011), 164–86Google Scholar.

52 Barnes, Ruth, Indian Block-Printed Textiles in Egypt: The Newberry Collection in the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford, 1977)Google Scholar.

53 The Ashburnham hangings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and embroideries at Hardwick Hall are examples. See Rosemary Crill, Indian Embroidery (1999), 8; Rosemary Crill, Textiles from India: The Global Trade (2006); Edwards, Eliuned, Textiles and Dress of Gujarat (Ahmedabad, 2011), 162–9Google Scholar.

54 Order Lists of the English East Indian Company: E/3/96/18, India Office Records, British Library. Derived from Europe's Asian Centuries EIC trade database, see www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/ghcc/eac/.

55 J. Tod, Travels in Western India Embracing a Visit to the Sacred Mounts of the Jains… (1839), 449.

56 Postans, Marianna, Cutch or Random Sketches Taken during a Residence in One of the Northern Provinces of Western India Interspersed with Legends and Traditions (1839; new edn, New Delhi, 2001), 173Google Scholar.

57 Haynes, Douglas, ‘Just like a Family? Recalling the Relations of Production in the Textile Industries of Surat and Bhiwandi, 1940–60’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 33, 1–2 (1999), 141–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Jones, M.et al., ‘Food Globalization in Prehistory’, World Archaeology, 43, 4 (2011), 665–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sibum, H. O., ‘Reworking the Mechanical Value of Heat: Instruments of Precision and Gestures of Accuracy in Early Victorian England, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 26, 1 (1995), 73–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 An Oral History of the Crafts in Kachchh: www.warwick.ac.uk/go/eac/oralhistoryproject. The interviews cited in this section of the paper are all summarised on this website.

60 Interview with Dr Ismail Khatri, Ajrakhpur, 15 Feb. 2012; interview with Abdul Jabbar Khatri, Dhamadka, 8 Nov. 2012.

61 Interview with Kanji Devji Maheshwari, Zura, 26 May 2012.

62 Interviews with Haroon Ibrahim Maniyar and Rameez Imtiyaz Maniyar, 25 May 2012.

63 Interview with Ramji Devraj Marwada, Hodko, 29 May 2012.

64 Interview with Shakeel Ahmed Mohammed Qasim Khatri, Mundra, 28 May 2012.

65 Interviews with Danabhai Samatbhai Bhadru, Sarli, 27 May 2012, and Patthubhai and Umara Kana Marwada, 29 May 2012.

66 Interview with Julekha Hussain Khatri, Bhuj, 26 May 2012.

67 Interview with Maghibai Khimoo Manodhiya, Bhujodi, 30 May, 2012

68 Interviews with Shakeel Qasim Khatri, Mundra; Sale Mohammed Jacab, Zura, 25 May 2012.

69 Interview with Samatbhai Vankar, Sarli, 27 May 2012.

70 Interview with Umara Kana Marwada Kharet, no date or place, and Haroon Ibrahim Maniyar, Bhuj, 25 May 2012.

71 Interview with Abdul Jabbar Khatri and Usman Musa, Dhamadka, 8 Nov. 2012.

72 Interview with Hanifa Yusuf Sumra and Jamila Ramju Sumra, Mandvi, 16 Feb. 2012.

73 Interview with Abdul Rashid and Osman Abdulla Bhatti, Mota Reha, 17 Feb. 2012.

74 Interview with Ismail Khatri, 15 Feb. 2012.

75 Interviews with Ismail Khatri, 15 Feb. 2012, and Abdul Jabbar Khatri, 8 Nov. 2012.

76 Interview with Jabbar Mohammad Hussain Khatri, Bhuj, 20 Feb. 2012.

77 Interview with Sugrabai Mohhamed Farooq Khatri, Bhuj, 9 Nov. 2012.

78 Interview with Julekha Khatri, 26 May 2012.

79 Interview with Kantilal Samatbhai Vankar, Sarli, 27 May 2012.

80 Interview with Ramji Devraj Marwada, Hodko, 29 May 2012.

81 Interview with Jan Mohammed and Kanji Devji Maheshwari, Zura, 26 May, 2012.

82 Interview with Shakeel Ahmed Mohammed Qasim Khatri, 28 May 2012.

83 Ibid.

84 Interviews with Abdul Rashid and Osman Abdulla Bhatti, Mota Reha, 17 Feb. 2012.