The growth of cotton textile imports into Britain from India opened up new opportunities for import substitution as the new cloths, patterns and designs became increasingly fashionable. However, high silver wages in Britain as a result of high productivity in other tradable goods and services, meant that British producers of cotton textiles could not use labour-intensive Indian production methods. The growth in British labour productivity that resulted from the search for labour-saving technological progress meant that unit labour costs became lower than in India despite the much higher wages in Britain. However, the full effects of the rise in British productivity were delayed until after the Napoleonic Wars by increasing wage and raw cotton costs before supply adjusted to the major increase in demand for inputs. On balance, the effects of British protective measures were neutral.

Cotton textiles and the great divergence: lancashire, india and shifting competitive advantage, 1600-1850

The laws of corporate groups such as merchants, traders, religious specialists, soldiers, etc. are examined on the basis of both the normative Hindu legal texts and epigraphical sources from various parts of India. Other recent studies arguing that medieval India experienced an increasing integration of polity and society over larger core areas are corroborated from the perspective of law and legal institutions. Methodological and theoretical propositions are also raised to argue that Hindu legal texts, known as Dharmasastra, are essential to any history of law and society in medieval India, but only when their nature and purpose are properly understood. Les lois des corps sociaux, comme les marchands, les negotiants, les experts religieux, ou les soldats, sont examinees d'apres les textes normatifs du droit hindou ancien, et aussi selon des sources epigraphiques venant des diverses regions de l'lnde. D'autres etudes recentes qui affirment que l'lnde medievale a connu une integration croissante entre regime et societe dans des domaines centralises plus etendus sont ici confirmees par le biais du droit et des institu tions legales. Des arguments methodologiques et theoriques sont aussi souleves pour soutenir que les textes legals hindous, connus sous le nom de Dharmasastra, sont fondamentals a toute histoire du droit et de la societe dans l'lnde medievale, mais seulement quand leur nature et leur objet sont bien compris.

Intermediate realms of law: corporate groups and rulers in medieval india

Modernity in South India today expresses itself in many distinctive and paradoxical ways. In part, this may be explained by a colonial history that explicitly attempted to draw on tradition even while pursuing innovation. However, in greater part, it may derive from a pre-colonial past of multiculturalism, economic mobility and intense social competition. South Indian society in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries possessed many features of an ‘early modernity’, which have guided its trajectories into the future at least as much as have latter-day encounters with ‘the West’.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/19472490903387274

Intimations of modernity in South India

Histories of technological change are so embedded within the historical experience of English industrialisation that until a couple of decades ago before the advent of revisionist views technology was synonymous with industrialisation or what was known as the industrial revolution and received more attention than any other aspect or this revolution’s history (Chapman 1972, 17). On the contrary, Indian textiles technology has not been that well-researched, not least perhaps because there were no (as far as we know) Indian Kaye, Crompton, Hargreaves, Arkwright; instead, the East India Companies’ trade has received more attention by historians who have thus established the commercial and subsequently political links between India, South East Asia, China and, above all, Europe. What little exists on Indian technology, scattered in numerous studies, does not provide by any means a coherent picture of the industry’s technological evolution and cautions against generalizations. The problem is exacerbated by the conflation of the two concepts of science and technology. In studies where the concept of knowledge encompassing science and technology is used, India has been dismissed as ‘traditional’, without organization for dissemination of knowledge and with social barriers erected among castes (Mokyr based on Morris 2002, 251), although some scholars have been more reluctant to adopt a cultural determinism point of view for the development of useful knowledge (Jones 1988, 103). This paper clarifies first views on Indian technology and whether it ‘stagnated’ for centuries before and after European arrival and then presents a chronology of textile technology, the ‘history’ of the spinning wheel, the weaving looms and dyeing techniques. The latter in particular is incorporated into the analysis in the last part of the paper by looking at dyeing techniques in India and the Ottoman Empire and their competition with a nascent industry in the Hapsburg Empire, in order to provide a comparative vantage point.

The Organization of Indian Textile Technology before and after the European Arrival

The plantation as a fusion of rural industry and commercial agriculture has become a shorthand for the the intensification of land-use, circulation of commodities, and the organization of labor concomitant with the modern world. While not the only place where plantations existed, the Atlantic is the context in which most archaeological research has taken place leaving untested certain assumptions about the development of the plantation. and the regions which informed its varied materializations in the modern world. By extending the the methods and approaches employed by archaeologists studying plantations to South India, we decenter plantation narratives and show how Indian Ocean commercial agriculture and rural industry also enabled the modern world. This article reports on results from the first phase of the Colonial Tharangambadi Archaeological Survey (CTAS). The goal of CTAS was to document changing settlement patterns, settlement organization, and material assemblage through a systematic landscape survey in the former Danish colonial enclave, Tranquebar (Tharangambadi). Specifically, we documented one South Indian settlement formation devoted to commercial agriculture called “gardens,” which has origins in the sixth century CE, or earlier, and how they were used outside the town’s walls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We argue that from historically distinctive agrarian facilities geared to commercial production, these plantation-like rural industries developed quite broadly using vulnerable labor to produce plant commodities in high volume for international markets. The particularities of plantation studies are enriched by considerations of parallel developments under similar conditions, as illustrated by India’s lesser-known Danish colony.

Gardens of the Coromandel Coast: Landscape Considerations of Commercial Agriculture in Tamil Nadu, South India

Updated with a new Preface and Introduction, this second edition explores the vicissitudes of handloom industry, status and role of weavers in South India, along with various other aspects like loom technology, production organization, and domestic and foreign trade in textiles.

Vijaya Ramaswamy

Papers

Textiles and Weavers in Medieval South India OIP