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plunder from Africa and America, in particular the silver obtained by the sale of slaves in
the West Indies and the Spanish America, to meet the costs of purchases in India.
By the middle of the 18th century, the Mughal Empire in India was disintegrating and the
central authority was weakened as it faced challenges from local regional powers. In the
course of a normal evolution this could have paved the way for the rise of bourgeois
forces in India, whose foundations had been laid amongst the powerful manufacturing,
trading and shipping interests in India. The English traders had been in India at that time
for almost 200 years and they seized this opportunity to fight and intrigue for the
territorial domination of India. In 1757 they declared war on the regional power in Bengal
and their victory at battle of Plassey in 1757 brought a vast area in the east under their
control.
As soon as the Company domination began to be established in India, the Company
merchant was able to throw the sword into the scales to secure a bargain which
abandoned all pretense of equality of exchange and the age-old problem of trading with
India had been solved. The Company rule began with outright plunder and the wealth of
India began to flood England in an ever-growing stream.
Immediately after, the great series of inventions, such as spinning-jenny and the steam
engine, began in Europe which initiated the Industrial Revolution. The development of
the age of inventions depended, not simply on "some special and unaccountable burst
of inventive genius," as the leading authority on English industrial history, W.
Cunningham, writes in his Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern Times,
but on the accumulation of a sufficient body of capital as the indispensable condition to
make possible the large-scale outlay for their utilisation. Previous inventions of Kay's flyshuttle in 1733 and Wyatt's roller-spinning machine in 1738 came to naught because
they couldn't be used for lack of capital. It was the plunder of India that thus set into
motion one of the greatest revolutions of history - the Industrial Revolution. In his Law of
Civilization and Decay, the American writer, Brooke Adams describes how it happened:
"The influx of the Indian treasure, by adding considerably to the nation's cash capital,
not only increased its stock of energy, but added much to its flexibility and the rapidity of
its movement. Very soon after Plassey, the Bengal plunder began to arrive in London,
and the effect appears to have been instantaneous; for all the authorities agree that the
'industrial revolution,' the event which has divided the nineteenth century from all
antecedent time, began with the year 1760. Prior to 1760, according to Bains, the
machinery used for spinning cotton in Lancashire was almost as simple as in India;
while about 1750 the English iron industry was in full decline because of the destruction
of forests for fuel. At that time four-fifths of the iron used in the kingdom came from
Sweden.
Plassey was fought in 1757, and probably nothing has ever equalled in rapidity of the
change which followed. In 1760 the flying shuttle appeared, and coal began to replace
wood in smelting. In 1764 Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, in 1776 Crompton
contrived the mule, in 1785 Cartwright patented the powerloom, and, chief of all, in 1768
Watt matured the steam engine, the most perfect of all vents of centralising energy. But
though these machines served as outlets for the accelerating movement of the time,
they did not cause that acceleration. In themselves inventions are passive, many of the
most important having lain dormant for centuries, waiting for a sufficient store of force to
have accumulated to set them working. That store must always take the shape of
money, and money not hoarded, but in motion. Before the influx of the Indian treasure,
and the expansion of credit which followed, no force sufficient for this purpose existed;
and had Watt lived fifty years earlier, he and his invention must have perished together.
Possibly since the world began, no investment has ever yielded the profit reaped from
the Indian plunder..."
The spoliation of India was thus the hidden source of capital accumulation which played
an all-important role in helping to make possible the industrial revolution in England.
Once the industrial capital was established in England, it needed markets to sells its
products to. It was again India which was forced, to absorb these goods to enable the
industrial revolution in England to sustain itself. India had to be de-industrialized in order
to achieve this. After the victory of English industrial capital over its mercantile capital,
India's textile industry was destroyed leading to the destruction of its urban economy
and the subsequent overcrowding in the villages and pushing India hundreds of years
behind in its economic development.