6 Dec 2021

Trade, sea voyage and supremacy of India continued

2920-2550 BC

Kalibangan

 

Use of dried brick and stone for domestic structures and defence walls; standardisation of bricks 3:2:1

Hearths; above and below ground ovens; Ploughed field surface with furrow in 2 directions

Shell; beads; copper; steatite

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Harappa 
Pop 23,500

 

Burnt bricks mainly used for drains, wells and bathrooms. Sun dried bricks used mainly for fillings. Size 28 x 14 x 7 cm; 4:2:1. Timber used for flat roofs and as frames or lacing for brickwork.
5 basic house plans ranging from single room tenements to houses with courtyards and up to 12 rooms to great houses with several dozen rooms and several courtyards. Nearly all large houses had private wells. Hearths common in rooms; bathrooms in every house with chutes leading to drainage channels. First floor bathrooms also built. Brick stairways provided access to the upper floors. Houses built with a perimeter wall and adjacent houses were separated by a narrow space of land.

Citadel mound and lower town surrounded by a massive brick wall. Citadel had square towers and bastions. Lower town for the general population. Granary with areas for threshing grains. Barrack like group of single roomed tenements were for the poorer classes.

 

 

Mohenjodaro
Pop. 35,000-41,000

 

 

Barrack like group of single roomed tenements were for the poorer classes. Range of shops and craft workshops-potters, dyers, metal workers, shell ornament makers and bead makers shops Great Bath - 12 x 7x 3 m. Stairs leading into the bath have timber treads set in bitumen. Floor of sawn bricks set on edge in gypsum mortar with a layer of bitumen sealer sandwiched between the inner and outer brick skins. Water supplied by a large well. Set of rooms surround the bath. Granary

 

2100-1900 BC

Lothal

Trading station and dock. Centre of carnelian bead manufacture

 

Dock is a rectangle basin with a spillway and locking device to control the inflow of tidal wave and permit automatic desilting of the channels. Raised platforms with ventilating channels were probably granaries or warehouses. Specialist workshops- copper, gold and beads.

 

 

Chanhudaro

Centre of carnelian bead manufacture.

 

 

 

2200-1700 BC

Kalibangan

 

Separate fortifications for both the citadel and lower town. No public drains but only soakage jars embedded in the streets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Occupation

1809–1813

1901

 

 

Spinners

10.3

 

 

Spinners / Weavers

2.3

1.3

 

 

Other Industrial

9.0

7.2

 

 

TOTAL

21.6

8.5

 

 

 

British East India Company rule (1764–1857) over 250 million acres (1,000,000 km2), or 35 percent of Indian domain. Indirect rule was established on  buffer states.

Ray (2009) explains when did the industry begin to decay, what was the extent of its decay during the early 19th century, and why it happened.  Ray uses the industry's market performance and its consumption of raw materials and emphasizes that the decline actually started in the mid-1820 s and reached a crisis by 1860, when 563,000 workers lost their jobs. ‘The industry shrank by about 28% by 1850 and just survived as British policies depressed the industry's exports, but suggests its decay is better explained by technological innovations in Britain.’

“Many historians point to colonization as a major factor in both India's deindustrialization and Britain's Industrial Revolution.[55][56][57][77] 

The capital amassed from Bengal following its 1757 conquest supported investment in British industries such as textile manufacture during the Industrial Revolution as well as increasing British wealth, while contributing to deindustrialization and famines in Bengal;[55][56][57][54] following the British conquest, a devastating famine broke out in Bengal in the early 1770s, killing a third of the Bengali population and 5 percent of the national population.[78] Colonization forced the large Indian market to open to British goods, which could be sold in India without tariffs or duties, compared to heavily taxed local Indian producers. In Britain protectionist policies such as high tariffs restricted Indian textile sales. By contrast, raw cotton was imported without tariffs to British factories which manufactured textiles and sold them back to India. British economic policies gave them a monopoly over India's large market and cotton resources.[79][66][80] India served as both a significant supplier of raw goods to British manufacturers and a large captive market for British manufactured goods.[81]

Bengal was still a major exporter of cotton cloth to the Americas and the Indian Ocean in 1811, However, Bengali exports declined over the course of the early 19th century, as British imports to Bengal increased, from 25% in 1811 to 93% in 1840.[82] 

Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta gave the following comparative estimates for Indian and UK populations and GDP per capita during 1600–1871 in terms of 1990 international dollars.[25][84][85]

Year

India ($)

UK ($)

Ratio (%)

India population (m)

UK population (m)

1600

782

1,104

72

142

5

1650

736

904

83

142

5.8

1700

719

1,477

49.3

164

8.8

1751

661

1,678

39.9

190

9.2

1801

639

2,142

32.6

207

16.3

1811

609

2,093

29.6

215

18.5

1821

580

2,090

28.2

205

21.0

1831

585

2,176

26.6

216

24.1

1841

584

2,380

24.6

212

26.9

1851

586

2,721

21.9

232

27.5

1861

554

3,065

18.0

244

29.1

1871

526

3,629

14.5

256

31.6

However, Parthasarathi criticised the per-capita GDP estimates from Broadberry and Gupta.[27][4] Workers in the textile industry, for example, earned more in Bengal and Mysore than they did in Britain, while agricultural labour in Britain had to work longer hours to earn the same amount as in Mysore.[5] Others such as Andre Gunder Frank, Robert A. Denemark, Kenneth Pomeranz and Amiya Kumar Bagchi also criticised estimates that showed low per-capita income and GDP growth rates in Asia (especially China and India) prior to the 19th century, pointing to later research that found significantly higher per-capita income and growth rates in China and India during that period.[86]

Economic historian Sashi Sivramkrishna estimates Mysore's average per-capita income in the late 18th century to be five times higher than subsistence,[27] i.e. five times higher than $400 (1990 international dollars),[63] or $2,000 per capita. In comparison, the highest national per-capita incomes in 1820 were $1,838 for the Netherlands and $1,706 for Britain.[64] According to economic historian Paul Bairoch, India as well as China had a higher GDP per capita than Europe in 1750.[87][88] For 1750, Bairoch estimated the GNP per capita for the Western world to be $182 in 1960 US dollars ($804 in 1990 dollars) and for the non-Western world to be $188 in 1960 dollars ($830 in 1990 dollars), exceeded by both China and India.[89] Other estimates he gives include $150–190 for England in 1700 and $160–210 for India in 1800.[90] Bairoch estimated that it was only after 1800 that Western European per-capita 

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