BRITAIN AND THE OTHERS^225France too was changing. As one coaching service put it in 1834 (on
the eve of the railway age): "greater speed is incompatible with
certain needs which, on grounds of convenience and sometimes
health, are not dispensable. One no longer stops to take meals, even
far apart; one can't get off, even at the relay stations, and so on." In
short, no pit stops. Where is modesty? "Women, children, older men
can't take this regimen."^22Why Not India?
Why no industrial revolution in India? After all, India had the
world's premier cotton industry in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, unbeatable for quality, variety, and cost. This industry not
only satisfied the large domestic demand but exported roughly half
its output throughout the Indian Ocean and indirectiy to Southeast
Asia and China. To this huge market, beginning in the seventeenth
century, came the stimulus of European demand—a huge shot in the
arm that inevitably aggravated old and created new supply problems.
Why, then, was there no interest in easing these difficulties by
substituting capital (machines) for labor?
Indian historians have tended to overlook or reject this omission.
Some, especially Indian nationalists, blame it on the Europeans, and
most particularly the British. India had been prosperous and
resourceful until these intruders burst on the scene, mixing into
Indian politics and fomenting conflict. Some of this speculation is
fantasy, and misdirected at that. One historian, for example, looks at
the royal workshops (the karkhanas) of seventeenth-century India
and dreams wistfully of a technological revolution: "One is tempted
to speculate if [they] might not have moved in the direction of
mechanization and become the state model factories for the modern
industrialization of India, had they not been terminated by the
British conquest of the country."^23 This, of an institution that could
buy or command labor at will!
One useful way to approach the problem is to ask, cui bono, who
benefits? Who would have gained from mechanization and
transformation? Three groups or interests were involved: the workers
(spinners and weavers); the middlemen, who typically advanced