(^228) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
keep large stocks and time their auction sales to match fluctations in
European demand. (Their agents and purveyors in India did their
best meanwhile to "shortstop" shipments normally destined to Asian
markets.) All of this was costiy, but cheaper than trying to transform
technology.
Besides, it was not obvious to the East India Company that direct
assistance to the Indian cotton industry was politically wise. British
manufacturing interests would have seen that as treason. Toward the
end of the seventeenth century a pamphleteer denounced the
prospect that merchants would send over to India "Cloth-Weavers,
and Dyers, and Throwsters, as well as Silk." Do that, he warned, and
"I question not but we shall have Cotton-Cloth and Knaves enough
to make it a fashion and Fools enough to wear it." The company
made haste to deny the charge.^31 The EIC was under constant attack
as an exporter of specie and bullion; it did not want the additional
onus of exporting jobs.
Finally, where were India's ideas of mechanization to come from?
Indian society did know technological change: the most important in
the textile manufacture came with the substitution of the wheel for
the distaff (though not for the finest muslin yarn). But innovation
took place within the conventional manual context, and a big
conceptual and social difference separates machines and hand tools.
One must distinguish further between all-purpose tools and
specialized: Indian artisans, however skilled, had scarcely started on
the path to instrumentation. Here is Major Rennell, the first
surveyor-general of Bengal, on a visit in 1761 to the Bombay
shipyard: "... the work is performed by Indian artificers, who are
observed to use but two kinds of edged tools, tho' their work is
durable and neat."^32 The skill was all in the hand, and not so much
in the eye as in the feel; not surprising in a society without corrective
lenses.
Worse yet, Indian craftsmen avoided using iron, and iron (and
steel) is indispensable to precision work. This was not a ferruginous
society. One Indian historian contrasts here Persian irrigation
technique, which used iron wheels and gearing, and the Indian
system, using wood, rope, and earthen pots; and like a good believer
in substitutability, he explains the difference in economic terms:
".. .a tool of lower efficiency can be used to manufacture the same
commodity by employment of cheap skilled labor."^33 He might also
have noted that India had no screws: the metalworkers could not cut
nora
(Nora)
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