BRITAIN AND THE OTHERS^229a proper thread; and that iron nails were rare. Their absence made a
difference in shipbuilding. European ships were nailed and spiked;
Indian vessels tied the planking to the hull with cords and ropes and
rabbeted and glued the boards end to end.^34
This manual mode explains as much as anything the failure of non-
European craftsmen to make clocks and watches as good as
Europe's. They had the hands, the "matchless ingenuity," but not
the tools. They did extraordinary work, in musket making for
example. "Even today, 1786," wrote a French convert to Islam
named Haji Mustafa, "Colonel Martin, a Frenchman, who has
gready distinguished himself these twenty-two years in the English
service, has at Lucknow a manufactory where he makes pistols and
fuzils better, both as to lock and barrel, than the best arms that come
from Europe."^35 But these gifted craftsmen made each piece
differendy, because they could not or would not work by
instruments. When the aforesaid Colonel Claude Martin, one of the
most enterprising agents of the East India Company, wanted to buy
a watch for himself, he sent to Paris and bought it from Louis
Berthoud, the finest chronométrier in France; and when, as often, he
sold clocks and watches to the court of Aoudh and other Indian
clients, he got them too from Europe. Where else? The Indians, like
the Chinese, were not doing anything in this area.^36
Under the circumstances, the move to machinery in India was not
to be envisaged. Such a leap would have entailed a shift from hand
skills nurtured from childhood, linked to caste identity and division
of labor by sex and age. It would also have required imagination
outside the Indian cultural and intellectual experience. As Chaudhuri
puts it: "In eighteenth-century India the empirical basis for an
Industrial Revolution was conspicuously lacking. There had been no
marked progress in scientific knowledge for many centuries, and the
intellectual apparatus for a diffusion and systematic recording of the
inherited skills was seriously defective."^37
And still in the nineteenth century: the British engineers who built
the Indian railways understood that Indian labor, cheap as it was,
would move earth and rock by hand; but they also took for granted
that the Indians would use wheelbarrows. Not at all: the Indians
were used to moving heavy burdens in a basket on their head and
refused to change. We even have one report of Indian laborers
placing barrows on their head rather than wheel them. Presumably
such resistance reflected a desire to spread the work and increase