An Astonishing Asymmetry

In 1719, the practice of fashionable women in London to wear Indian calicoes attracted the anger of the weavers of Spitalfields. A mob of several thousand weavers attacked all women they saw in Indian calicoes or linens, sousing them with ink, aqua fortis and other fluids.

The textiles of India were so superior to anything produced in Britain that in the 18th century, Acts of Parliament were passed, forbidding the import of such goods. Britain – future champion of free trade – passed a law in 1720, prohibiting altogether the use in Britain of ‘any garment or apparel whatsoever, of any painted, printed or dyed calicoes, in or about any bed, chair, cushion, window curtain or any other sort of household stuff or furniture.’

In 1774, a statute confirmed the ban on the import of cotton goods, effectively protecting the nascent industry in Britain from foreign competition. The development of the cotton industry in Britain had been given powerful impetus by the availability of cotton from plantations in North America. In 1733, Kay’s flying shuttle, in 1767 Hargreaves’ spinning jenny and in 1785 Cartwright’s power loom had opened up possibilities of production on an unprecedented scale. Tariffs on Indian imports also kept British market closed to products from the sub-continent.

Throughout the 19th century, despite the quality of Indian goods, mass production in Britain made it possible to sell cottons cheaply in India; a development which rapidly displaced and undermined local handicrafts. One consequence of this was the de-industrialization of Bengal, as India increasingly became a source of cheap cotton for the industrialization of Lancashire. By 1813, although Indian cotton goods were still only half the price of British goods, tariffs of over 70 per cent made them unaffordable. Cotton also ceased to be available to weavers in India. The East India Company converted independent handloom weavers into wage earners, and it monopolized the export of handloom products.

During the 19 century, Bengal underwent a re-ruralisation, what historian Amaury de Riencourt called ‘an agrarian revolution in reverse’, as traditional tax-collectors were turned by the British into landlords, who soon controlled much of the land occupied by peasant farmers. The population of Dacca fell in the two decades from 1814 to 1835 from 150,00 to about 20,000. This process, impoverishment and reversal of an ancient culture, occurred simultaneously with the upheavals in Britain associated with industrialisation. While the people of Britain were increasingly being evicted from the countryside, by ‘improved’ agricultural practices, by enclosures and by the loss of common land and the diversion of land to other – often ornamental – purposes, the people of Bengal, dispossessed of their seasonal earnings as weavers, were undergoing a migration in the opposite direction, forced back upon agriculture alone for their subsistence.

In his Rural Rides, written on a journey through Britain in the 1820s, William Cobbett wrote:

‘In this beautiful island, every inch of land is appropriated by the rich. No hedge, no ditch, no commons, no grassy lanes: a country divided into great farms; a few trees surround the farmhouse. All the rest is bare of trees; and the wretched labourer has not a stick of wood and has no place for a pig or cow to graze or even to lie down upon.’ 

What would Cobbett have made of the landscapes of Bengal at that time, which Governor General William Bentinck later described as bleached by the bones of its weavers?

The success of industry in Britain would have been impossible without that very protectionism which is now universally deplored as an obstacle to development, and without subsidies from the plunder of Bengal and the broken bodies of its wasted craftspeople.

In a curious unravelling of history, Britain itself was de-industrialized during the middle and later years of the 20th century, and its textile industry, which had once dominated the markets of India, fell into rapid decay. In an effort to keep that industry alive, the British had recruited from South Asia – including that part of Bengal which had provisionally become part of Pakistan – in the 1950s and 1960s workers who would keep the mills of Lancashire open by means of continuous production on twelve-hour shifts. All this proved to be in vain, and soon the cotton towns of Lancashire became only the ghosts of their former selves, their skills commemorated in local museums, the fading sensibility of their people recorded in archives and libraries.

This waning of cotton in Britain occurred at the same time as Bengal – at least its Eastern part, which in 1971 became the independent country of Bangladesh – began a process of ‘industrialisation.’ Perhaps this should be seen as a ‘re-industrialisation’, although the labour it called forth was a far cry from the ruined craft of the nimble and dexterous fingers of its traditional weavers. To become one of the major centres of the global ‘rag trade’ bears small relation to the wonders of sheer fabric created by the weavers of Bengal when the East India Company arrived, muslin whose fineness gave rise to a fabulous mythology, that a 100 yards would pass through a wedding ring or fit into a matchbox. Today, some three million workers – mainly young woman – have been called back from their rural pardah, summoned into a global industry that earns eighty per cent of the foreign exchange of Bangladesh. These garment workers are also ghosts, their labour a caricature of the defunct skills of their ancestors, as they sit behind long rows of Juki or Brother machines, stitching for Wal-Mart, Carrefour, Primark or Marks & Spencer, items for the brief throwaway consumption of privilege.

The people of Bengal had ancient crafts and incomparable accomplishments struck from their fingers; indeed their whole lives were ruined and re-shaped in order that they might provide markets for inferior British goods. Two centuries later, the British, who no longer clothe themselves, have themselves become one of the principal markets for apparel from Bangladesh; a service for which its garment workers are, according to a World Bank report in May 2010, the lowest-paid in the world.

Astonishing asymmetry, in which the only constant is the unmaking and re-making of the psyche of Bengalis, the opportunistic destruction and arbitrary re-creation of their industries at the convenience of those more powerful than they. Victims of the imperial economic violence of yesterday remain victims of the global economic imperium of this most enlightened age.

Jeremy Seabrook is an author and journalist specialising in social, environmental and development issues. His latest book is People Without History