Deindustrialisation of India under British rule
- Date
- c. 1800-1870
- Category
- Economy & trade
- Region
- India (South Asia) and the British Empire
- Era
- Early Modern
- Significance
As Britain mechanised cotton spinning and weaving, the world's textile trade was upended, and nowhere more dramatically than in India, long the leading producer and exporter of fine cotton cloth.
In the early eighteenth century Indian handloom textiles dominated global markets, but between roughly 1800 and 1860 cheap, machine-made Lancashire cloth, backed by British tariff and trade policy, flooded both export markets and India's own domestic market. Indian weavers, unable to compete on price, lost their livelihoods in large numbers, and the subcontinent was reshaped from a manufacturing centre into a supplier of raw cotton for British mills and a captive market for their output. Historians describe this reversal as one of the most significant cases of 'deindustrialisation' in economic history, contributing to the wider 'Great Divergence' in wealth between industrialising Europe and the rest of the world. It illustrates that the Industrial Revolution was a global phenomenon whose benefits and burdens were unequally distributed, restructuring colonial economies and societies far from the factory towns of Britain.
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Empires active in c. 1800-1870
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Russian Empire1721 CE – 1917 CE
- Qing Dynasty1636 CE – 1912 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
- Mughal Empire1526 CE – 1857 CE
Related economy & trade events
- Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations9 March 1776
- Founding of the Bank of England27 July 1694
- Founding of the English and Dutch East India Companies1600–1602
- Britain wins the Asiento at the Treaty of Utrecht1713
- Royal African Company chartered, expanding England's slave trade1672
- Founding of the Bank of Amsterdam (Wisselbank)31 January 1609
Further reading
The wider story
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
Best-selling world history told through the trade routes that moved goods, faiths and ideas.
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