(i) Introduction: India’s past has been marked by the entry of numerous groups of people at different times who have established their rule over different parts of what constitutes modern India today.

(ii) Differences:

(a) The impact of colonial rule is distinguished from all other earlier rules because the changes it brought in were far-reaching and deep. History is full of examples of the annexation of foreign territory and the domination of weaker by stronger powers. Nevertheless, there is a vital difference between the empire building of pre-capitalist times and that of capitalist times.

(b) Apart from outright pillage, the precapitalist conquerors benefited from their domination by exacting a continuous flow of tribute. On the whole they did not interfere with the economic base. They simply took the tribute that was skimmed off the economic surplus that was produced traditionally in the subjugated areas. (Alavi and Shanin, 1982).

(c) In contrast British colonialism which was based on a capitalist system directly interfered to ensure greatest profit and benefit to British capitalism. Every policy was geared towards the strengthening and expansion of British capitalism. For instance, it changed the very laws of the land. It changed not just land ownership laws but decided even what crops ought to be grown and what ought not to be. It meddled with the manufacturing sector.

(d) It altered the way production and distribution of goods took place.

(e) It entered into the forests. It cleared trees and started tea-plantations. It brought into the Forest Acts that changed the lives of pastoralists. They were prevented from entering many forests that had earlier provided valuable forage for their cattle.

Britain Industrialisation’s Impact on Brtain’s Urbanisation:

(1) Industrialisation refers to the emergence of machine production, based on the use of inanimate power resources like steam or electricity.

(2) In most standard western textbook of sociology, we learn that even in the most advanced of traditional civilizations, most people were engaged in working on the land. The relatively low level of technological development did not permit more than a small minority to be freed from the chores of agricultural production.

(3) By contrast, prime feature of industrial societies today is that a large majority of the employed population work in factories, offices or shops rather than agriculture. Over 90 per cent of people in the west live in towns and cities, where most jobs are to be found and new job apportunities are created.

(4) Not surprisingly, therefore, we usually associate urbanisation with industrialisation. They often do occur together but not always so.

Example: For instance, in Britain the first society to undergo industrialisation, was also the earliest to move from being rural to a predominantly urban country.

(5) In 1800, well under 20 per cent of the population lived in towns or cities of more than 10,000 inhabitants. By 1900 this proportion had become 74 per cent. The capital city, London, was home to about 1.1 million people in 1800; it increased in size to a population of over 7 million by the start of the twentieth century.

(6) London was then by far the largest city ever seen in the world, a vast manufacturing, commercial and financial centre at the heart of a still expanding British empire.

Impact of British industrialisation on India: (i) In India the impact of the very same British industrialisation led to deindustrialisation in some sectors. And decline of old urban centres. Just as manufacturing boomed in Britain, traditional exports of cotton and silk manufacturing from India declined in the face of Manchester competition.

(ii) This period also saw the further decline of cities such as Surat and Masulipatnam while Bombay and Madras grew.

(iii) When the British took over Indian states, towns like Thanjavur, Dhaka, and Murshidabad lost their courts and therefore, some of their artisians and court gentry. From the end of the 19th century, with the installation of mechanised factory industries, some towns became much more heavily populated.

(iv) Urban luxury manufactures like the high quality silks and cottons of Dacca or Murshidabad must have been hit first by the almost simultaneous collapse of indigenous court demand and the external market on which these had largely depended.

(v) Village crafts in the interior, and particularly, in regions other than eastern India where British penetration was earliest and deepest, probably survived much longer, coming to be seriously affected only with the spread of railways. Unlike Britain where the impact of industrialisation led to more people moving into urban areas.

(vi) In India the initial impact of the same British industrialisation led to more people moving into agriculture. The Census of India Report shows this clearly.

Introduction of charges in several spheres: (i) To facilitate the smooth functioning of its rule, colonialism introduced a wide array of changes in every sphere, be it legal or cultural or architectural. Colonialism was a only apart in the very scale and intensity of the changes that it brought about. Some of these changes were deliberate while some took place in an unintended fashion.

Example: We saw how western education was introduced to create Indians who would manage British colonialism. Instead it led to the growth of a nationalist and anticolonial consciousness.

(ii) This magnitude and depth of the structural changes that colonialism unleashed can be better grasped if we try and understand some basic features of capitalism.

(iii) Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and organised to accumulate profits within a market system.

(iv) Capitalism in the west emerged out of a complex process of European exploration of the rest of the world, its plunder of wealth and resources, an unprecedented growth of science and technology, its harnessing to industries and agriculture. What marked capitalism from the very beginning was its dynamism, its potential to grow, expand, innovate, use technology and labour in a way best assured to ensure greatest profit. What marked it too was its global nature.

(v) Western colonialism was inextricably connected to the growth of western capitalism. This had a lasting impact on the way capitalism developed in a colonised country like India. In the next section on industrialisation and urbanisation we see how colonialism led to very distinct patterns.

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V. Imp.

(i) Historically, we know that nation state developed in Europe after the downfall of feudalism. Nation state took place in Germany, Britain, France, Spain, Polland, Belgium, etc. With the beginning of first decade of the twentieth century national states became the dominant political form. That we all live in nation states and that we all have a nationality or a national citizenship may appear natural to us today.

(ii) Before the First World War passports were not widely used for international travel, and in the most areas few people had one. Societies were, however, not always organised on these lines.

(iii) Nation state pertains to a particular type of state, characteristic of the modern world. A government has sovereign power within a defined territorial area, and the people are citizens of a single nation. Nation states are closely associated with the rise of nationalism.

(iv) The principle of nationalism assumes that any set of people have a right to be free and exercise sovereign power. It is an important part of the rise of democratic ideas.

(v) It must have struck you that the practice of colonialism and the principle of nationalism and democratic rights are contradictory. For colonial rule implied foreign rule such as British rule over India.

(vi) Nationalism implied that the people of India or of any colonised society have an equal right to be sovereign. Indian nationalist leaders were quick to grasp this irony. They declared that freedom or swaraj was their birth-right and fought for both political and economic freedom.