NCERT Class 11 History Chapter 9 The Industrial Revolution

TOWARDS Modernisation

IN the previous section you have read about certain crucial developments in the medieval and early modern world – feudalism, the European ‘Renaissance’ and the encounters between Europeans and the peoples of the Americas. As you would have realised, some of the phenomena that contributed to the making of our modern world gradually evolved in this period, and especially so from the mid-fifteenth century onwards. Two further developments in world history created a context for what has been called ‘modernisation’. These were the Industrial Revolution and a series of political revolutions that transformed subjects into citizens, beginning with the American Revolution (1776-81) and the French Revolution (1789-94).

Britain has been the world’s first industrial nation and you will read about how this came to be in Theme 9. For long it was believed that British industrialisation provided the model for industrialisation in other countries. The discussion of Theme 9 will show how historians have begun to question some of the earlier ideas about the Industrial Revolution. Each country drew upon the experiences of other nations,without necessarily reproducing any model. In Britain, for instance, coal and cotton textile industries were developed in the first phase of industrialisation, while the invention of railways initiated the second stage of that process. In other countries such as Russia, which began to industrialise much later (from the late nineteenth century onwards), the railway and other heavy industry emerged in the initial phase of industrialisation itself. Likewise, the role of the state, and of banks, in industrialisation has differed from country to country. The treatment of the British case in Theme 9 will hopefully whet your curiosity about the industrial trajectories of other nations such as the USA and Germany, two significant industrial powers. Theme 9 also emphasises the human and material costs incurred by Britain on its industrialisation – the plight of the labouring poor, especially of children, environmental degradation and the consequent epidemics of cholera and tuberculosis. Linking the world – In 1927 Charles Lindbergh, twenty-five years old, flew across the Atlantic Ocean, from New York to  Paris, in a singleengine aeroplane.

In Theme 11 you will similarly read about industrial pollution and cadmium and mercury poisoning in Japan that stirred people into mass movements against indiscriminate industrialisation. European powers began to colonise parts of America and Asia and South Africa well before the Industrial Revolution. Theme 10 tells you the story of what European settlers did to the native peoples of America and Australia. The bourgeois mentality of the settlers made them buy and sell everything, including land and water. But the natives, who appeared uncivilised to European Americans, asked, ‘If you do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can one buy them?’ The natives did not feel the need to own land, fish or animals. They had no desire to commodify them; if things needed to be exchanged, they could simply be gifted. Quite obviously, the natives and the Europeans represented competing notions of civilisation. The former did not allow the European deluge to wipe out their cultures although the US and Canadian governments of the mid-twentieth century desired natives to ‘join the mainstream’ and the Australian authorities of the same period attempted to simply ignore their traditions and culture. One might wonder what is meant by ‘mainstream’. How does economic and political power influence the making of ‘mainstream cultures’?

Western capitalisms – mercantile, industrial and financial – and early-twentieth-century Japanese capitalism created colonies in large parts of the third world. Some of these were settler colonies. Others, such as British rule in India, are examples of direct imperial control. The case of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China illustratesa third variant of imperialism. Here Britain, France, Germany, Russia, America and Japan meddled in Chinese affairs without directly taking over state power. They exploited the country’s resources to their own advantage, seriously compromising Chinese sovereignty and reducing the country to the status of a semi-colony.

Almost everywhere, colonial exploitation was challenged by powerful nationalist movements. Nationalisms, however, also arose without a colonial context, as in the West or Japan. All nationalisms are doctrines of popular sovereignty. Nationalist movements believe that political power should rest with the people and this is what makes nationalism a modern concept. Civic nationalism vests sovereignty in all people regardless of language, ethnicity, religion or gender. It seeks to create a community of rights-exercising citizens and defines nationhood in terms of citizenship, not ethnicity or religion. Ethnic and religious nationalisms try to build national solidarities around a given language, religion or set of traditions, defining the people ethnically, not in terms of common citizenship. In a multi-ethnic country, ethnic nationalists might limit the exercise of sovereignty to a chosen people, often assumed to be superior to minority communities. Today, most western countries define their nationhood in terms of common citizenship and not by common ethnicity. 

As with industrialisation, so with paths to modernisation. Different societies have evolved their distinctive modernities. The Japanese and Chinese cases are very instructive in this regard. Japan succeeded in remaining free of colonial control and achieved fairly rapid economic and industrial progress throughout the twentieth century. The rebuilding  of the Japanese economy after a humiliating defeat in the Second World War should not be seen as a mere post-war miracle. As Theme 11 shows, it resulted from certain gains that had already been accomplished in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Did you know, for instance, that by 1910 tuition fees for studying at a primary school had more or less ended and enrolment had become universal? The Japanese path to modernisation nevertheless, like that of any other country, has had its own tensions: those between democracy and militarism, ethnic nationalism and civic nation-building and between what many Japanese describe as ‘tradition’ and ‘westernisation’.

The Chinese resisted colonial exploitation and their own bureaucratic landed elite through a combination of peasant rebellion, reform and revolution. By the early 1930s, the Chinese Communist Party, which drew its strength from peasant mobilisation, had begun confronting the imperial powers as well as the Nationalists who represented the country’s elite. They had also started to implement their ideas in selected pockets of the country. Their egalitarian ideology, stress on land reforms and awareness of women’s problems helped them overthrow foreign imperialism and the Nationalists in 1949. Once in power, they succeeded in reducing inequalities, spreading education and creating political awareness. Even so, the country’s single-party framework and state repression contributed to considerable dissatisfaction with the political system after the mid- 1960s. But the Communist Party has been able to retain control over thecountry largely because, in embracing certain market principles, it reinvented itself and has worked hard to transform China into an economic powerhouse.

The different ways in which various countries have understood ‘modernity’ and sought to achieve it, each in the context of its own circumstances and ideas, make a fascinating story. This section introduces you to some aspects of that story.

Please refer to attached file for NCERT Class 11 History Towards Modernisation