In any period of Indian history, small-scale industrial producers formed a significant occupational category. Before 1800, large numbers of handloom weavers on the Indian littoral exported fine textiles to markets in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Some of the textiles they supplied to the European merchants redefined fashion in Europe. Artisans were valued by the indigenous states, because their special skills were needed to sustain consumption of the wealthy classes.
The importance of the artisan is recognized in the economic and social history of colonial India (c. 1857–1947) mainly in the context of arguments about the harmful effects of British colonial policy. In a variety of discourses—from Indian nationalism to global Marxism—the artisan after 1800 turns into an example of the “de-industrialization” thesis, which contends that exposure to free trade under colonial rule led to a destruction of livelihoods on a large scale. The fact that millions of artisans survived the nineteenth century is overlooked in this scholarship. While the scale of destruction of jobs has been measured often, with more or less credibility, little effort goes to answering the question of what happened to those weavers who did not give up their occupation.
Small Town Capitalism is an attempt to answer this question with the example of western India. The belief that the artisan must decline, the book suggests, derives from a biased and largely obsolete reading of European history, which leads to the conclusion that industries not using machinery and operating from within households are not capitalistic enough, and therefore are destined to disappear as industrial capitalism is established. “A study of small producers,” Haynes argues instead, “centres an understanding of industrial capitalism squarely in the history of the broader structures of the regional economy rather than in Europe or the colonial ports of India” (p. 6). The “broader structure” refers to “the interplay of world capitalism, the colonial and post-independence states,” and a number of key actors located in the towns where skilled migrant handloom weavers formed settlements. These actors were the households, the “weaver-capitalists,” wage-laborers, consumers, and merchants. The structure adapted to the changing commercial and political environment well enough. Handloom weavers of western India relocated when possible near cloth and yarn markets, met new types of consumer demand, invested in new tools and processes, and defined the professional character of a number of industrial towns in western India. These towns were “small” in comparison with the centers of factory industry, such as Ahmedabad or Bombay, but they grew rapidly in the late twentieth century partly upon a livelihood-base laid by artisan production. The “small town” in the book is also an analytical category, being a distinct form of regional capitalism.
The book consists of eight substantive chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. Chapter 1 discusses “the historical and global contexts,” meaning by that phrase the long-distance trade and circulation that characterized the precolonial past of the western Indian weaver. The chapter suggests that this heritage was partially lost, but also partially reconstructed, in the later years. Chapter 2 on “artisanal towns” shows one of the ways that the heritage continued to work, namely, migration of weavers that led to urban growth in western India. Unlike in the factory cities, in the artisanal towns, the weaver settlements made a visible mark on the cultural and economic profile of the towns. Chapter 3 (“Consumers, Merchants, and Markets”) studies the growth of cloth buying among classes that had experienced a rise in purchasing power. Peasants and middle-class buyers experimented within the context of traditional apparel styles, thus providing weavers with a relatively risk-free field for innovations in design, style, and marketing systems.
Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the producer. Chapter 4 (“Organisation of Production”) shows how family, wage-labor, and paternalistic relations using the idioms of caste and community shaped the work site. Chapter 5 shows that, despite many cases of sustainable innovation, average living standards did not improve in the long run. Haynes seems to explain this finding with reference to increasing inequality, an effect in turn of the ambiguity in the relationship between the hired workers or weavers and the employers of labor. Chapter 6 (“Colonial State”) shows that the role of the colonial state was that of a distant observer. Chapter 7 (“Paradox of the Long 1930s”) deals with the interwar period when “weaver-capitalists” emerged more powerful than before, setting off a development of the small-scale power-loom industry. Chapter 8 (“Politics of the Workshop”) explores another dimension of the same trajectory, a short-lived episode of labor mobilization.
This is a path-breaking book in two senses. First, it seeks to implement an understanding of industrial capitalism as a culturally constituted process. In doing so, it integrates three distinct planes of discourse, the economics of manufacturing, consuming cultures, and the social organization of production. Secondly, it breaks with the stylized historiographies of the artisan available in most interpretations. It achieves this effect through a close look at one Indian region, and within it, at the particular milieu of the small town consisting of the household, the workshop, the neighborhood, associations, and leading individuals. The conceptual challenge is a formidable one, and the fact that artisans are poorly served by archival resources makes meeting it difficult. It is not surprising that the book took several years to write, being shaped as much by archival research as sustained contact with the field; numerous conversations; and participation in debates about development, industrialization, and social transformation in contemporary India. The final product combines the field-workers’ intuitions, the historians’ command on archival resources, and a powerful thesis—blended neatly with a crisp writing style.
By staying focused on western India, the book achieves a close fit between the aim, which is to demonstrate the existence of a regional variety of capitalism, and the means, which is a fascinating source-based study of one region. But such a focus raises a problem too. Weavers adapted, or failed to adapt, in quite different ways between the many regions of India. A particularly useful comparison would be with southern India, especially Tamil Nadu, where handloom weavers did well, and yet the regional actors, their relationship with politics, even the very category of “small town,” may need to be redefined when moving from the west to the south. The book enables raising these issues, which are ideal topics for a future conference panel, but does not address these implications of its argument.
