Write a note on the Environmental Discourse on Industrialism.

 Industrial Revolution was a momentous occurrence. It signaled a brake for the biological regimes and initiated a process of industrialisation that was impregnated with enormous new possibilities of the use of natural resources. Industrialisation was accompanied by technological advances of far reaching impacts and they together unleashed processes that altered completely the prevailing picture of the natural world. Fernand Braudel had said: “In fact, until the eighteenth century, a Jungle Book could have been written about almost any part of the globe” (The Structures of Everyday Life, tr. Sian Reynolds, Harper and Row, 1985, p.69). Within a century since then, however, echoes of wailing voices could be heard saying How Green Was My Valley?

England was a pioneer in industrialisation. It was a special circumstance that had given England a position of eminence. Industrialisation was a complex process that had got initiated there due to a peculiar combination of factors. The major areas that had come under the splurge of industrialisation were agriculture, demography, inland transport, technology, trade and industry. In fact there was no sector of private or public life in England that was actually immune from industrialisation. An understanding of industrialisation and its working in England is therefore of help to us in gaining insights into the formulation of environmental perceptions of English colonisers.

Agriculture provided the necessary backdrop against which the industrial changes unfolded. Experiments with soil usage and the introduction of a variety of crops was perhaps the first stage where notable changes became evident. The fertilising properties of soil were enhanced by liming and marling the soil (adjusting the right mix of clay and lime in the soil) and a pattern of crop rotation experimented for rejuvenating the different layers of soil. It is an interesting fact that industrial and mechanised equipment in agriculture were introduced only around midnineteenth century. Braudel notes that changes in agriculture “come not so much from machines or wonder crops as from new methods of land use; new timetables for ploughing; new forms of crop rotation which eliminated fallow and encouraged grazing, a useful source of fertiliser and therefore a remedy for soil exhaustion; attention to new strains of crops; selective breeding of sheep and cattle; specialised farming for higher yields – all with results which varied according to region, to natural conditions and to the constraints of the market which were never the same in two places. The resulting system was what would in the nineteenth century be called high farming…” (The Perspectives of the World, tr. Sian Reynolds, Harper and Row, 1984, p.559).

One of the early changes in the industrial sector was the introduction of coke as a fuel replacing charcoal. The most noticeable use of coke was in blast-furnaces for making pig-iron. In “about 1760, the cost price of charcoal-fired smelting was about £ 2 per ton greater than that of iron produced by the rival method” the coke fired blast furnaces (Braudel, op. cit. p.569). The other significant change was in the cotton sector where a production boom began to show by the close of the eighteenth century. Here India was directly involved. To quote Braudel again whose succinct remarks are of high value in our discussion: “The cotton revolution, first in England, but very soon all over Europe, began by imitating Indian industry, went on to take revenge by catching up with it, and finally outstripped it. The aim was to produce fabrics of comparable quality at cheaper prices. The only way to do so was to introduce machines – which alone could effectively compete with Indian textile workers. But success did not come immediately. That had to wait for Arkwright’s water-frame (1769) and Crompton’s mule (1775-8) which made it possible to produce yarn as fine and strong as the Indian product, one that could be used for weaving fabric entirely out of cotton. From now on, the market for Indian cottons would be challenged by the developing English industry – and it was a very large market indeed, covering England and the British Isles, Europe (where various continental cotton industries were however soon putting up their own competition), the coast of Africa, where black slaves were exchanged for lengths of cotton, and the huge market of colonial America, not to mention Turkey and the Levant – or India itself. Cotton was always produced primarily for export: in 1800 it represented a quarter of all British exports; by 1850 this had risen to fifty per cent” (Braudel, op. cit., p.572).

An extraordinary expansion of English trade was one more feature of industrialisation. After 1760 the English overseas trade continuously increased. The centre of gravity of this trade moved towards American colonies and India. Significantly this success, in most cases, was achieved by force. Along side this, came improvements in inland transport. The Canal fever - as the development of navigable waterways is generally known as - began in 1775 and by 1830s wide and narrow canals had crisscrossed the entire country. The main intent was to facilitate haulage of resources on a bulk scale so that growth of English industries would not be stifled for want of natural resources in the proximity of the sites of the industries.

These details point towards two conclusions. In the first place industrialisation resulted into a good deal of destruction, adaptation and restructuring. The traditional structures of agriculture were impaired and the land use patterns changed significantly. For instance, animal farming became more profitable than arable making farmers to shift to forage crops. Since forage crops do best on light and sandy soils, these became the most productive land in England. Heavy clayey soils by contrast, previously regarded as the richest for cereal growing, and unsuitable for forage crops, were hit by the low prices created by higher yields in rival regions (Cf. Braudel, op. cit., p.560). Secondly, industrialism i.e. the adaptation of an industrial mode of life, became the dominant social norm. In other words, this meant a transition from a predominantly agricultural society to one in which manufacture dominated.

The central discourse under industrialisation was about the revolution in the mode of resource use – transforming resources from one form to another and making it possible for resources to be transported over large distances, away from the places of their origin.

Evidently the environmental perception or understanding of the English colonisers was mediated by this discourse. In the English understanding of environmental conditions in India in the eighteenth century but especially since the battle of Plassey the following features were quite dominant:

· The natural resources of India needed to be elevated to the level of commercial use in place of the prevalent general practice of use for subsistence purposes;

· The resource-use practices needed to become free of any restraints so as to enable resource exploitation;

· In this process, community control over resources required to be unshackled even through legal mechanisms if needed; and

· A conflict in the ways of life or cultures was deemed inevitable in this process.

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