From Comparative Sociology to Global History: Britain and India in the Pre-History of Modernity

Abstract

The concept of Modernity is presently very problematic in the social sciences. Included in those problems is a tendency to hypostasise ‘the West’ as possessed of an originary and authentic culture and history, which distinguished it absolutely from all Other and Traditional cultures and histories. These distinctive qualities laid a unique pathway to Modernity, which subsequently became ‘universally’ available to the rest of the world. This paper explores historical conditions in Britain and India at one of the key moments of Modernity's ‘emergence’: the mechanisation of cotton textile manufacturing. It argues that Britain's modernisation is inconceivable except in a broader global context of which India already comprised a vital part. And, reciprocally, that India's role in the construction of Britain's Modernity, so far from opening up possibilities of it following the same course itself, conveyed imperatives which took its society towards a reverse process of ‘Traditionalisation.’

Historical sociology, international relations and connected histories

“…7 Despite the existence of an extensive historical and sociological literature addressing these very connections, Mann continues to argue for the self-contained emergence and development of the industrial revolution with little acknowledgement of the wider global conditions from which this largely endogenous account is built (for an overview, see Washbrook 1997;Bhambra 2007a). As such, industrialization continues to be regarded as a European phenomenon subsequently diffused to the rest of the world rather than one which was global in its instantiation and which had differential impacts across the globe.…”

Colonial modernism and the flawed paradigms of urban renewal: uneven development in Bombay, 1900–25

“…These commodities provided the basis for a¯ourishing colonial trade with China, 5 while raw cotton exports to England contributed signi®cantly to new domestic consumption patterns which paved the way for Britain's industrial take-off. 6 Spatially, Bombay was thus conceived as a regional centre of colonial mercantile capital accumulation, at the heart of an export-oriented network of communications centred on its port. The development of built structures between the early eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, created`the Fort' (the expanding forti®ed harbour area) as the dominant urban social space and the nucleus of early colonial settlement.…”

Undoing the Epistemic Disavowal of the Haitian Revolution: A Contribution to Global Social Thought

“…2 The industrial revolution, for example, is understood to be a European phenomenon that was subsequently diffused globally. However, if we take the cotton factories of Manchester and Lancaster as emblematic of this revolution, then we see that cotton was not a plant that was native to England, let alone to the West (Washbrook 1997). It came from India as did the technology of how to dye and weave it.…”