Through two World Wars and the Great Depression, this book explores the turbulent history of colonial Indian industry in the period immediately prior to independence. Focusing on five major industries in Bengal - coal mining, iron-smelting, jute manufacturing, paper making and tea plantation – the book looks at the impact of the war efforts on production, employment and capital: some industries experienced rapid growth due to additional investment, others suffered due to the dislocation of markets. Moreover, by drawing lessons from the war economy (especially the dearth of various essential commodities including war materials), the colonial government took up various measures in the inter-war period to promote India’s domestic industries for the first time. Additionally, the book also argues that many of the expatriate firms in India became financially weak because of the Depression which paved the way for the ‘Indianisation’ of corporate houses. These elements were significant factors in the decline of British industrial hegemony in India and aided the de-colonisation process which followed. This book will be of interest to scholars of Indian economic history as well as those with wider interests in decolonisation, industrial history and the first half of the twentieth century.

Through two World Wars and the Great Depression, this book explores the turbulent history of colonial Indian industry in the period immediately prior to independence. Focusing on five major industries in Bengal - coal mining, iron-smelting, jute manufacturing, paper making and tea plantation - the book looks at the impact of the war efforts on production, employment and capital: some industries experienced rapid growth due to additional investment, others suffered due to the dislocation of markets. Moreover, by drawing lessons from the war economy (especially the dearth of various essential commodities including war materials), the colonial government took up various measures in the inter-war period to promote India's domestic industries for the first time. Additionally, the book also argues that many of the expatriate firms in India became financially weak because of the Depression which paved the way for the 'Indianisation' of corporate houses. These elements were significant factors in the decline of British industrial hegemony in India and aided the de-colonisation process which followed. This book will be of interest to scholars of Indian economic history as well as those with wider interests in decolonisation, industrial history and the first half of the twentieth century.

Through two World Wars and the Great Depression, this book explores the turbulent history of colonial Indian industry in the period immediately prior to independence. Focusing on five major industries in Bengal - coal mining, iron-smelting, jute manufacturing, paper making and tea plantation – the book looks at the impact of the war efforts on production, employment and capital: some industries experienced rapid growth due to additional investment, others suffered due to the dislocation of markets. Moreover, by drawing lessons from the war economy (especially the dearth of various essential commodities including war materials), the colonial government took up various measures in the inter-war period to promote India’s domestic industries for the first time. Additionally, the book also argues that many of the expatriate firms in India became financially weak because of the Depression which paved the way for the ‘Indianisation’ of corporate houses. These elements were significant factors in the decline of British industrial hegemony in India and aided the de-colonisation process which followed. This book will be of interest to scholars of Indian economic history as well as those with wider interests in decolonisation, industrial history and the first half of the twentieth century.

This book sets out the present state of the discussion of the decline in British industry and introduces new directions in which the debate is now proceeding.

This survey of the rise and decline of English watchmaking fills a gap in the historiography of British industry. Clerkenwell in London was supplied with 'rough movements' from Prescot, 200 miles away in Lancashire. Smaller watchmaking hubs later emerged in Coventry, Liverpool, and Birmingham. The English industry led European watchmaking in the late eighteenth century in output, and its lucrative export markets extended to the Ottoman Empire and China. It also made marine chronometers, the most complex of hand-crafted pre-industrial mechanisms, crucially important to the later hegemony of Britain’s navy and merchant marine. Although Britain was the 'workshop of the world', its watchmaking industry declined. Why? First, because cheap Swiss watches were smuggled into British markets. Later, in the era of Free Trade, they were joined by machine-made watches from factories in America, enabled by the successful application to watch production of the 'American system' in Waltham, Massachusetts after 1858. The Swiss watch industry adapted itself appropriately, expanded, and reasserted its lead in the world’s markets. English watchmaking did not: its trajectory foreshadowed and was later followed by other once-prominent British industries. Clerkenwell retained its pre-industrial production methods. Other modernization attempts in Britain had limited success or failed.

Sakade challenges the narrative that the focus of British manufacturing went "from Empire to Europe" and argues rather that, following the Second World War, the key relationship was in fact trans-Atlantic. There is a commonly accepted belief that, during the twentieth century, British manufacturing declined irreparably, that Britain lost its industrial hegemony. But this is too simplistic. In fact, in the decades after 1945, Britain staked out a new role for itself as a key participant in a US-led process of globalisation. Far from becoming merely a European player, the UK actually managed to preserve a key share in a global market, and the British defence industry was, to a large extent, successfully rehabilitated. Sakade returns to the original scholarly parameters of the decline controversy, and especially questions around post-war decline in the fields of high technology and the national defence industrial base. Using the case of the strategically critical military and civil aircraft industry, he argues that British industry remained relatively robust. A valuable read for historians of British aviation and more widely of 20th century British Industry.