Indian Textile Industry Dbq Analysis

From the 1880s to the 1930s, Japan and India both endured increase in the use of machines in the textile industry. Both countries had similar recruitment techniques, but differed greatly in the type of workers, and the conditions of which they worked in.
One similarity between the Japanese and Indian mechanization is their use of farmers. Farmers were hired to increase the production while they were also cheap and desperate for income. A Japanese industrialist stated (document 5) that they are able to pay farmer workers for little to nothing because when they come to the city “all he or she has to do is earn enough to maintain his or her own living.” The Japanese were able to take advantage of this cheap source of labor. In addition, the British

The Indian textiles chart (document 1) shows how India used more machines to increase yarn and cloth production in 1914 as opposed to 1884. The chart shows how machine-spun yarn, in addition to the amount of the amount of machine produced cloth is quickly gaining the amount of handwoven yarn, which shows how the uses of machines in the textile industry are increasing. An Indian Economist (document 6) in 1996 talks of how handweavers are unable to compete with the machine-made cloth producers, and is therefore rapidly declining. This shows India’s step towards a more efficient mechanized cloth industry. Compared with India’s cloth textiles, Japan’s chart of cotton yarn (document 2) shows that Japan is rapidly producing in the textile industry because of the pounds of cotton and yarn made. This is resulted from the increased use of machines in the Japanese textile

Documents 10 and 8 are both pictures of an Indian and a Japanese textile mill. The Indian mill (document 10) shows all male workers, indication that many more males worked in Indian textile mills than females did. However, in contrast to India, the Japanese mill (document 8) shows numerous females working in the mills and only a few men, indicating that Japan was actually the opposite of India and had more female than male workers. A comparative chart of female workers in the two countries (document 7) shows that less than a quarter of Indian textile laborers were female whereas more than three quarters of laborers were female in Japan. This gap could be a result of plain availability but it could also be a result from the Hindu religion which suppressed women from working in jobs. The chart also shows that the percentage of of Indian female workers goes down at the same time as the Japanese percentage slightly increases. This shows the difference of workers between India and Japan. Document 4 also provides a well written source concerning the high percentage of female workers in Japanese mills. The document states that the female laborers were a great salvation for poor peasant