The New World of Islam Part 16

FOOTNOTES:

[192] According to some historians, this race-mixture occurred almost at once. The theory is that the Aryan conquerors, who outside the north-western region had very few of their own women with them, took Dravidian women as wives or concubines, and legitimatized their half-breed children, the offspring of the conquerors, both pure-bloods and mixed-bloods, coalescing into a closed caste. Further infiltration of Dravidian blood was thus prevented, but Aryan race-purity had been destroyed.

[193] Sir Bampfylde Fuller, _Studies of Indian Life and Sentiment_, p.

40 (London, 1910). For other discussions of caste and its effects, see W. Archer, _India and the Future_ (London, 1918); Sir V. Chirol, _Indian Unrest_ (London, 1910); Rev. J. Morrison, _New Ideas in India: A Study of Social, Political and Religious Developments_ (Edinburgh, 1906); Sir H. Risley, _The People of India_ (London, 1908); also writings of the "Namasudra" leader, Dr. Nair, previously quoted, and S. Nihal Singh, "India's Untouchables," _Contemporary Review_, March, 1913.

[194] For the nationalist movement, see Archer, Chirol, and Morrison, _supra_. Also Sir H. J. S. Cotton, _India in Transition_ (London, 1904); J. N. Farquhar, _Modern Religious Movements in India_ (New York, 1915); Sir W. W. Hunter, _The India of the Queen and Other Essays_ (London, 1903); W. S. Lilly, _India and Its Problems_ (London, 1902); Sir V.

Lovett, _A History of the Indian Nationalist Movement_ (London, 1920); J. Ramsay Macdonald, _The Government of India_ (London, 1920); Sir T.

Morison, _Imperial Rule in India_ (London, 1899); J. D. Rees, _The Real India_ (London, 1908); Sir J. Strachey, _India: Its Administration and Progress_ (Fourth Edition--London, 1911); K. Vyasa Rao, _The Future Government of India_ (London, 1918).

[195] I have already discussed this "Golden Age" tendency in Chapter III. For more or less Extremist Indian view-points, see A. Coomaraswamy, _The Dance of Siva_ (New York, 1918); H. Maitra, _Hinduism: The World-Ideal_ (London, 1916); Bipin Chandra Pal, "The Forces Behind the Unrest in India," _Contemporary Review_, February, 1910; also various writings of Lajpat Rai, especially _The Arya Samaj_ (London, 1915) and _Young India_ (New York, 1916).

[196] For Indian Mohammedan points of view, mostly anti-Hindu, see H. H.

The Aga Khan, _India in Transition_ (London, 1918); S. Khuda Bukhsh, _Essays: Indian and Islamic_ (London, 1912); Sir Syed Ahmed, _The Present State of Indian Politics_ (Allahabad, 1888); Syed Sirdar Ali Khan, _The Unrest in India_ (Bombay, 1907); also his _India of To-day_ (Bombay, 1908).

[197] This att.i.tude of the "Depressed Cla.s.ses," especially as revealed in the "Namasudra a.s.sociation," has already been discussed in Chapter III, and will be further touched upon later in this present chapter.

[198] Regarding the Indian native princes, see Archer and Chirol, _supra_. Also J. Pollen, "Native States and Indian Home Rule," _Asiatic Review_, January 1, 1917; The Maharajah of Bobbili, _Advice to the Indian Aristocracy_ (Madras, 1905); articles by Sir D. Barr and Sir F.

Younghusband in _The Empire and the Century_ (London, 1905).

[199] A good symposium of extremist comment is contained in Chirol, _supra_. Also see J. D. Rees, _The Real India_ (London, 1908); series of extremist articles in _The Open Court_, March, 1917. A good sample of extremist literature is the fairly well-known pamphlet _India's "Loyalty" to England_ (1915).

[200] Discussed in the preceding chapter.

[201] Quoted in Chapter IV.

[202] Lord Sydenham, "India," _Contemporary Review_, November, 1918. For similar criticisms of the Montagu-Chelmsford proposals, see G. M.

Chesney, _India under Experiment_ (London, 1918); "The First Stage towards Indian Anarchy," _Spectator_, December 20, 1919.

[203] Lionel Curtis, _Letters to the People of India on Responsible Government_, already quoted at the end of Chapter IV.

[204] Sir V. Chirol, "India in Travail," _Edinburgh Review_, July, 1918.

[205] _I. e._, self-government, in the extremist sense--practically independence.

CHAPTER VII

ECONOMIC CHANGE

One of the most interesting phenomena of modern world-history is the twofold conquest of the East by the West. The word "conquest" is usually employed in a political sense, and calls up visions of embattled armies subduing foreign lands and lording it over distant peoples. Such political conquests in the Orient did of course occur, and we have already seen how, during the past century, the decrepit states of the Near and Middle East fell an easy prey to the armed might of the European Powers.

But what is not so generally realized is the fact that this political conquest was paralleled by an economic conquest perhaps even more complete and probably destined to produce changes of an even more profound and enduring character.

The root-cause of this economic conquest was the Industrial Revolution.

Just as the voyages of Columbus and Da Gama gave Europe the strategic mastery of the ocean and thereby the political mastery of the world, so the technical inventions of the later eighteenth century which inaugurated the Industrial Revolution gave Europe the economic mastery of the world. These inventions in fact heralded a new Age of Discovery, this time into the realms of science. The results were, if possible, more momentous even than those of the age of geographical discovery three centuries before. They gave our race such increased mastery over the resources of nature that the ensuing transformation of economic life swiftly and utterly transformed the face of things.

This transformation was, indeed, unprecedented in the world's history.

Hitherto man's material progress had been a gradual evolution. With the exception of gunpowder, he had tapped no new sources of material energy since very ancient times. The horse-drawn mail-coach of our great-grandfathers was merely a logical elaboration of the horse-drawn Egyptian chariot; the wind-driven clipper-s.h.i.+p traced its line unbroken to Ulysses's lateen bark before Troy; while industry still relied on the brawn of man and beast or upon the simple action of wind and waterfall.

Suddenly all was changed. Steam, electricity, petrol, the Hertzian wave, harnessed nature's hidden powers, conquered distance, and shrunk the terrestrial globe to the measure of human hands. Man entered a new material world, differing not merely in degree but in kind from that of previous generations.

When I say "Man," I mean, so far as the nineteenth century was concerned, the white man of Europe and its racial settlements overseas.

It was the white man's brain which had conceived all this, and it was the white man alone who at first reaped the benefits. The two outstanding features of the new order were the rise of machine-industry with its incalculable acceleration of ma.s.s-production, and the correlative development of cheap and rapid transportation. Both these factors favoured a prodigious increase in economic power and wealth in Europe, since Europe became the workshop of the world. In fact, during the nineteenth century, Europe was transformed from a semi-rural continent into a swarming hive of industry, gorged with goods, capital, and men, pouring forth its wares to the remotest corners of the earth, and drawing thence fresh stores of raw material for new fabrication and exchange.

Such was the industrially revolutionized West which confronted an East as backward and stagnant in economics as it was in politics and the art of war. In fact, the East was virtually devoid of either industry or business, as we understand these terms to-day. Economically, the East was on an agricultural basis, the economic unit being the self-supporting, semi-isolated village. Oriental "industries" were handicrafts, carried on by relatively small numbers of artisans, usually working by and for themselves. Their products, while often exquisite in quality, were largely luxuries, and were always produced by such slow, antiquated methods that their quant.i.ty was limited and their market price relatively high. Despite very low wages, therefore, Asiatic products not only could not compete in the world-market with European and American machine-made, ma.s.s-produced articles, but were hard hit in their home-markets as well.

This Oriental inability to compete with Western industry arose not merely from methods of production but also from other factors such as the mentality of the workers and the scarcity of capital. Throughout the Near and Middle East economic life rested on the principle of status.

The Western economic principles of contract and compet.i.tion were virtually unknown. Agriculturalists and artisans followed blindly in the footsteps of their fathers. There was no compet.i.tion, no stimulus for improvement, no change in customary wages, no desire for a better and more comfortable living. The industries were stereotyped; the apprentice merely imitated his master, and rarely thought of introducing new implements or new methods of manufacture. Instead of working for profit and advancement, men followed an hereditary "calling," usually hallowed by religious sanctions, handed down from father to son through many generations, each calling possessing its own unchanging ideals, its zealously guarded craft-secrets.

The few bolder, more enterprising spirits who might have ventured to break the iron bands of custom and tradition were estopped by lack of capital. Fluid "investment" capital, easily mobilized and ready to pour into an enterprise of demonstrable utility and profit, simply did not exist. To the Oriental, whether prince or peasant, money was regarded, not as a source of profit or a medium of exchange, but as a store of value, to be h.o.a.rded intact against a "rainy day." The East has been known for ages as a "sink of the precious metals." In India alone, the value of the gold, silver, and jewels hidden in strong-boxes, buried in the earth, or hanging about the necks of women must run into billions.

Says a recent writer on India: "I had the privilege of being taken through the treasure-vaults of one of the wealthiest Maharajahs. I could have plunged my arm to the shoulder in great silver caskets filled with diamonds, pearls, emeralds, rubies. The walls were studded with hooks and on each pair of hooks rested gold bars three to four feet long and two inches across. I stood by a great cask of diamonds, and picking up a handful let them drop slowly from between my fingers, sparkling and glistening like drops of water in sunlight. There are some seven hundred native states, and the rulers of every one has his treasure-vaults on a more or less elaborate scale. Besides these, every zamindar and every Indian of high or low degree who can save anything, wants to have it by him in actual metal; he distrusts this new-fangled paper currency that they try to pa.s.s off on him. Sometimes he beats his coins into bangles for his wives, and sometimes he hides money behind a loose brick or under a flat stone in the bottom of the oven, or he goes out and digs a little hole and buries it."[206]

Remember that this description is of present-day India, after more than a century of British rule and notwithstanding a permeation of Western ideas which, as we shall presently see, has produced momentous modifications in the native point of view. Remember also that this h.o.a.rding propensity is not peculiar to India but is shared by the entire Orient. We can then realize the utter lack of capital for investment purposes in the East of a hundred years ago, especially when we remember that political insecurity and religious prohibitions of the lending of money at interest stood in the way of such far-sighted individuals as might have been inclined to employ their h.o.a.rded wealth for productive purposes. There was, indeed, one outlet for financial activity--usury, and therein virtually all the scant fluid capital of the old Orient was employed. But such capital, lent not for productive enterprise, but for luxury, profligacy, or incompetence, was a destructive rather than a creative force and merely intensified the prejudice against capital of any kind.

Such was the economic life of the Orient a hundred years ago. It is obvious that this archaic order was utterly unable to face the tremendous compet.i.tion of the industrialized West. Everywhere the flood of cheap Western machine-made, ma.s.s-produced goods began invading Eastern lands, driving the native wares before them. The way in which an ancient Oriental handicraft like the Indian textiles was literally annihilated by the destructive compet.i.tion of Lancas.h.i.+re cottons is only one of many similar instances. To be sure, some Oriental writers contend that this triumph of Western manufactures was due to political rather than economic reasons, and Indian nationalists cite British governmental activity in favour of the Lancas.h.i.+re cottons above mentioned as the sole cause for the destruction of the Indian textile handicrafts. But such arguments appear to be fallacious. British official action may have hastened the triumph of British industry in India, but that triumph was inevitable in the long run. The best proof is the way in which the textile crafts of independent Oriental countries like Turkey and Persia were similarly ruined by Western compet.i.tion.

A further proof is the undoubted fact that Oriental peoples, taken as a whole, have bought Western-manufactured products in preference to their own hand-made wares. To many Westerners this has been a mystery. Such persons cannot understand how the Orientals could buy the cheap, shoddy products of the West, manufactured especially for the Eastern market, in preference to their native wares of better quality and vastly greater beauty. The answer, however, is that the average Oriental is not an art connoisseur but a poor man living perilously close to the margin of starvation. He not only wants but must buy things cheap, and the wide price-margin is the deciding factor. Of course there is also the element of novelty. Besides goods which merely replace articles he has always used, the West has introduced many new articles whose utility or charm are irresistible. I have already mentioned the way in which the sewing-machine and the kerosene-lamp have swept the Orient from end to end, and there are many other instances of a similar nature. The permeation of Western industry has, in fact, profoundly modified every phase of Oriental economic life. New economic wants have been created; standards of living have been raised; canons of taste have been altered.

Says a lifelong American student of the Orient: "The knowledge of modern inventions and of other foods and articles has created new wants. The Chinese peasant is no longer content to burn bean-oil; he wants kerosene. The desire of the Asiatic to possess foreign lamps is equalled only by his pa.s.sion for foreign clocks. The ambitious Syrian scorns the mud roof of his ancestors, and will be satisfied only with the bright red tiles imported from France. Everywhere articles of foreign manufacture are in demand.... Knowledge increases wants, and the Oriental is acquiring knowledge. He demands a hundred things to-day that his grandfather never heard of."[207]

Everywhere it is the same story. An Indian economic writer, though a bitter enemy of Western industrialism, bemoans the fact that "the artisans are losing their occupations and are turning to agriculture.

The cheap kerosene-oil from Baku or New York threatens the oilman's[208]

existence. Bra.s.s and copper which have been used for vessels from time immemorial are threatened by cheap enamelled ironware imported from Europe.... There is also, _pari pa.s.su_, a transformation of the tastes of the consumers. They abandon _gur_ for crystal sugar. Home-woven cloths are now replaced by manufactured cloths for being too coa.r.s.e. All local industries are attacked and many have been destroyed. Villages that for centuries followed customary practices are brought into contact with the world's markets all on a sudden. For steams.h.i.+ps and railways which have established the connection have been built in so short an interval as hardly to allow breathing-time to the village which slumbered so long under the dominion of custom. Thus the sudden introduction of compet.i.tion into an economic unit which had from time immemorial followed custom has wrought a mighty change."[209]

This "mighty change" was due not merely to the influx of Western goods but also to an equally momentous influx of Western capital. The opportunities for profitable investment were so numerous that Western capital soon poured in streams into Eastern lands. Virtually devoid of fluid capital of its own, the Orient was bound to have recourse to Western capital for the initiation of all economic activity in the modern sense. Railways, mines, large-scale agriculture of the "plantation" type, and many other undertakings thus came into being.

Most notable of all was the founding of numerous manufacturing establishments from North Africa to China and the consequent growth of genuine "factory towns" where the whir of machinery and the smoke of tall chimneys proclaimed that the East was adopting the industrial life of the West.

The momentous social consequences of this industrialization of the Orient will be treated in subsequent chapters. In the present chapter we will confine ourselves to a consideration of its economic side.

Furthermore, this book, limited as it is to the Near and Middle East, cannot deal with industrial developments in China and j.a.pan. The reader should, however, always bear in mind Far Eastern developments, which, in the main, run parallel to those which we shall here discuss.

These industrial innovations were at first pure Western transplantings set in Eastern soil. Initiated by Western capital, they were wholly controlled and managed by Western brains. Western capital could not venture to entrust itself to Orientals, with their lack of the modern industrial spirit, their habits of "squeeze" and nepotism, their l.u.s.t for quick returns, and their incapacity for sustained business team-play. As time pa.s.sed, however, the success of Western undertakings so impressed Orientals that the more forward-looking among them were ready to risk their money and to acquire the technique necessary for success. At the close of Chapter II, I described the development of modern business types in the Moslem world, and the same is true of the non-Moslem populations of India. In India there were several elements such as the Parsis and the Hindu "banyas," or money-lenders, whose previous activities in commerce or usury predisposed them to financial and industrial activity in the modern sense. From their ranks have chiefly sprung the present-day native business communities of India, exemplified by the jute and textile factories of Calcutta and Bombay, and the great Tata iron-works of Bengal--undertakings financed by native capital and wholly under native control. Of course, beside these successes there have been many lamentable failures. Nevertheless, there seems to be no doubt that Western industrialism is ceasing to be an exotic and is rooting itself firmly in Eastern soil.[210]

The combined result of Western and Eastern enterprise has been, as already stated, the rise of important industrial centres at various points in the Orient. In Egypt a French writer remarks: "Both banks of the Nile are lined with factories, sugar-refineries and cotton-mills, whose belching chimneys tower above the mud huts of the fellahs."[211]

And Sir Theodore Morison says of India: "In the city of Bombay the industrial revolution has already been accomplished. Bombay is a modern manufacturing city, where both the dark and the bright side of modern industrialism strike the eye. Bombay has insanitary slums where overcrowding is as great an evil as in any European city; she has a proletariat which works long hours amid the din and whir of machinery; she also has her millionaires, whose princely charities have adorned her streets with beautiful buildings. Signs of lavish wealth and, let me add, culture and taste in Bombay astonish the visitor from the inland districts. The brown villages and never-ending fields with which he has. .h.i.therto been familiar are the India which is pa.s.sing away; Bombay is the presage of the future."[212]

The juxtaposition of vast natural resources and a limitless supply of cheap labour has encouraged the most ambitious hopes in Oriental minds.

Some Orientals look to a combination of Western money and Eastern man-power, expressed by an Indian economic writer in the formula: "English money and Indian labour are the two cheapest things in the world."[213] Others more ambitiously dream of industrializing the East entirely by native effort, to the exclusion and even to the detriment of the West. This view was well set forth some years ago by a Hindu, who wrote in a leading Indian periodical:[214] "In one sense the Orient is really menacing the West, and so earnest and open-minded is Asia that no pretence or apology whatever is made about it. The Easterner has thrown down the industrial gauntlet, and from now on Asia is destined to witness a progressively intense trade warfare, the Occidental scrambling to retain his hold on the markets of the East, and the Oriental endeavouring to beat him in a battle in which heretofore he has been an easy victor.... In competing with the Occidental commercialists, the Oriental has awakened to a dynamic realization of the futility of pitting unimproved machinery and methods against modern methods and appliances. Casting aside his former sense of self-complacency, he is studying the sciences and arts that have given the West its material prosperity. He is putting the results of his investigations to practical use, as a rule, recasting the Occidental methods to suit his peculiar needs, and in some instances improving upon them."

This statement of the spirit of the Orient's industrial awakening is confirmed by many white observers. At the very moment when the above article was penned, an American economic writer was making a study tour of the Orient, of which he reported: "The real cause of Asia's poverty lies in just two things: the failure of Asiatic governments to educate their people, and the failure of the people to increase their productive capacity by the use of machinery. Ignorance and lack of machinery are responsible for Asia's poverty; knowledge and modern tools are responsible for America's prosperity." But, continues this writer, we must watch out. Asia now realizes these facts and is doing much to remedy the situation. Hence, "we must face in ever-increasing degree the rivalry of awakening peoples who are strong with the strength that comes from struggle with poverty and hards.h.i.+p, and who have set themselves to master and apply all our secrets in the coming world-struggle for industrial supremacy and for racial readjustment."[215] Another American observer of Asiatic economic conditions reports: "All Asia is being permeated with modern industry and present-day mechanical progress."[216] And Sir Theodore Morison concludes regarding India's economic future: "India's industrial transformation is near at hand; the obstacles which have hitherto prevented the adoption of modern methods of manufacture have been removed; means of transport have been spread over the face of the whole country, capital for the purchase of machinery and erection of factories may now be borrowed on easy terms; mechanics, engineers, and business managers may be hired from Europe to train the future captains of Indian industry; in English a common language has been found in which to transact business with all the provinces of India and with a great part of the Western world; security from foreign invasion and internal commotion justifies the inception of large enterprises. All the conditions are favourable for a great reorganization of industry which, when successfully accomplished, will bring about an increase hitherto undreamed of in India's annual output of wealth."[217]

The factor usually relied upon to overcome the Orient's handicaps of inexperience and inexpertness in industrialism is its cheap labour. To Western observers the low wages and long hours of Eastern industry are literally astounding. Take Egypt and India as examples of industrial conditions in the Near and Middle East. Writing of Egypt in 1908, the English economist H. N. Brailsford says: "There was then no Factory Act in Egypt. There are all over the country ginning-mills, which employ casual labour to prepare raw cotton for export during four or five months of the year. The wages were low, from 7-1/2_d._ to 10_d._ (15 to 20 cents) a day for an adult, and 6_d._ (12 cents) for a child. Children and adults alike worked sometimes for twelve, usually for fifteen, and on occasion even for sixteen or eighteen hours a day. In the height of the season even the children were put on night s.h.i.+fts of twelve hours."[218]

In India conditions are about the same. The first thorough investigation of Indian industry was made in 1907 by a factory labour commission, and the following are some of the data published in its report: In the cotton-mills of Bombay the hours regularly worked ran from thirteen to fourteen hours. In the jute-mills of Calcutta the operatives usually worked fifteen hours. Cotton-ginning factories required their employees to work seventeen and eighteen hours a day, rice and flour mills twenty to twenty-two hours, and an extreme case was found in a printing works where the men had to work twenty-two hours a day for seven consecutive days. As to wages, an adult male operative, working from thirteen to fifteen hours a day, received from 15 to 20 rupees a month ($5 to $6.35). Child labour was very prevalent, children six and seven years old working "half-time"--in many cases eight hours a day. As a result of this report legislation was pa.s.sed by the Indian Government bettering working conditions somewhat, especially for women and children. But in 1914 the French economist Albert Metin, after a careful study, reported factory conditions not greatly changed, the Factory Acts systematically evaded, hours very long, and wages extremely low. In Bombay men were earning from 10 cents to 20 cents per day, the highest wages being 30 cents. For women and children the maximum was 10 cents per day.[219]

With such extraordinarily low wages and long hours of labour it might at first sight seem as though, given adequate capital and up-to-date machinery, the Orient could not only drive Occidental products from Eastern markets but might invade Western markets as well. This, indeed, has been the fear of many Western writers. Nearly three-quarters of a century ago Gobineau prophesied an industrial invasion of Europe from Asia,[220] and of late years economists like H. N. Brailsford have warned against an emigration of Western capital to the tempting lure of factory conditions in Eastern lands.[221] Nevertheless, so far as the Near and Middle East is concerned, nothing like this has as yet materialized. China, to be sure, may yet have unpleasant surprises in store for the West,[222] but neither the Moslem world nor India have developed factory labour with the skill, stamina, and a.s.siduity sufficient to undercut the industrial workers of Europe and America. In India, for example, despite a swarming and poverty-stricken population, the factories are unable to recruit an adequate or dependable labour-supply. Says M. Metin: "With such long hours and low wages it might be thought that Indian industry would be a formidable compet.i.tor of the West. This is not so. The reason is the bad quality of the work.

The poorly paid coolies are so badly fed and so weak that it takes at least three of them to do the work of one European. Also, the Indian workers lack not only strength but also skill, attention, and liking for their work.... An Indian of the people will do anything else in preference to becoming a factory operative. The factories thus get only the dregs of the working cla.s.s. The workers come to the factories and mines as a last resort; they leave as soon as they can return to their prior occupations or find a more remunerative employment. Thus the factories can never count on a regular labour-supply. Would higher wages remedy this? Many employers say no--as soon as the workers got a little ahead they would quit, either temporarily till their money was spent, or permanently for some more congenial calling."[223] These statements are fully confirmed by an Indian economic writer, who says: "One of the greatest drawbacks to the establishment of large industries in India is the scarcity and inefficiency of labour. Cheap labour, where there is no physical stamina, mental discipline, and skill behind it, tends to be costly in the end. The Indian labourer is mostly uneducated. He is not in touch with his employers or with his work. The labouring population of the towns is a flitting, dilettante population."[224]