Industrialisation

🎯 How This Word Works in UPSC Writing

The shift from agrarian and handicraft production to mechanised factory production. Britain's precedence is explained by a combination of conditions rather than any single cause, and listing them is what the question usually wants: accessible coal and iron, capital accumulated through trade and empire, agricultural improvement releasing labour from the land, enclosure creating a workforce with no alternative, a legal framework securing property and patents, and colonial markets to absorb the output. The social consequences are equally examinable, since urbanisation outran sanitation, factory discipline replaced task-oriented work with the clock, child and female labour became systematic, and the working class that emerged organised into trade unions and eventually secured factory legislation. For India the comparative point is that industrialisation occurred under colonial conditions, which disrupted the sequence and is the subject of the deindustrialisation argument.