One of the enduring mysteries in my life has been trying to understand why the Industrial Revolution, which started in England in the mid-18th century and introduced spinning and weaving machines, did not first happen in India. After all, India was producing most of the world’s cotton thread and cloth at that time. Whenever I ask this, I get the answer: “Indian labour costs were so low that nobody needed to invent machines to spin or weave.”
The term “Industrial Revolution” was popularised by the English economic historian Arnold Toynbee in an 1882 lecture at Oxford University to describe how
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