Today's world is undergoing the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which started with the First Industrial Revolution (FIR) in England in 1760 with the money plundered from Bengal. England emerged as the leader of the Industrial Revolution immediately after seizing the Kingdom of Bengal through the Battle of Conspiracy in 1757.
While the FIR brought capitalist advancement, progress, and development to the British economy, it caused socio-economic and political degradation in the colonies in the global South, especially in Bengal.
The colonialist writers and their cohorts generally portray a rosy picture of the British Raj in Bengal/India from 1757 to 1947, claiming that they linked local markets to the global economy, facilitating a new horizon of life in the colonies. They hardly refer to the dark sides of the British colonial rule and their plundering of Bengal resources, making it a "cash cow" that receives closer attention in the present write up.
Some legendary historians admitted that Bengal was the wealthiest region in the contemporary world by maintaining its "proto-industrialization and the early signs of Industrial Revolution." Evidence suggests that Bengal resources earned by plundering contributed to the Industrial Revolution in England during 1760-1840. The American historian Brooks Adams, in his book The Laws of Civilization and Decay (1896), noted:
"Very soon after Plassey [Polashi], the Bengal plunder began to arrive in London, and the effect appears to have been instantaneous, for all the authorities agree that the Industrial Revolution, the event which has divided the 19th century from all antecedent time, began with the year 1760. Plassey was fought in 1757, and probably nothing has ever equaled the rapidity of the change which followed between 1760 and 1815; the growth was very rapid and prodigious."
As a result of the influx of Bengal finances, their strategic investment in the manufacturing factories and industries and the dividends earned in the UK were fabulous. Consulting the financial records, the Latin American writer Andre Gunder Frank (1969), in his book The Third World Crisis, observed:
"Bengal once provided the lifeblood of mercantile and industrial capitalist development in the metropolis."
Some Western economists argued that no investment had produced so much profit from the money and resources from Bengal plundering since the dawn of human civilization. During the initial 50 years of the Industrial Revolution, the UK remained steadfast without facing any effective competitors or encounters from other European countries in the overseas market. Bangladeshi author Anupam Sen (1982), in his book The State, Industrialization and Class Formations in India, provided an analysis of the questionable impact of the colonial state in steering under-development in the sub-continent, specifically in Bengal.
To create and expand its external market, the BEIC destroyed the local industries, including the world-famous Muslin and textile products in today's Bangladesh territory. In their typical exploitation, the colonial rulers ruined the local industries to feed their industrial products in the overseas market, not to be completed by Bengal products.
The expatriate authority "systematically destroyed the textile and Muslin industries through various and innumerable methods of oppression to the poor weavers such as by fines, imprisonments, floggings, forcing bonds from them." Consequently, the world-famous Bengal Muslin products virtually disappeared due to British coercive de-industrialization policies.
Under the Mughals, for its finest quality, Bengal Muslin was in high order among the European aristocrats and nobility. It was prized several times in the Imperial courts of Europe and Asia. The Eastern Bengal cotton textile industry was also among the most remarkable in the world.
Under the Nawabi rule, Bengal textiles amounted to more than 50% of British and Dutch textile exports from Asia. A vast amount of Bengal raw silk, cloths, etc, were exported to the West and as far as Gujrat, Lahore, and even Ispahan in Persia. Before the colonial takeover, Asian merchants exported raw silk from Bengal, amounting to Rs48 lakh per annum on average during the mid-eighteenth century.
Contemporary foreign travellers and European trading companies recorded that the quality of Bengal textile products surpassed all other parts of Asia. In a sharp observation, the Indian historian Romesh C Dutt (1893), in his book Economic History of India, noted:
"The people of Bengal had never lived under oppression so far-reaching in its effects, extending to every village market and every manufacturer's loom. They had been used to arbitrary acts from men in power but had never suffered from a system that touched their trades, occupations, and lives so closely. The springs of their industry were stopped; the sources of their wealth dried up."
The rapid de-industrialization of the region brought tremendous hardship for the uprooted local artisans, pushing most of them with no other occupation to fall back on agriculture, which created massive rural unemployment for the first time in Bengal's history.
As a result, the proportion of the unskilled rural population dependent on farming for their livelihood increased almost 100% within the first 100 years of colonization.
Moreover, to meet the growing demands of Indigo for their textile products, after its supply line was cut off from America in 1776, the colonial authority ensured the supply from Bengal, compelling farmers to produce Indigo in various districts of West Bengal and Jessore in Bangladesh.
The European planters forced the Bengali peasants to grow Indigo for its use as a blue dye in their textile industries in the UK, and the practice continued since 1777. They also established monopoly businesses to boost revenue earnings by forcing farmers to grow opium poppies and ganja. As a result of prolonged colonial exploitation, the Bengal peasantry, particularly the Bengali Muslim community, suffered the most.
Looking back at lessons learned from the colonial past, Bangladesh must look forward to investing in human capital to enable the next generation to impart in a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA).
The younger generation must advance with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Artificial Intelligence, or "cyber-physical production systems" of intelligent factories. They must be increasingly adaptive to the shifting paradigm of production and manufacturing systems of robotics, the Internet of Things (IOT), as big data analytics have empowered manufacturing intelligence.
The Digital Revolution is changing the world faster compared to how people worked under the earlier Industrial Revolutions. The younger generation in Bangladesh needs to be equipped and tuned to the emerging technological need of the 21st century to bring back the glories of the pre-colonial economy in the global society.
Dr M Emdadul Haq is the Chair of the Department of History and Philosophy at North South University.