GIVE KEY LEARINGS FOR THIS READING IN SHORT

Capital and Empire (1850–1930) Industry ◈ The trading world that joined the land (agriculture) and the sea (foreign trade) enabled industrialisation in an important, if indirect way. Marketing agents, managers, machines, and engineers needed for a factory to succeed were in short supply in 1850. Agricultural export created the capacity to pay for skilled services and machinery purchased from abroad. Merely the capacity to import machines or hire abroad would not be enough to explain factories. Industry required a great deal more money than did trade, and kept capital locked in for longer. Money was difficult in India. Leveraging would be suicidal for industries in this world, unless the process was carefully planned. Here, organisation mattered. These resources were procured by different groups by different means. Indians usually operated in the home market, recruited managers from within the extended family, raised investment money from existing businesses, friends, and family. Those people already in long-distance trade had better chance of doing this – another way that agricultural trade helped industrial investment. The Europeans relied more on knowledge of foreign markets and agency networks in these markets. They recruited managers and partners from abroad. Most raised money from London, though increasingly they floated shares in India (mainly Calcutta). Because of these differences, the Europeans were more likely to use the corporate form for their firms, whereas Indians used a hybrid between a family and corporate, adapting the mix depending on their access to capital markets. Both sets of actors relied equally on the recruitment of technical people from abroad. Because stock markets were undeveloped in India, the London money market did not value Indian investment highly until the railway companies began operation. Banks financed trade and not industrial investment. Industrial firms needed to tap into trading profits. This was true both of Europeans and Indians. But after the Indian Mutiny ended and Crown rule began (1858), a different type of foreign firm entered India. These came to India from an industrial base in Britain, or were fortune hunters with some money who joined industry after a short career in trade. I call them bornindustrial, though the term should not be read literally. The British Empire spawned these enterprises in a sense. Faster transportation links, uniform legal framework, and the use of one official language within the Empire encouraged capitalists to become mobile. The Empire also increased the scope of public–private partnership and indirectly led to greater associational activity. The emergence of modern industry was offset to some extent by a decline in traditional industry in the 1870s. However, based on the experience of the cotton handloom industry, we now know that the decline of the handicrafts was arrested from the 1870s, and reversed from around 1900.1 More on this topic later. This chapter describes the profile of some of the leading families and firms who invested in industry. Let us first consider the European investors. European Industrialists South India Some of the European industrial firms of the twentieth century had trading origin.2 The early history of Finlay was discussed in Chapter 3. In the 1870s, James Finlay started jute mills in Calcutta, and in the next decade, began selling Indian tea. By 1900, they owned the major part of the tea trade market in the Anaimalai and the Nilgiris, which were consolidated under four companies listed in London. Their other ventures included a cotton mill in Bombay and a sugar refinery in United Provinces. In the 1830s, ownership had passed on to a former partner, John Muir, and the firm stayed as family-controlled until 1924. Their core business by then was selling tea worldwide, in which business the London partner companies played an important role.3 Another South Indian enterprise, Harrisons and Crosfield, began as a Liverpool tea trader in 1844, and ventured into tea estates in Ceylon and South India in only about 1900. By then their distribution network was spread over a large area in Asia and the Pacific, and the firm was beginning to produce rubber in Malaya. It abandoned partnership quite late, in 1908. Long after the founder of Parry, Thomas Parry, had died (1824, see Chapter 3 on Thomas Parry), his firm acquired sugar factories on the south-eastern coast, and by 1855, added more sugar plants. With these acquisitions, Parry changed from being a trading to a manufacturing firm. In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Parry joined an emigration agency and began gold mining. Its sugar interests by then had emerged as the core of the business, with the addition of a distillery. In the 1890s, the firm merged with the East India Distilleries (EID) registered in London, to form EID Parry. In the early twentieth century, EID Parry briefly diversified into engineering, but its core business remained focused on sugar and insurance. In 1948, the company shifted its registration to India. McDowell, a former servant of the East India Company, on completing his indenture, set up a wine-merchant business in Madras in 1825. Later partners moved into blending spirits, then to blending tobacco, and processing and manufacturing these two products. McDowell is now the most famous brand among indigenous whiskies in India.

Eastern India If we look only at legally registered firms, Calcutta was a European city. An approximate measure of the relative share of the Indian and European communities in the formal businesses of Calcutta would be the shareholding in the Bank of Bengal. In 1904, the proportions were 84 and 16 per cent between Europeans and Indians, respectively. 4 Of course, this is only an indicative measure. There were many born-industrial European enterprises in this region. Jute and tea furnish the most examples. Jute is a natural fibre grown mainly in southern West Bengal and Bangladesh. It is used as a raw material for sacking cloth. The demand for sacks increased in the nineteenth century in keeping with the volume of international commodity trade. Until about 1850, Bengal raw jute was processed by a handicraft industry, and by mills outside India, mainly in Dundee in Britain, and somewhat later in Germany. 5 But already, mechanised jute spinning and weaving had started near Calcutta. George Acland’s mill of 1855 was the pioneer. In a short time, the Indian industry grew to become a virtual monopoly in the world. Between 1869 and 1913, the number of mills increased from 5 to 64, and employment from 5–10,000 to 215,000. Until World War I, the industry was entirely owned and managed by Europeans. A second field of European enterprise was tea. When the Company lost its monopoly of China trade (1833), it turned to India for supplies of tea. Assam, which had become part of British India in 1825, had the ideal climate and topography for tea plantations. Efforts to develop plantations in Assam began. The first Indian tea was made in a government experimental farm and arrived in England in 1838. Encouraged by the reception, the Assam Company was formed the following year taking over the government’s farms. Also in 1838, the government set up rules for leasing out land to plantation companies. The terms were liberal, and in some cases liberalised further over time. From the late nineteenth century, and especially after railway links between the Calcutta port and the Assam gardens had improved, there was a massive expansion of tea cultivation in Assam. Companies registered in London were the investors. The area under tea gardens grew from 154,000 acres in 1880 to 337,000 acres in 1900. Meanwhile, the number of workers increased from 184,000 to 665,000. Gardens sprang up in the Darjeeling hills and the Dooars region in north Bengal, and in the Surma valley in Eastern Bengal. Nearly 75 per cent of tea farming land, however, was in Assam. The share of Indian tea in Britain’s market increased from 7 per cent in 1868 to 54 per cent in 1896. Unlike Assam, in Dooars and Surma Valley local capitalists owned some of the smaller gardens. Who were the pioneers in the born-industrial set? Andrew Yule (1834– 1902), merchant and industrialist, started and managed jute, coal, and tea companies in Calcutta. The group’s London associates were George Yule and later Yule, Catto, main shareholders of Morgan Grenfell. Gillanders Arbuthnot was founded in Calcutta in 1833 by John Gladstone, trading in textiles and indigo. In 1843, Gladstone, Wyllie (after James Wyllie) and later Gladstone, Lyall were among the leading Calcutta trading and insurance firms of the nineteenth century, known as Gillanders Arbuthnot. John’s grandson Henry Gladstone led diversification into jute around 1880. Before 1947, Gillanders owned Indian Copper, which produced practically the entire output of copper in India. Jardine Skinner formed in Bombay in 1825, and reconstituted in Calcutta in 1844. It had common ancestry with the east Asian conglomerate Jardine Matheson, founded by the China traders William Jardine and James Matheson. Jardine Skinner started in jute with Kamarhatty Company in 1877 and Kanknarra Company in 1882, and later diversified to tea. George Henderson was a Calcutta merchant who founded the Baranagar Jute Factory in 1857, one of the earliest jute mills in the neighbourhood of Calcutta. McLeod was a partnership engaged in jute agency with Dundee before they established a string of jute mills (1907–12). The group’s founder Charles McLeod was first a jute trader (1880s) and later the manager-owner of the McLeod group of jute mills, of which Soorah, Kelvin, and Empire were the most important. Indigo agency was the source of prosperity for a Calcutta concern that turned industrial, Kilburn. C. E. Schoene, Calcutta merchant in indigo, founded the firm in 1842. E. D. Kilburn, with family history in silk trading, joined him in 1847 as partner. Its survival through the worst years of indigo probably owed to an early diversification into cloth, rice, and jute. Cloth came from Liverpool, rice was sent to Australia, and jute went from Bengal to Dundee. The firm later diversified into shipping, engineering, and tea, and managed the oldest tea company in India, Assam Company, from 1867. By 1900, Kilburn was a managing agent for several tea estates. Kilburn’s greatest legacy was an electricity generation and distribution firm called Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation, set up in 1897 with a contract to supply electricity to users in Calcutta. The firm exists today as one of the better-managed utility companies in a generally inefficient industry dominated by government companies, and is owned by the R. P. Goenka group of Calcutta. Shaw Wallace imported Manchester piece goods, cement, metals, and paper and exported hides and skins and raw cotton. Walter Duncan, who started the partnership that was to become Duncan Brothers, a name in tea plantation and jute mills, was originally a tea and jute exporter (after a short stint as an employee of the Bank of Bengal). Anderson Wright started as a merchant house in Calcutta, and owned or managed jute mills (including Kharda Jute), coal mining company, insurance, trading, and shipping line to Natal. Its London counterpart was Clarke, Wilson and Co. Offbeat cases of traders turning industrial include T. A. Martin of Messrs. Walsh, Lovett & Co., a Birmingham firm that dealt in metals and construction material in South America and opened a branch in Calcutta (1874). Later in the nineteenth century, Martin formed a partnership with a Bengali, R. N. Mukherjee, to set up the largest engineering firm in Eastern India, Martin Burn. From 1918, the firm managed Indian Iron and Steel Co or IISCO, which, along with Tata Steel, was an indigenous integrated steel factory. In the 1830s, Robert Mackenzie, partner of William Mackinnon after 1847, was a piece-goods trader in Ghazipur (Bihar). Between 1847 and 1856, the partnership (Mackenzie died in a shipwreck in 1852) was still engaged in merchandising, when Mackinnon started the British India Steam Navigation (Fig. 5.1).6 The shipping company gained from a mail contract with the government. One of the companies connected with the group, Mackinnon-Mackenzie, invested in tea estates and jute manufacturing, and was one of the leading managing agencies in Calcutta between 1860 and 1900. James Mackay, Earl of Inchcape, joined in 1874 and was in charge around 1900, when the company invested heavily in jute, including India Jute Mill. Closely allied with this group was another, Macneill Barry. General merchants Duncan Macneill and John Mackinnon established Macneill and Co in 1876, which joined the Inchcape group in 1914. They owned and managed tea, jute, inland navigation, and Ganges Rope Co. They later merged with Kilburn. The early history of the big Calcutta group called the Bird Brothers again illustrates (like Kilburn and Mackinnon-Mackenzie) how important doing business with the government was to some of the trading firms of the Empire era. Samuel Bird supplied indentured labour to government construction projects.7 Among early side businesses of the firm were railway contracts for loading and unloading goods between boats and trains; a government contract to unload grain from ships in Calcutta; and a bullock caravan train between Darjeeling, a European settlement, and Sahibganj, a railway junction. Some of its original businesses, such as the labour contract, the railway contract, and the bullock caravans were in decline in the 1870s, and the firm of Bird needed to reinvent itself. In two major steps taken in 1874 and 1875, the Birds acquired Oriental Jute Company’s assets, took over the McAllister managing agency, and also took over a coal mine, coincidentally from the same McAllister. The entry of Bird in India had happened when banking was still limited, capital market non-existent, and laws not clearly set out. They were not the only firm that made the move from commerce to industry by taking over the assets of a defunct business. But even that did not save them from financial trouble. Though a great deal of the background to these moves remains unknown, the Birds were helped in these projects by their few friends in Calcutta, which included the family of Ernest Cable, later head of the firm, and the Dignams of Orr, Dignam, the leading business solicitors of Calcutta. In a little over ten years, Bird had changed from a trading firm to a manufacturing firm, but the changeover was not complete. Their contract labour business continued, and many large government construction projects came their way. Ernest Cable (1859–1927) became a partner of the firm in 1886. Thereafter, Bird diversified into jute and coal. In 1917 Bird acquired F. W Heilgers, a German managing agency with interests in paper, jute, and coal. Major Heilgers’s companies were Kinnison Jute and Naihati Jute. Around 1947, Bird and Heilgers was headed by Cable’s son-in-law and partner Edward Benthall (1893–1961). The Scotsman Thomas Duff came to Calcutta after a stint with the Borneo Company in the 1870s, and founded two jute companies, Samnuggur Jute Factory (1873), and Titaghur Jute Factory (1883). Thomas Duff and Co. took on the agency of the Victoria Jute Factory Co. in 1888 and that of the Angus Company in 1933. It was registered in London until 1949, when it registered in India. The holding company was based in Dundee. Turner Morrison was a shipping firm established by Alfred Turner (c. 1860) as an extension of the Liverpool trading house Turner and Co. They managed the Asiatic Steam Navigation Co. Alexander Lawrie and Stephen Balmer set up Balmer Lawrie in the 1860s, which first went into tea, and then developed in engineering and coal. Octaviaus Steel was mainly engaged in tea, coal, railways, and limestone. Last but certainly not the least, was Williamson Magor, the largest tea producer in the world today and a company owned by B. M. Khaitan of Calcutta. Two individuals of Calcutta, J. H. Williamson, whose brother had an association with the Assam Co, the first tea company of India, and R. B. Magor, an employee of the Great Eastern Hotel in Calcutta, started Williamson Magor in 1869 with a main interest in tea.

GIVE SUMMARY OF ONLY MOST IMPORTANT POINTS IN 3 SENTGENCES EXACTLY

Kanpur and Bombay Mirzapur, as we have seen, was mainly a trading town. By contrast, nearby Kanpur had developed from a trading town to a manufacturing one, led by both European and Indian capital. The most famous Indian industrial family of Kanpur, Juggilal Kamlapat, came from a Marwari trading firm, Ramnath Baijnath. But this was a later development. Kanpur was probably the largest settlement of European traders in northern India before the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Several families here were established as indigo planters and tobacco traders. Several of these settlers lost their lives during the Mutiny, including one Christie who was the cofounder of what was to become the largest firm of Kanpur, Begg Sutherland. But Kanpur’s advantageous location and its subsequent emergence as a large garrison helped European and Indo-European enterprise revive soon after. Begg Dunlop was founded c. 1850 by David Begg, indigo trader and planter, in Calcutta. The firm diversified in jute during the headship of George Sutherland around 1900. Sutherland’s involvement led to the formation of Begg Sutherland, which managed six Kanpur cotton mills. The principal company Alliance was a multi-unit jute mill of Calcutta. The largest European company of Kanpur, the British India Corporation, was the product of a collaboration between five Kanpur merchants, George Allen, W. E. Cooper, Bevan Petman, J. Condon and Gavin Jones, who, between 1876 and 1894, started woollen mills, cotton mills, and leather factories in the city. The other prominent Kanpur entrepreneur, who set up a large leather manufacturing firm, was William Cooper of Cooper Allen. Cooper came from a land-holding family in England and was in his early career a commodity trader and indigo planter. His partner George Allen had a similar profile in business. Many other British individuals who became prominent in the industrial world of Kanpur had been artisans or managers of estates in their early years. In a pattern reminiscent of jute, in Kanpur, Europeans owned big saddle and harness factories, whereas Muslim traders supplied them with hides.8 A. H. Creet, an Armenian born in Persia, set up one of the best-known and early private tanneries in the city. Creet, who migrated to India in 1874, was first a jeweller in Lucknow, then a dealer in leather, and finally proprietor of the Cawnpore Tannery in 1896. A decade later, a partnership between William Stork and two Muslim hide merchants of Delhi and Kanpur, bought the factory. Bombay had fewer European enterprises. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the three largest European firms – Greaves, Brady, and Killick – did not originate in trade or industry, but in the enterprise of skilled mechanics. They were more akin to the Martins of Calcutta. Around 1880, an American trading firm, Stearns Hobart & Co., entered Bombay’s history as the first company to propose a mass urban-transit system (horse- drawn tram). This proposal was the foundation of the Bombay Electric Supply and Transport Company, which now runs Bombay’s buses.9 The connection between trade and manufacture was much closer with the Indians. In fact, there were very few born-industrial ventures among them.

GIVE SUMMARY OF ONLY MOST IMPORTANT POINTS IN 2 SENTGENCES EXACTLY

Indian Industrialists British industrialisation had established cotton as a major export article from India and export merchants began to build contacts with British ports and manufacturing centres. The Parsis, who were already familiar with apprenticeship in Britain relating to ship-repair, took to this road without much difficulty. The 1860s crash in Bombay led to widespread bankruptcy among the contemporary trading firms, and the Parsi firms took a very big hit. The small group of wealthy individuals who survived the crash had already spread risks by investing in industry. 10 Dinshaw Petit (1823–1901) was the most famous personality to have done so. Although a pioneering cotton mill set up by Cowasji Davar had appeared ten years before the crash, the decade after the crash saw the transformation of Bombay from a trading to a manufacturing city. Petit’s apprenticeship had happened in a European trading firm with operations in China and opium. Petit survived the cotton famine crash to establish more mills, and his success in turn attracted others to invest in mills. His agent Nowrosjee Wadia (1849–99) started Bombay Dyeing in 1875. The move by Jamsetji Tata (1839–1901) from China and Africa trades to the Alexandra Mill was another instance of this pattern. In Tata’s case, this move was followed by the Empress Mills (1874–7) of Nagpur. Already, Jamsetji was developing an interest in the prospect of steel (see next). Nine out of the thirteen mills set up in the 1870s belonged to Parsi owners.11 In 1914, there were 95 cotton textile mills in India; 34 had been started by Parsi entrepreneurs. The interdependence between trade, industry, and finance played a very important role in sustaining industrialisation. The combination of cotton textiles and cotton trade was an advantage. Cotton mills procured machines and foremen from Lancashire, to which market Bombay’s merchants sold cotton. The export market for raw cotton, which boomed during the American Civil War, reduced in importance somewhat, but Lancashire remained a steady and a major buyer of cotton. The Indian mills sold a large part of their output of yarn to ports in China where again Bombay’s merchants had sold cotton. The joining of trade with finance was also an advantage. Trade in cotton mill stock expanded in response to mill construction and growth of public shareholding. The Parsis had set up banks and loan societies in the 1840s and the 1850s. Cowasji Davar’s energy mainly went into banking rather than industry. After the cotton market speculation, and in Bombay’s subsequent growth as a financial market, Gujarati stockbrokers and bankers took the lead. In the 1870s more than three hundred share brokers met almost daily under a banyan tree, where the stock exchange stands now. 12 Capital moved from trade into mills more easily thanks to the mediation of stockbrokers. Among other communities who invested in cotton mills were the Khojas, the Bhatias, the Gujarati traders and bankers with their base in Ahmedabad, and the Bombay-based Baghdadi Jews. Several of them had some history of collaboration with Europeans. Some had withdrawn from more active maritime trade as European firms based in London took control of the maritime trade. Others had expanded their commercial operations further afield into overland trade, a legacy of the pre-European pattern of regional integration. The owners of the first cotton mills came from these communities, and partly from European trading houses dealing in cotton. The pioneering names among cotton mill owners included Petit, Wadia and Tata (Parsis), Currimbhoys (Khoja), Sassoons (Jews), Khatau Makanji, Morarji Goculdas, Thakersey (Bhatias from Kutchch), and Greaves Cotton, W. H. Brady, and Killick Nixon (European houses). The origin of Ahmedabad’s mill industry was more rooted in Hindu and Jain business. Among the prominent names, Sarabhais and Lalbhais, were Jain traders already prominent as pedhis. Pedhi would usually mean a company, establishment, or a business house; it could also mean charitable trust, such as the Anandji Kalyanji Pedhi active today looking after the religious and cultural well-being of the Shwetambar Jain community. 13 Many pedhis were bankers. A few industrial groups originated in Asian trade. The Khoja firm of Currimbhoy Ebrahim had started as cotton yarn exporters to China. The Sassoons (see Chapter 4) also conformed to this pattern. The relative scale of Parsi big business was shrinking from the end of the nineteenth century. Other than Tata, Wadia, and Petit, one major industrial group emerged, Ardeshir Godrej (1868–1936), in the early twentieth century. Godrej was an offbeat figure in this set. A trained lawyer practising in Zanzibar in his early life, he returned to Bombay and developed an interest in lock-making. He took a patent on a new design, and on that foundation built a factory making locks and deposit boxes. This was the start of a diversified business group with interest in furniture, soaps, and real estate. Running a cotton mill was a very risky business. Community network was of little help in meeting the most important challenges. The absence of an organised capital market was a constant source of instability. Longevity of mills tended to be short, and profits fluctuating. The business only survived because there were many trading firms available to buy up liquidating property. Between 1885 and 1925, out of the 100 odd mills in Bombay, 45 mills were taken into liquidation and reconstructed under other names; 12 were burnt down or closed and dismantled; 16 transferred to agencies; and 24 were working under the same agencies. Of these 24, only 5 belonged to five pioneering and long-surviving groups: Maneckji Petit, Morarji Goculdas, Hindustan under Thakersey Moolji, Khatau Makanji, and Sassoon. Several of Bombay’s mills changed hands many times. Coorla Mills, for example, was one of the earliest ventures set up in 1860 by Bomanji Wadia, and changed hands twice (first Cossimbhoy Dharamsey and later Merwanji Framji Panday) before the company running it was liquidated in 1886 and Jamsetji Tata purchased the premises and started the Swadeshi Mills. A similar example was Albert and Victoria. In the case of Alexandra, the owner was convicted for mismanagement of funds. Also tainted by a corruption scandal was Dwarkadas Dharamsey, who managed three mills that changed hands. Greaves Cotton took over premises started by Manchester firms in Bombay, and the Sassoons took over a cluster of small and unprofitable mills. K. M. Hiramanick, a Parsi merchant, managed a number of mills, some of which eventually ended up with the Currimbhoy group. The City of Bombay Mill, started by Mancherji Banaji, was taken over by the managing agent W. H. Brady. Indeed, in many cases of changeover, the agent took over both ownership and operation of the mill.14 After Bombay, Ahmedabad was the second major centre for the development of the textile industry. Although Ahmedabad was not a port city, British acquisition in 1818 ‘brought about significant changes in the climate of enterprise’ in the city. 15 Business firms of Ahmedabad, for example, started making routine use of British Indian commercial law, which, among other effects, activated the real estate market and real estate development in the city. Prominent bankers, therefore, welcomed the integration of the city in British India. In 1863, Bombay and Ahmedabad were connected by a direct train line. Thereafter, while artisanal enterprise may have suffered somewhat, the bankers and traders of Ahmedabad could think of operating in a wider geographical zone that included the cottongrowing Bombay port Khandesh to the east, and cotton-growing Broach to the south. Khandesh itself was connected by rail with Ahmedabad via Surat in 1900. In the eighteenth century, Ahmedabad bankers did considerable business with the numerous princely states that ruled western India. In the 1810s, they financed the opium traffic between central India and Bombay. Shortly thereafter, the government of the East India Company devised several schemes to promote export of raw cotton from the western coast. Individuals connected with the trade tried to start spinning mills themselves. In these businesses, again, Ahmedabad bankers occasionally made some investment. In this way, capitalists of the city had developed considerable familiarity with cotton textile trade and manufacture when mill construction started in Bombay city. By 1850, both Bombay and Ahmedabad belonged in the huge complex of cotton trade and financing of cotton trade then emerging in western India. The biography of the pioneer industrialist of Ahmedabad, Ranchhodlal Chhotalal (1823–98), shows that this prehistory of trade and banking did not naturally lead to the emergence of an industrial entrepreneur. What he had inherited from his family or learnt from observing the cotton traders apparently played a small part in his evolution into an industrialist. Chhotalal came from a Nagar Brahmin family. Nagar Brahmins were often appointed as court officers in the princely states of western India, and in that capacity, acquired proficiency in languages, including Persian, Marathi, and English. Chhotalal travelled a lot too, and through these travels, he acquired the two most important features of his curriculum vitae: exposure to Europeans and experience of living in different parts of India.16 Chhotalal worked as an officer of the Company agent in several states, and though he lost this job owing to his alleged and unproven role in the Lunavada state succession dispute, he was proficient in English and had among his closest associates two British individuals: one an army officer known as Fuljames, and the other one a ginning mill owner of Broach known as Landon. When the plan for a mill was first drawn up (and later abandoned), Fuljames had supplied information on the textile industry in Britain, and Landon offered to fund half the cost of a textile mill. Three Baroda bankers, two princes, and Chhotalal himself would contribute the other half. Bankers of Ahmedabad refused to subscribe any money. The project was revived again around 1858. Already Landon had started a spinning mill in Broach, and Davar’s and Maneckji Petit’s had been working for a few years in Bombay. The machines for the mill were purchased in England through the agency of the merchant, later Parliamentarian and public intellectual Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1917). One set of machines never arrived. The second set took many months to reach Ahmedabad because of poor transport links with the port of Cambay. Installation of the factory was delayed by repeated misfortune with British engineers. Still, by 1863 it was up and running and by 1870 had grown about four times the original scale and added weaving, thanks to the efforts of Edington and Whittle, two engineers. As these companies made profits and offered large dividends, nine per cent in some years, some of the original shareholders sold their stake. In this way, there emerged a secondary market for mill shares. Chhotalal was one of the first industrialists to take up a leadership role in city administration. As in the business ventures, in his political ones he also faced resistance from other merchants of the city. He was trying to push through water supply and underground drainage schemes by the Ahmedabad municipality. The move was opposed by the wealthy residents of the city who feared more taxes on them. The mainly European and Parsi engineer corps was divided in their view of the merits of these schemes. In the worst phase of the dispute, Chhotalal faced violent physical assault in a public meeting. His extensive political connection, personal wealth, and goodwill with the British administration eventually saw these schemes through. Despite a violent beginning, the joining of business with public administration was to become a model for the future. Industrialists were big city residents almost without exception. They joined the administration of city municipalities, where the principle of self-government was first tried. Their exposure to organised institutionalised politics was from the start greater than that for merchants and bankers in the interior of the country. This exposure made them politically central, both to the imperial administration and to their own community of capitalists. Both these factors were active especially in the port cities. The second-generation owners of long-surviving textile mills all tended to be prominent public figures, working not only for community-bound charity or educational projects as many Parsis did, but also in the municipality, port management, famine relief, and general and women’s education. For some examples, Gordhandas Khatau, son of Khatau Makanji, was an elected member of the Bombay Corporation; Lalbhai Dalpatbhai, the Ahmedabad mill owner, was an elected member of the Ahmedabad District Board; Sylas Moses, a senior manager of the Sassoon group, was a member of the Bombay Port Trust; George Sutherland, partner of Begg Dunlop, was a Sheriff of Calcutta and an elected member of the Bengal legislature. Similar, if fewer, examples can be found also among artisan-entrepreneurs of these times (see next). Ranchhodlal was an early example of the entrepreneurs who made their views about politics and economic policy known in public. He was neither a free trader nor a protectionist, but advocated free trade with those countries which offered free trade to Indian goods and protection for others. In this view, Britain was an equal trade partner of India’s, and no specific worries were expressed about British competition in the textile market itself. Later, such public presentation of opinions about economic policy became institutionalised in associations, and after World War I, the activity was becoming politicised as well. Most Indian industrialists emerged from cotton and textile trade, and as industrialists, retained their ties with textiles. Ardeshir Godrej was an exception to this pattern. Another figure broke with the pattern in a more decisive way. The emergence of the largest and most diversified conglomerate in postcolonial India was owed to this break.

GIVE SUMMARY OF ONLY MOST IMPORTANT POINTS IN 2 SENTGENCES EXACTLY