Retrieving Cultural Vignettes: A Study from Spitalfields to Murshidabad to Mahua Dabar 1722-1857

Abstract

The research paper explores the complex relationships between British industrialization and Indian textile manufacturing between 1722 and 1857 and the cultural and economic history of the textile chain spanning from Spitalfields in London to Murshidabad in Bengal and to the village of Mahua Dabar in northern India. This study, based on the examination of primary sources such as parliamentary reports, local newspapers and colonial administrative documents, demonstrates that the relationship between metropolitan capital and colonial production in the British silk trade radically changed with the onset of mechanization. As it will be shown in the paper, the transition of the East India Company from purchasing finished Indian textiles to acquiring raw materials was the turning point in Britain’s economic domination of Indian manufacturing. The destruction of Mahua Dabar, which was burned down by British forces in 1857 after British officers were massacred, serves as a microcosm of the violence embedded in the structural economic changes of colonization. Therefore, this study deepens our understanding of the way in which textile manufacturing became a site of imperial exploitation and resistance throughout the era of British colonialism in India.