18 Industrialization Civilization and Growth of Urban Societies

Nisha Thapa

    Contents:

    Introduction

Early industry

Industrial civilization

Industrialization in India

Growth of urban societies

Summary

Learning Objectives:

After studying this module, the learner will be able to understand:

• Historical background of the development of the industrial civilization.
• Early industry.
• What is industrialization?
• The process of urbanization an industrialization.
• The growth of urban societies.

    Introduction

Human beings were nomadic hunters and gatherers until about 8000 BC and did not ‘work’ as a separate sphere of life. Sustenance activities such as gathering food were day-long and not distinguished from leisure time. Technology was very simple and included lodge poles, bone needles, stone cutters, and scrappers. Skills were commonly shared and every individual could perform most of the tasks of the entire group. Division of labour was rudimentary where the young accompanied the elders and helped them in their work, in turn, receiving training, which is equivalent to modern day on the job training.

In the early days, division of labour was gender based keeping in mind the biological differences. However, the gathered food was equitably distributed among all. In the Andaman Islanders, Anthropologist A. Radcliffe Brown (1922) describes these societal norms as; should a man shrink these obligations, nothing would be said to him, unless he was a young unmarried man, and he would still be given food by others, but he would find himself occupying a position of inferiority in the camp, and would entirely lose the esteem of his fellows.

Agriculture started with harvesting wild grains and grew with the development of techniques to increase the yield of these plants. Development of agriculture and domestication of animals brought several changes in the organization of the societies. If some were warriors, others became priests and eventually occupied other official positions. However, social life was almost the same as during the hunting societies. Children helped elders with basic work and activities. The relative positions of men and women also underwent change. It can be rightly noted as “since men had been in hunting, they were the inventors of systematic herding; since women had been gathering plants, women were inventors of systematic agriculture”. The peasant now concentrated on a beautiful harvest.

Apparently, Urbanization and growth go together: no country has ever reached middle income status without a significant population shift into cities. Urbanization is necessary to sustain growth in developing countries, and it yields other benefits as well. But it is not painless or always welcomed by policymakers. Managing urbanization is an important part of nurturing growth; neglecting cities- even in countries in which the level of urbanization is low- can impose heavy costs.

Industrialization is at the heart of a larger, more complex process often designated as modernization after the increase in production due to technological advancement which is associated with industrial revolution. Industrialization is the period of social and economic change that transforms a human group from an agrarian society into an industrial one, involving the extensive re-organisation of an economy for the purpose of manufacturing. It is a process that happen in countries when they start to use machines to do work that was once done by people. (Meier, 2016)

In short, industrialization is defined as the economic transition from small scale, labour intensive production to large scale, capital intensive production in factories and industries.

Early industry

Industry means application or utilization of tools in order to achieve output. Hence, industry can be said to be as old as mankind and man is industrious because he is intelligent. The earliest type of industry is the simple transformative industry represented by early hunters and agriculturalists.

The tools used by the transformative industry were simple. The bows, arrows and spears for hunting; plough and hoe for cultivating fields. Urban areas were small and people worked as artisans, tradesmen, common labourers, servants and domestics. Most of the workforce was dispersed, working as tenant farmers or peasants on small plots of land; spinning thread or weaving cloth at home, or in a small workshop with others craftsmen or even put on the streets peddling goods. A significant number of people worked for wages but the relationship between employer and employee was more personal. People had difficult working conditions like long hours, harsh treatment, many lived close to the margin of subsistence but also enjoyed considerable autonomy in their work, had close contact with family and workmates, and sufficient time off from work for religious holidays and personal predilections.

Industrial civilization

Over the last 250 years, the rapid advance of industrialization has made a profound impact on human society. The set of systemic and far reaching changes to human institutions and culture involved amount to a new type of civilization, cantered on industry, markets and secular knowledge. Industrial civilization is also highly significant as the first truly global civilization, integrating all parts of the globe into a single unit for the first time. These profound transformations in social life have however brought with them both major opportunities for advances in human welfare linked with the unprecedented economic dynamism of the industrial revolution, but also may offer profound challenges and problems. These include ways of ensuring that the benefits of economic dynamism are combined with principles of social security and equity in the pursuit of social justice and minimize risks for all people and classes involved in industrial civilization. But they also extend to the environmental sustainability of a civilization based on industry and recognition that the application of scientific knowledge and technology to human life is equally fraught with risks and opportunities.

To qualify as a civilization it is necessary for a particular mode of social organization to meet a number of criteria. These involve:

a) A systematic pattern of economic, political, social, and cultural life that is robust, enduring over a significant length of time and which spreads across spatially to a significant degree.

b)  A pattern of this kind that is distinct in key respects from other patterns.

Industrial civilization, in contrast with previous civilisation is distinctive not simply for the leading role of industry in its make-up, nor for its sustained economic dynamism. Its distinctiveness is more broadly connected with a change in the relationship of economic activity to the priorities of human life in general, and to the transformation of human capacities to exploit nature for human advantage. All previous civilizations required some kind of successful economic foundation whether through agrarian activity, trade or imperial domination of others. Nonetheless, their distinctiveness centred more on bounded patterns of political, cultural and religious activity based on states and or communities of religious authority, than on economic activity alone. Major innovations, such as the development of agriculture, cities, writings, political self-government and codified law were significant in some cases, while the achievement of social cohesion through ritual practices predominated elsewhere.

Compared with all this, industrial civilization is noteworthy both for the striking intensity of social change, and for innovations that transformed the relations between economy and society, economy and nature. The economy became far more sharply differentiated from the remainder of society as market exchange and private property rights in capital were progressively freed from political and customary regulation. Notions of free trade meant that food and other necessities of life could be sold in the market at the best possible price for the producer, with no account having to be taken of the need or resources of the starving and the poor. The private property rights of holders of capital required that no other criterion enter into the choice and location of investment other than expectations of profit. No individual, from this perspective had a right to be employed, if it did not pay any producer to provide work. In place of traditional notions of a just price for food, or customary forms of community support for the needy, the new civilization asserted economic priorities above social responsibilities. Rational pursuit of economic self-interest and the harnessing of science to industrial technology would, it was assumed, provide a new secularized basis for the advancement of human welfare.

Simultaneously, nature was seen as a resource to be exploited for human benefit with little concern for natural resource depletion or for the longer term sustainability of the industrial energy requirements and technologies. This is not to say that a number of previous civilizations had not exploited nature. Problems such as soil erosion arising from deforestation were for example, known to the classical Mediterranean civilizations. Nonetheless the pace and intensity with which industrial civilization exploited natural resources through the application of scientific understanding to resource extraction industries was unprecedented the process whereby the burning of fossil fuels have led to detectable increase in global warming can also be traced to back to the 19th century advancement of industrial civilization.( Holton,2010)

Fig 1: The Evolution of Technologies

Industrialization in India

India has a rich cultural heritage. Over the centuries, its immense wealth attracted several foreigners to invade and thereafter, settle down here. Today, the country has a number of cities but continues to be a predominantly agricultural nation with a large population in the villages. The Indian agriculture communities are not unlike the peasant agricultural communities one finds anywhere in the world. An Indian village comprises of a group of families, usually compound in structure, living in the midst of their agricultural lands. The technology used is simple and productivity low since life centres on subsistence. The focus is on material self sufficiency, a trait associated with a general centripetal orientation to life in both the family and the community. However, all the villages are dependent on agriculture; all families do not work on the farms. Only a portion practices agriculture while the rest specialize in various crafts and menial occupations. In exchange for the various services, the cultivators pay a fixed share of their produce to those providing these services. At the heart of this division of labour is the caste system and it is this practice of craft that gave rise to industries in India.

Growth of urban societies

Urbanization, greater economic growth and rising living standards historically have gone hand in hand and are central facts of our modern world because urban areas account for a large percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in most countries. No country in the world has ever reached middle income status without a considerable population shifting into cities. Over the past 200 years while the world population expanded considerably people everywhere in the world have shifted from almost exclusively living in rural areas to living in cities. At the same time there has been a transformation in the structure of global economy from the majority of people working in the agricultural sector to mainly working in urban manufacturing and service based factors. In most countries urbanisation is a natural consequence and stimulus of economic development based on industrialization.

We know what we mean when we say “I live in a city” or “I am moving to a city” because we have certain images of cities in our mind. Its bright lights at night, the busy shopping centres, the tall buildings or even the traffic jams. But how do we define places as urban and how do we distinguish a city from a “town” or a “village”? To begin with, the definition for what constitutes an “urban area” varies considerably in different part of the world. The major institution that documents both population and urban growth is the United Nations. In preparing estimates of the urban population, the United Nations relies on data produced by national statistical offices in all countries in the world. However, each country uses different criteria in order to distinguish urban from rural areas, and thus a standardized definition does not exist despite international efforts. The majority of countries define urban areas applying certain requirements regarding the density of settlement, population size or the share of a population employed in agriculture. However, there is agreement that many people are concentrated in a small space rather than being spread out over a large territory.

In this context, indeed it is vital to clarify and distinguish the concept of urbanization and urban growth as both terms will be used repeatedly henceforth. The term urbanization refers to the process whereby an increasing percentage of a country’s population comes to live in urban areas. Urbanization occurs when the urban population grows at a faster rate than the rural population. In other words, if the rural population and the urban population grow at the same pace, the rate of urbanization will not change. The principle source of this process of urbanisation is people migrating out of rural areas to come to live in urban areas.

The term urban growth is used to refer to the percentage change in the total number of people living in urban areas from year to year. Mostly, urban growth is caused by three factors:

Natural population increase among city residents; migration to cities from rural areas; and statistical reclassification of previously rural areas in urban, as they become built up. In theory, it is possible for a country to experience urban growth without urbanization. This is the case, if the number of people living in urban areas is increasing, but at the same or slower rate than the rural population. However, this is rare and over the past decades the majority of world regions have seen urban growth and urbanization simultaneously.

The urban growth process entails the process from human settlements becoming villages, village growing into towns, and towns being transformed into cities. First, when the urban sector is relatively small for example village rural-to-urban migration is the principal contributor to urban growth. However, as the urban sector becomes larger, urban natural population increase tends to play the greater role for urban growth unlike urbanization. An increase event was the industrial revolution taking place in the 18th and 19th century in Western Europe when the rapid expansion of industries required more and more people to work in factories. This created new opportunities in cities that attracted people looking for employment and a better life. At the same time major changes in agricultural technologies increased agricultural productivity which allowed feeding an ever growing urban population. (Clarke,2006)

Summary

Effort has been made to define industrialization and growth of urban societies and how it progressed. The society never remains static. Throughout history man has endeavoured to control nature. In its endeavour, man has undergone many shifts in methods of production. The humans in ancient times were primarily hunters and gatherers of food. This was an egalitarian society. The chief characteristics of hunting and gathering society was that it never had surplus.

During the industrialization of a country people leave farming and work to take higher paid jobs in factories in towns. Industrialization is a part of a process where people adapt easier and cheaper ways to make things. By using better technology, it becomes possible to produce more goods in a shorter amount of time.

A single person can add to the production. Therefore, economic opportunities are just one reason people move into cities. On the other hand, growth of urban societies; while cities have existed since ancient times, until recently they represented only a relatively small proportion of the population. The lives of majority of the people were predominantly shaped by the rural community.

The massive growth of societies in urban and metropolitan areas and the shift of a significant proportion of the population to urban areas has been a characteristic feature of the past six decades or so. Urbanization was an off-shoot of the industrial revolution which created a demand for a large number of workers at centralized locations. The growth of cities depends not only on birth and death rates and migration but also on political, religious, historical and economic factors.

References

• Annez Patricia Clarke and Buckley Robert.M (2006) Urbanization and growth: Setting the context. Available from: www.http://pdfs semantischolars.prg. [Accessed: 20thMarch 2016]
• Bramwell, Anna 1989. Ecology in the Twentieth Century: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press
• Brown Radcliffe (1922) The Andaman Islanders: A study in social anthropology. Cambridge:Cambridge university press.
• Forde, D. 1934.Habitat, Economy and Society, London: Methuen.
• Holton Robert (2010) Industrial civilization. Ireland: department of sociology Trinity college.
• Meier Felix and Selhausen Zu (2016) Urbanization in Africa: the history of African development. Available from: www.http://aehnetwork.org/textbook. [Accessed: 19th March 2016].
• Singh Narendra (2012) Industrial Sociology. Haryana: Tata McGraw Hill Education Private Limited.

    Suggested Readings

• Adams, R.M. 1965. The Evolution of Urban Society. Aldine, Chicago.
• Agrawal, D. P. 1971. The Copper-Bronze Age in India. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Butzer, K.1971. Environment and Archeology. 2nd edn, Aldine, Chicago.
• Chakrabarti, D. K. 1995. The Archaeology of Ancient Indian Cities. Delhi: Oxford University Press
• Ellen, R. 1982.Environment, Subsistence and System: The Ecology of Small-Scale Social Formations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
• Morris R.N (2007) Urban Sociology. Great Britain: Willimer Brothers Limited.
• Ratnagar, S. 1981. Encounters. Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press
• Singh, Jaspal (1991), Contributions to Industrial Sociology. Delhi: National book organization
• Thapar, Romila (1996) Ancient Indian Social History: Some interpretations. Hyderabad: Orient Longman.
• Wheeler, M. 1953. The Indus Civilization. London