Crafts and Capitalism: Re-thinking the link

Until the 1980s, the narrative on the history of the Indian crafts was a pessimistic one. It said that the mechanized goods imported from an industrializing Britain from around the 1820s killed India’s handicrafts. That change must have been devastating when we consider that in the centuries before the British industrial revolution, India’s industries like handmade textiles were so well-developed as to attract traders from all over the world.

Technology changed the balance. A power loom that could move six times faster than the handloom, or a spinning machine that could produce a hank of yarn using one-eighth the labour a hand-operated spinning wheel needed, left the Indian spinner and weaver with little chance to compete. Crafts were banished from “industrial capitalism.”

Since the 1990s, a new paradigm on the artisans took shape, partly to acknowledge the fact that craft skills were remarkably resilient in South Asia. The paradigm starts from the premise that the crafts used another kind of capital along with the physical ones, broadly called design capability. This the machines tried to copy, sometimes with success, sometimes without.

That redefinition of “capital” invites the crafts back into “capitalism.” It changes the story of the great transformation of the artisan tradition, which I explore in several books and articles. Some are joint work.