Factories Come Up The first cotton mill in Bombay came up in and it went into production two years later. By four mills were at work with , spindles and , looms. Around the same time jute mills came up in Bengal, the first being set up in and another one seven years later, in . In north India, the Elgin Mill was started in Kanpur in the 1860s, and a year later the first cotton mill of Ahmedabad was set up.
By , the first spinning and weaving mill of Madras began production. Who set up the industries? Where did the capital come from? Who came to work in the mills?
. The Early Entrepreneurs Industries were set up in different regions by varying sorts of people. Let us see who they were. The history of many business groups goes back to trade with China.
From the late eighteenth century, as you have read in your book last year, the British in India began exporting opium to China and took tea from China to England. Many Indians became junior players in this trade, providing finance, procuring supplies, and shipping consignments. Having earned through trade, some of these businessmen had visions of developing industrial enterprises in India. In Bengal, Dwarkanath Tagore made his fortune in the China trade before he turned to industrial investment, setting up six joint-stock companies in the 1830s and 1840s.
Tagore’s enterprises sank along with those of others in the wider business crises of the 1840s, but later in the nineteenth century many of the China traders became successful industrialists. In Bombay, Parsis like Dinshaw Petit and Jamsetjee Nusserwanjee Tata who built huge industrial empires in India, accumulated their initial wealth partly from exports to China, and partly from raw cotton shipments to England. Seth Hukumchand, a Marwari businessman who set up the first Indian jute mill in Calcutta in , also traded with China. So did the father as well as grandfather of the famous industrialist G.D.
Birla. Capital was accumulated through other trade networks. Some merchants from Madras traded with