ABSTRACT
Western industry, influenced by great changes in commerce, agriculture and transport, has evolved, slowly, from the handicraft organization of the late Middle Ages through a variety of stages to the factory system. In the later stages, a rapid ripening of the cumulative developments occurred—a change so abrupt and striking as to be often called the Industrial Revolution. Oriental industry has been subjected to more sudden and violent changes in some of these respects and is now passing much more quickly from the simpler to the more complex form. This results in the contemporaneous existence of a variety of types of industrial equipment and organization and furnishes suggestive glimpses of many stages of our own economic and social history. In European terms, the fifteenth century and all its successors, as well as some still earlier, are jostling the twentieth in India. The purpose of this chapter is to describe some of these types of organization, evanescent, or sometimes, perhaps, relatively enduring, and to attempt to untangle some of the forces which have caused them to come into existence.
