Why did iron production in India stop?
 

It has earlier been discussed, on this and other forums, why iron/steel production in India stopped in the last half of 19th century. Most suggests it was be course the iron ores dried out, and I can’t deny that some may have dried out, but as one of the tribes, the Agaria’s, working almost solely with melting iron from the ores, moved around a lot from place to place, this can not be the reason. Further more, if this was the case, how can India have a steel industry to day?

In the book ‘The Agaria’ by Verrier Elwin, Oxford University Press, 1942, the author gives other reasons.

The author writes, that the iron industry collapsed in less than a century, beginning about 1850, and with the biggest number of furnaces closed in the start of the period.

The author mentions many places, but I will only mention a few here:

“In Mysore we are told ‘the output of iron has greatly diminished during the last few decades’ – and that was in 1898”.

“We return finally to the Central Provinces, where the industry has always flourished and where it has even now held out more manfully than elsewhere. Yet here is a tragic tale to tell. The number of furnaces working in the Province fell from 510 to 136 in thirty years (1909 to 1939)”.

In other places the iron industry had stopped completely, before we began writing 1900. The reasons, the author gives, for this drastic collapse, are mainly three.

The governments in the different districts put a tax on what was dug out from the ore, a tax on the charcoal and a tax on the furnace, and the tax was, in some places, so high that the workers could work hard and starve to death, if they went on melting iron.

In some places they were not allowed to fell trees for making charcoal, as the governments decided that too much wood was needed.

Massive export from Europe to India of cheap iron/steel.



Above was the sad part of the story; here comes a few other things from the book.

The Agaria’s also made Virgin Iron, which was very powerful when it came to nasty spirits or most illnesses. In the book, the author has mentioned different things they made spades, ploughshares and other stuff in that line – but there is no mention of weapons, other than some axes. It is also mentioned that building a house where a blacksmith has been working brings bad luck, and it is never done – remember it, and don’t ever make a mistake like that.

But back to the Virgin Iron. This is not easy to make, as it takes a new ore of good quality, a new furnace used for the first time, a virgin to dig out the ore and to work the bellows. Virgin Iron it mostly sold in small pieces, as each piece has great power.

I imagine it is economies of scale; even with Hindoo labor cheaper than Brittish (though remember that many working Britons at the time were themselves little or no more than slaves), the new big industrial furnaces were a cheaper/more efficient way to smelt than traditional hand processes. Also, this is how England tried to run colonies; raw material out; processed goods in. How did iron shift from being a raw material to a processed good? Allow me to suggest two factors; 1/ the Hindoo iron may not have been consistent enough or otherwise "good" enough (which often boils down to too alien, when humans say it; "I don't understand it, so it's stupid....") by Brittish industrial standards to be used as a raw material in their industries, and (related) 2/ the English steel and iron production had become both controlled enough and standard enough (not to mention copious enough) to produce products famed and used throughout the world.

Yes Tom you may be right, but why did the English not make a steel factory in India, where they had enough of quality iron ores?

In the book the author mentions that the Agaria's made weapons like arrow heads, three kind of axes where the biggest is described as a battle axe, two kind of spears, one with a steel haft and one with a wooden haft and utility knifes - but he does not mention swords or other kind of weapons at all.

I could agree with Tom , in that the idea for the colonizing powers was to open new markets for the products of their homeland/s .

A lot of the Great Game (aside from the potential invasion of India by Russia) was all about who got to sell their national wares in the disputed territories .

I would not be surprised if the British discouraged , or did not support , ore mining and smelting in India . That was not what they were after as they had plenty of good steel at home . England wanted the exotic stuff that only India and the Far East could offer .

I often wonder how prized the wootz of India really was to the English , they must have destroyed a hell of a lot of it when they broke up the nation states .

Why bother making steel in India when you had masses of unemployed at home who needed jobs ?

I think you are right Rick, besides it takes a lot of charcoal to make a ton of iron – and they made many hundreds of tons of iron – over the years thousands of tons.

See what the author writes in a footnote:
In sixteenth century England there was a flourishing village melting industry. But in 1558 and Act forbade the felling of timber for charcoal and the opening of new works anywhere save in Surry, Kent and Sussex. In 1585 these counties were also included. Foreign iron began to be imported, and from 1665-1740 the number of native furnaces fell from 300 to 59. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the iron works were moved from the woods to the coalfields, and the modern iron industry began.

I think we can conclude, that the lack of iron production in India, was not due to lack of iron ore, as often mentioned before – the reason was quite different.

Also Jens , during that time England needed all the wood it could get its hands on for the Royal Navy , England's Wooden Walls .

Before the American Revolution and after there was a brisk business in New England supplying timber for shipbuilding . Mast stock was a specialty of New England's timber industry .

God help the Yankee colonial who cut down an Eastern White Pine marked with the King's broad arrow . :eek:

Protectionism for native Brittish industry may have played a role, and also the English may not have considered the Hindoos "civilized" enough (ie. industrialized enough) at the time to operate such factories properly, and I'm certainly not saying I'd agree with this, but it seems like maybe typical ethnocentric thinking for humans. Real good question though, Jens, and I wonder about it, too. As for 19th and early 20th century W European attitudes towards wootz, they seem to be a blend of horror/fear at the deeds its weilders could do with it, and the contempt in which most traditional (including European traditional) material culture was then held by an emergent culture mostly unmixedly proud of its own relatively new industrialism.

Quotes and Responses
 

"Protectionism for native Brittish industry may have played a role, "

>May have ? I think that's what Imperialism was all about ; enriching the Mother country .


"and also the English may not have considered the Hindoos "civilized" enough (ie. industrialized enough) at the time to operate such factories properly, and I'm certainly not saying I'd agree with this, but it seems like maybe typical ethnocentric thinking for humans."


>If we consider the majority of steel E.W.'s coming out of India even today we are looking at spotty quality control at the best .


" Real good question though, Jens, and I wonder about it, too. As for 19th and early 20th century W European attitudes towards wootz, they seem to be a blend of horror/fear at the deeds its weilders could do with it, and the contempt in which most traditional (including European traditional) material culture was then held by an emergent culture mostly unmixedly proud of its own relatively new industrialism . "

> I would submit that the swords of Islam struck the Crusader era Europeans with awe and horror. When we get to the 19th 20th c. 'then' the ignorance and contempt becomes more apparent with the critical exception of the art connoisseur . Have you read Elgood's book on Hindu Arms ? In it he cites various on scene sources that said the native states were for the most part quite inefficient at war .

Anyway , my two cents worth . :)

Yeah; I think it was more of an industrial attitude toward traditional technology than anything else. I still encounter a lot of an attitude among current N Americans that while old cutlery is interesting and all it is not of the quality of today's. I know in some fields this just ain't so. Now, as to what's possible today; maybe so, but industry seems to have a way of both creating the possible and finding it uneconomic..........Hindoo blade work is, as Rick says of......was it spotty quality control or something? That is, though, somewhat in the nature of it still being somewhat done in traditional small work-shop settings, though I suppose that's on it's way out everywhere..... And some of it is really nice, too....

In the book mentioned above, the author writes about ores in different places, telling about the colour and quality of the different ores, and whether the ore was found mixed with earth, clay or maybe in stones, which had to be granulated before the melting. In some of the ores the iron quality was so poor, that things made of the iron would break quickly.

The huts where they melted the ores were with a roof, but without walls, but within time, the walls build themselves, as all the slag was thrown just outside the hut. This information’s he got from the Agaria’s – and they should know, having lived from iron producing for many generations.

There were different ways the Agria’s used, when they needed to find new iron ores. One was by dreaming where they would find it, and another one was, to go out in the wood and shoot a red arrow in the air, where it landed they started to dig. Not very scientific I would say, but on the other hand, if it worked, the whole area must have been one big iron ore, covered with more or less earth.
It should also be mentioned that the iron the Agaria’s made, was mostly, if not all, used locally, and that the Agaria’s mostly were operating in a belt between Orissa and Rajastan.

The iron export was mainly from the western and southern part of India, as well as from the northern part, probably along the Silk Road.
We mostly tend to focus on Indian steel export going west, but the caravans travelling the Silk Road have, most likely, taken ingots and maybe blades east too, just as the boats from the east and south India sailed westward with their cargos of Indian steel, they most probably also sailed eastwards with the same kind of cargoes, even more so, as the Indians had colonies in their eastern neighbour countries, in the early times – as far away as Japan, it is said.

When we come to discus the Indian export of blades and ingots to Persia and Syria it has been mentioned earlier, that a minor part of the ingots were of inferior quality. This meant that the Persian merchants wanted their own people in India, to test the ingots before they were shipped – but it also meant, that Indian merchants traded in the Persian and Syrian bazaars, guaranteeing the quality of the ingots/blades sold. Also, we must not forget, that the Persian/Syrian markets were not the only markets on which the Indians sold ingots/blades – I don’t know, but should I guess, I would think that the African market at times could have been as big, if not bigger.

Could the "nasty spirits and illnesesses" have been some of the common heavy metal poisonings from impurities in the ore ? Certainly things like lead or murcury could be sufficient even in the houses of workers in levels to cause illnesses

No according to the author the bad spirits and illnesses are things like, you drop dead, you break a leg, your wife find someone else - well this could be a blessing.
What do you say Andrew? I understand, all right - no blessing.
It seems to be different than the horse shooe, which is meant to bring luck, this 'Virgin Iron' it meant, not to bring you luck, but to protect you from bad things.
You are of course right, that there probably must have been some lead and mercury in the ores they dug out, and I doubt that they got very old, although I don't know.

Jens

Sorry for dropping in late in the conversation....It is a weird thing that the British were studing and trying to replicate wootz, while killing the traditional industry with their imports. From what I have read, I guess the British iron was cheaper (less labor intensive) and of better quality, which probably means more homogenous than the Indian bloomery iron. Wootz was a very small part of the indian iron working. The British industrial revolution Blast furnaces will make much more steel than the traditional Indian bloomery. It is like things today all over...cheap mass produced imports over traditional local made items.
Ann :)

The hazards of mining and metal working
 

RhysMichael has touched on an area with which I have some familiarity -- the harmful effects of various metals on people's health -- and correctly reports that various hazardous exposures occur in the mining, refining and working of metals.

These adverse effects have been well understood, if not the exact causes, for at least 400-500 years, and anecdotal accounts of these problems date to Egyptian and Roman times, and possibly earlier.

Galen (c. 150 AD) wrote of the harmful effects of working in sulfur mines. There is a famous treatise by Agricola, De Re Metallica (About Things Metallic), published in 1556 which describes the hazards of mining and metallurgy. Also, an excellent account of metal workers in Bernadino Ramazzini's book, De Morbis Artificum Diatriba (Treatise on the Harmful Effects of Work), published in 1713.

Most heavy metals have considerable toxicity and persist in the body for many years: lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, etc.

Iron, itself, is not generally very harmful and is excreted quite readily from the body. Iron is a necessary element for health, being an essential ingredient in hemoglobin where it participates directly in the transport of oxygen in the blood.

Interesting comment Ann, I thought the same. First the European mass production of iron/steel put a great preassure on the local markets, and a bit later the weapon technology did the rest.

RhysMichael and Ian, I don't intend to say that metals like lead and mercury did not play a role, they may have, but the author does not mention it. As Ian writes these dangers were known early, and as the book was written in 1942 I guess the author would have mentioned it when writing about 'Virgin Iron'.
The pits were like on the picture, a whole in the ground, and normally not more than about two to three meters deep. A thing mentioned in the book, which seems to be more of a danger than lead and mercury was the collapse of the pit, burying the one working in the pit.

That's a classic example of dangerous vs harmful; driving too fast is dangerous to your health but not harmful to it; smoking vice-versa. Let's not get "smart" about exhaust fumes or burning down your house smoking in bed :p Exposure to heavy metals is bad for you. Getting in a pit is harmless, unless it collapses; ;then often deadly. Living in Houston, a low-lying swampy area with mushy unstable seeming soil, I am amazed and disturbed when I often see workers in unsupported pits.