Crops, Indigo, British and India Ncert Class 8th

Indigo Plantation and The British- Ruling the countryside

• British thought of growing crops in India that Europe required along with the revenue.
• They forced the cultivators in various parts of India to produce crops like jute (Bengal), Tea (Assam), Sugar( United Provinces), Wheat (Punjab), Rice and Cotton. 
• They were trying the most on the cultivation of opium and Indigo.
• Indigo is a plant which grows primarily in tropics, during 13th-century Indian indigo was used by cloth manufacturers across Europe.
• The price of Indian indigo was high and the supply to Europe was also less, to meet the demand the cloth manufacturers used another plant called ‘woad‘.

• Woad was a temperate plant, easily available in Europe but the dye from woad was low in quality than indigo.
• This created competition from indigo and thus the woad producers requested their governments to ban the import of indigo. 
• The French also began cultivating indigo in St Domonique, Portuguese in Brazil, English in Jamaica, Spanish in Venezuela and many parts of North America. 
• By end of the 18th century, the British started industrialisation expanding their cotton production which increased in the demand of the Indian dye again.

• The existing supplies of dye from America and the West Indies declined due to certain reasons, and in return, the demand of Indian Indigo rose again. 
• As a result of this high demand of Indian Indigo, by 1810,  95 per cent of Indigo was imported into Britain from India.
• Indigo became a commercial crop, and thus officials, businessman and numerous other people invested in the Indigo plantations in India.