Social Science (087) — AI-generated practice question

The adoption of the fly shuttle by handloom weavers illustrates a key principle: craft industries selectively adopted new technology to survive competition with mills, without abandoning their traditional structure. Weavers did not mechanise fully; they incorporated affordable innovations that boosted output while keeping costs low.

Impact of fly shuttle: It increased productivity per worker, speeded production, and allowed weaving of wider cloth. By 1941, over 35% of handlooms used fly shuttles; in Bengal, Travancore and Madras this rose to 70–80%. As a result, handloom cloth production nearly trebled between 1900 and 1940.

Limits of adaptation — why prosperity did not follow:

• Weavers worked extremely long hours; the entire household, including women and children, was drawn into production.
• Demand for coarser cloth (bought by the poor) collapsed during famines and bad harvests, hitting those weavers hardest.
• Expanded output did not translate into higher earnings — more production simply meant harder labour under the same difficult conditions.

Thus, technological adaptation ensured survival, not prosperity; weavers remained an integral but exploited part of the industrialisation process.

Source: Chapter 4 — "The Age of Industrialisation", Section 5.1 Small-scale Industries Predominate

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The examiner looks for two distinct parts: (1) the principle illustrated — selective/partial technology adoption as a survival strategy — with the fly shuttle as evidence; and (2) the limits — why more production ≠ better lives. Many students write only about the fly shuttle's benefits and forget the second half. Always cite the statistics (35%, 70–80%, trebling 1900–1940) — they earn easy marks. The phrase "survival, not prosperity" is a clean concluding idea that examiners reward.