AI-generated practice question — model-generated for extra practice, not a previous-year CBSE board question.
The perception took hold because large factories and steam-powered machines were visually dramatic and symbolically powerful, making them easier to record and celebrate. Historians often began industrial histories with the "setting up of the first factories," overlooking what came before and alongside them.
However, this is misleading. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, less than 20% of Britain's workforce was in technologically advanced sectors. The typical mid-nineteenth century worker was a craftsperson or labourer, not a machine operator. In India, only 5% of industrial labour worked in registered factories in 1911. Handloom cloth production actually trebled between 1900 and 1940.
This selective perception reveals that economic history tends to privilege the new and visible over the ordinary and widespread, distorting our understanding of how industrialisation actually functioned.
Source: Chapter 4, Sections 1, 1.2, 5.1, and Conclusion
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Examiners look for: (1) identifying why factories dominated the imagination — their visibility and symbolic value; (2) specific textual evidence that contradicts this perception (the statistics on workforce, handloom expansion, slow spread of steam engines); (3) a concluding insight on what this reveals about how history is recorded. Avoid vague generalisations — always anchor each point to a fact from the chapter. The answer should be analytical, not just descriptive.