Q.What are some kinds of changes brought about by technology and the economy?

The chapter gives several distinct ways technology and the economy jointly cause social change. …

Technology and economic organisation together have produced some of the most far-reaching social changes of the modern period, and the chapter offers several distinct routes through which this happens.

First, a single technological breakthrough can transform economic and social geography almost immediately once combined with the market: the steam engine, applied to ships and railways, dramatically sped up transport, enabled the westward expansion of industry and trade in America and Asia, and (from 1853) reshaped India's own economy. Second, a technology can lie socially 'dormant' for a long time and only produce dramatic change once it meets the right economic context — gunpowder and paper, both invented in China, had limited impact there for centuries but transformed warfare and communication once they reached a modernising Western Europe. Third, technological change in one place can devastate an established economic order elsewhere: new spinning and weaving machinery in Britain, backed by market power and colonial rule, destroyed the Indian subcontinent's handloom industry, until then the largest in the world. Fourth, changes in economic organisation that are not directly technological can still transform society: large-scale plantation agriculture (sugarcane, tea, cotton) created a huge demand for labour that helped establish slavery and the slave trade between the 17th and 19th centuries, and in India drove the forced migration of Adivasi labour from Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh to the Assam tea plantations. Finally, contemporary examples show the same logic continuing today …