nese peasant is no longer content to burn bean-oil; he wants
kerosene. The desire of the Asiatic to possess foreign lamps is equalled
only by his passion for foreign clocks. The ambitious Syrian scorns the
mud roof of his ancestors, and will be satisfied only with the bright
red tiles imported from France. Everywhere articles of foreign
manufacture are in demand.... Knowledge increases wants, and the
Oriental is acquiring knowledge. He demands a hundred things to-day that
his grandfather never heard of."[207]

Everywhere it is the same story. An Indian economic writer, though a
bitter enemy of Western industrialism, bemoans the fact that "the
artisans are losing their occupations and are turning to agriculture.
The cheap kerosene-oil from Baku or New York threatens the oilman's[208]
existence. Brass and copper which have been used for vessels from time
immemorial are threatened by cheap enamelled ironware imported from
Europe.... There is also, _pari passu_, a transformation of the tastes
of the consumers. They abandon _gur_ for crystal sugar. Home-woven
cloths are now replaced by manufactured cloths for being too coarse. All
local industries are attacked and many have been destroyed. Villages
that for centuries followed customary practices are brought into contact
with the world's markets all on a sudden. For steamships and railways
which have established the connection have been built in so short an
interval as hardly to allow breathing-time to the village which
slumbered so long under the dominion of custom. Thus the sudden
introduction of competition into an economic unit which had from time
immemorial followed custom has wrought a mighty change."[209]

This "mighty change" was due not merely to the influx of Western goods
but also to an equally momentous influx of Western capital. The
opportunities for profitable investment were so numerous that Western
capital soon poured in streams into Eastern lands. Virtually devoid of
fluid capital of its own, the Orient was bound to have recourse to
Western capital for the initiation of all economic activity in the
modern sense. Railways, mines, large-scale agriculture of the
"plantation" type, and many other undertakings thus came into being.
Most notable of all was the founding of numerous manufacturing
establishments from North Africa to China and the consequent growth of
genuine "factory towns" where the whir of machinery and the smoke of
tall chimneys proclaimed that th