Decline in indian textile industry

Decline in indian textile industry (eighteenth century)

Prasannan Parthasarathi's works have made it possible to emphasize the key role of anti-Indian protectionist policies in the emergence of the British textile industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, exports of manufactured products (textiles of all kinds, silks. porcelain) came chiefly from China and India, and they were largely financed by imports of silver and gold coming from Europe and America, as well as from Japan. Indian textiles, and especially printed fabrics and blue calicos, were madly popular in Europe and throughout the world. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, 80 percent of the textiles traded by British merchants for slaves in West Africa were made in India, and this proportion still reached 60 percent at the end of the century, Maritime registers indicate that in 1770s, Indian textiles by themselves represented a third of the cargos loaded in Rouen  on ships engaged in the slave trade, Ottoman reports attest that indian textile exports to the Middle East were still at that time larger than those sent to West Africa. This does not seem to have been s problem for the Turkish authorities, who were more concerned with the interests of the local consumer than with those of the producers In European merchants very quickly saw the interest they might have in encouraging protests against Indian textiles, and in appropriating part of this know how to develop their own trans-continental projects In 1988, the British Parliament introduced tariffs of 20 percent, raised them to 30 percent in 1690, and finally imposed a complete ban on the importation of printed or colored textiles in 1700. From that time on, only undyed fabric was imported from India, which allowed British producers to innovate, dyeing and printing their own. Similar mea prod were adopted in France, and they were strengthened in the United Kingdom throughout the eighteenth century, notably with the institution in 1787 of a duty of 100 percent on all Indian textiles. The pressure exercised by slave traders in Liverpool, who had a vital need for quality textiles to develop their commerce on the coast of Africa without spending all their coin, played a decisive role, espe cially between 1765 and 1785, a period during which British produc tion rapidly improved. It was only after having acquired an incontest- able comparative advantage in the textile industry, in particular thanks to the use of coal, that the United Kingdom began, starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, to adopt a more assertive free-trade dis- course. The British also made use of protectionist measures in the naval industry, which had flourished in India in the seventeenth and eigh- teenth centuries, by instituting in 1715 a special tax of 15 percent on all goods imported on ships made in India, and then by decreeing that only British vessels could import to the United Kingdom m1770serchandise coming from east of the Cape of Good Hope. Even if it is difficult to propose an overall estimate, it seems clear that the whole of these pro- tectionist measures, imposed on the rest of the world by the threat of attack by British gunboats, played a significant role in British and European industrial domination. According to available estimated china and India's share in worldwide manufacturing, which was still 53 % in 1800 was no more than 5 % in 1900.

(brief history of equality – thomas ppiketty – harvard university press -2022- page 57-59)