উপমহাদেশিয় সুতির কাপড় কেন শস্তা ছিল...

Indian cotton cloth was cheaper than the all-cotton goods that Europeans manufactured in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in the higher-quality varieties. In Normandy, for example, a French firm successfully made muslins between 1753 and 1760 only because of a protective duty. The manufacture collapsed when the protection was removed. Similarly, an attempt to make all-cotton muslins in Lancashire in the 1760s failed because of a lack of yarn “cheap enough to compete with Indian muslin.”

...Indian cottons were less expensive than silk cloth, which in the seventeenth century became the fabric of high fashion in Europe. “When novelty was demanded, it was demanded first from the silk designers,” Beverly Lemire has written. The introduction of Indian cottons challenged the primacy of silk, which it replaced in the making of gowns as well as other garments. Initially, the “members of the middling and lower orders began to buy the vibrant cottons as a cheap facsimile of the brocades and flowered silks favoured by the aristocracy.” For the less wealthy, the lower prices of printed and painted cottons enabled them to imitate the silk styles of the elite. Given the threat that cottons posed, it is not surprising that the London protests of the 1690s against Indian imports were spearheaded by the silk weavers of Spitalfields who believed that they were being undercut by low-wage workers in the Indian subcontinent. “N. C.,” a London weaver, for instance, criticized the English East India Company for “having their goods cheap wrought by the wretched poverty of that numerous people.”
What should one make of such claims for low Indian wages?

প্রসন্নন পার্থসারথীর হোয়াই ইওরোপ গ্রো রিচ... থেকে