Britain's Calico Acts blocked Indian textiles — and built the rival that killed the trade

In the late 17th century, the British East India Company's most profitable trade was Indian cotton textiles — brightly coloured, finely woven calicoes and chintzes from Bengal. The cloth was cheaper and more comfortable than British wool and linen, and it flooded the English market. By the 1680s, the Company's textile imports had surpassed the value of its spice trade.

The British wool industry, threatened by this competition, mobilised. Weavers rioted, stormed East India Company offices, and attacked people wearing imported cloth. Parliament responded with the Calico Acts: a 1698 ban on most Indian cotton textiles entering England, and a 1721 Act that even banned the sale of domestic printed cotton. The Acts forced Indian cloth into warehouses for re-export only — a tariff wall designed to protect the wool industry from the cheap, superior Indian product.

The wall had the opposite of its intended effect. By banning finished cloth but exempting raw cotton, the Acts inadvertently created a protected market for British cotton manufacturing. Mills in Lancashire and Manchester developed mechanised spinning and weaving, fed by raw cotton imports that grew from 2,000 bales a year in the 1700s to 7,000 by the 1770s. When the Acts were repealed in 1774, a wave of investment doubled raw cotton demand every decade until the 1840s.

The Indian handloom industry, which had supplied the world's finest textiles for centuries, lost its largest export market. Its weavers' skill — the defence that had outcompeted every rival for generations — was useless against machine-made cottons produced at a fraction of the cost. By 1850, India was a net importer of British textiles, and the industry that had once been the world's largest was a colonial casualty.