The weavers lose their markets

Bengal and Gujarat cloth had supplied European trade since the seventeenth century. The Charter Act of 1813 ended the Company's monopoly of the India trade, and after the Napoleonic Wars British competition grew quickly. By Stephen Broadberry, Johann Custodis and Bishnupriya Gupta's figures, textile exports to Britain fell from about 1.36 million pieces a year in 1800 to 1804 to about 193,000 in 1830 to 1834. Cloth from Britain went from nothing in 1801 to 38 million yards in 1831 and 793 million in 1871.

The pin marks Dhaka, the best-known of the centres that lost their export trade, but the estimate covers the whole subcontinent. Home-market production fared far better than exports: 1,178 million yards in 1801, 1,101 million in 1831. On the authors' index, export industry fell by about 86 per cent in those thirty years, and all industry and commerce by about a third. Most Indian spinning and weaving served the home market and carried on.

"Deindustrialisation" hides two claims. The weak form says industry shrank as a share of the economy. The strong form says output itself fell. Broadberry and his co-authors find the strong form for 1800 to 1830 and call its scale modest, against Bagchi's catastrophe. They also warn that India's fall behind Britain began well before 1800 and "cannot be attributed solely to colonialism". India's GDP per head stood at about 62 per cent of Britain's in 1600, 28 per cent in 1801 and 22 per cent in 1831.