“From Asia to Europe, from head to foot, everyone was clothed in Indian textiles.” Qualify this statement with a critical account of India’s foreign trade with special reference to textiles.

The claim is broadly justified for the period before 1750.

• Range and reputation. Dacca muslin, Coromandel chintz and painted calico, Gujarati and Bengali cottons and silks were unmatched in fineness, in fast dyeing and in price. India held the technology of mordant dyeing that Europe could not reproduce.
• Market reach. Indian cloth clothed Southeast Asia, where it functioned almost as currency in the spice trade, and reached east Africa, west Asia and, from the seventeenth century, Europe in bulk through the Dutch and English companies.
• Scale. Textiles were the largest single item in Asia's export trade, and Europe paid for them in bullion, which is the origin of the mercantilist complaint about silver draining east.

The critical qualifications.

• The claim is about cotton. India did not supply the world's woollens or, in most markets, its silks; the dominance was in one sector, in which it was overwhelming.
• The trade was regionally concentrated in Bengal, Coromandel and Gujarat, so it was not a general condition of the Indian economy.
• It was politically contested. England's Calico Acts of 1700 and 1721 prohibited the import and then the wearing of Indian printed cottons, precisely because the trade was destroying domestic weaving. Protectionism is the strongest evidence of Indian competitiveness — and the first stage of the reversal.
• It was reversed within a century. Mechanised spinning, one-way tariffs and colonial control turned India from the world's supplier into a market and a source of raw cotton.

Who captured the gains. Not the weaver. Production ran on the dadni system of advances, and after 1757 the Company's monopsony in Bengal, enforced through gomastas, fixed prices below market, restricted weavers to Company contracts and punished default. The trade's profits accrued to merchants, intermediaries and the companies. India's textile dominance was therefore real, but its benefit to Indian producers was limited well before mechanisation destroyed it.