Cotton textile exports from the Indian subcontinent, 1680-1780

"India’s central position in the global textile trade of the eighteenth century is increasingly appreciated. Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and West Africa, and even the Americans were major markets for Indian stuff and the trade in Indian cottons was an important link between the commercial worlds of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Despite the importance of this trade, there is little research on the volume of cotton textile exports from the subcontinent. Nevertheless, recent revisionist accounts of Indian economic history, especially found in the work of Tirthankar Roy, have argued that exports represented an insignificant fraction of production. Roy, for instance, believes exports may have been only one per cent of total cotton cloth manufactures. The purpose of this paper is to assemble some new estimates of cloth production and exports for the subcontinent. In doing this it will build upon and extend the author’s estimates for South India, which was one of the major cotton textile exporting regions of the subcontinent. "