The Crafts and Capitalism

This book presents a comprehensive history of handloom weaving industry in India to challenge and revise the view that competition from machine-produced textiles destroyed the country’s handicrafts as claimed by historians until recently. It shows that skill-intensive handmade textiles survived the competition on a large scale, and that handmade goods and high-quality manual labour played a positive role in the making of modern India. Rich in archival material, The Crafts and Capitalism explores