The fear of unemployment made women workers hostile to the introduction of new technology. When the Spinning Jenny was introduced in the woollen industry, women who survived on hand spinning began attacking the new machines. This conflict over the introduction of the jenny continued for a long time.

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M. Imp.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, merchants from the towns in Europe began moving to the countryside, supplying money to peasants and artisans, persuading them to produce for an international market.

(i)With the expansion of world trade and the acquisition of colonies in different parts of the world, the demand for goods began growing.

(ii)But merchants could not expand production within towns. This was because here urban crafts and trade guilds were powerful.

(iii)These were associations of producers that trained craftspeople, maintained control over production, regulated competition and prices, and restricted the entry of new people into the trade.

(iv)Rulers granted different guilds the monopoly right to produce and trade in specific products.

(v)It was therefore difficult for new merchants to set up business in towns. So they turned to the countryside. In the countryside poor peasants and artisans began working for merchants.

By the 1750s the network, controlled by Indian merchants, was breaking down.

(i)The European companies gradually gained power – first securing a variety of concessions from local courts, then the monopoly rights to trade.

(ii)This resulted in a decline of the old ports of Surat through which local merchants had operated.

(iii)Exports from these ports fell dramatically, the credit that had financed the earlier trade began drying up, and the local bankers slowly went bankrupt.

(iv)In the last years of the seventeenth century, the gross value of trade that passed through Surat had been Rs 16 million.

(v)By the 1740s it had slumped to Rs 3 million.Trade through the new ports came to be controlled by European companies, and was carried in European ships.

The appointment of Gomastha:

(i)The Company tried to eliminate the existing traders and brokers connected with the cloth trade, and establish a more direct control over the weaver.

(ii)It appointed a paid servant called the gomastha to supervise weavers, collect supplies, and examine the quality of cloth.

(iii)It prevented Company weavers from dealing with other buyers. One way of doing this was through the system of advances.

(iv)Once an order was placed, the weavers were given loans to purchase the raw material for their production.

(v)Those who took loans had to hand over the cloth they produced to the gomastha. They could not take it to any other trader.

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M. Imp.