6 ideas
British cotton spinning was mechanised mainly to imitate and undercut Indian calicoes, which had captured European and Atlantic markets through quality, colourfastness and low price. Mechanisation was a strategy of import substitution against a superior foreign competitor, not the spontaneous result of a uniquely inventive culture.
Explain divergent economic paths by asking what specific problems each region was under pressure to solve, not what virtues or institutions it possessed. Britain faced a competitive textile threat and a wood shortage; South Asia faced neither, so it had no parallel reason to pursue the same technologies.
Deforestation and rising timber prices in early modern Britain created a fuel shortage that the state and industry answered by shifting to coal and developing technologies to mine and burn it, including the steam engine. India's different ecology and forest management produced no comparable shortage, so the coal-and-steam path had no incentive there.
Before 1800, South Asian wages, living standards, commercial networks, and artisanal skill were broadly comparable to advanced parts of Europe. Market institutions and craft knowledge were well developed, so the divergence cannot be explained by an 'Asian backwardness' that predated industrialisation.
The British state protected its infant cotton industry with tariffs and bans on Indian calico imports, and used naval and colonial power to secure raw cotton and export markets. Industrialisation depended on deliberate state intervention, not laissez-faire markets.
Indian weavers, spinners and dyers relied on embodied tacit skill, specialisation and dense merchant-artisan networks to produce high-quality cloth cheaply. Where skilled labour already delivered quality at low cost, there was less incentive to invest in labour-saving machinery, so high craft competence can reduce the pressure to mechanise.