[CleanedStar]

Yes.

One must remember that pre-colonization India, say, the Mughal empire, included not only India, but modern Pakistan and Bangladesh of course. Not a central point, but an important one.

In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith goes on about "the mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies". Acts of Parliament in 1700 and 1720 forbid import of fabric from India. Later on, England began forcing English textiles in India itself with various laws. England purposefully destroyed the thriving textile market of India (again India being India/Pakistan/Bangladesh in the time before and during the British occupation).

[weland]

No, really. India was hardly "on track" to becoming an industrialized nation roughly a hundred years before industry happened. Furthermore, India was actually the first Asian country with a modern textile industry, in the 1850s -- twenty years before Japan.

What you're thinking about is the Calico acts. They were two because the first one, passed in 1699 IIRC, was easy to circumvent -- as it only banned the import of some types of calico. The second one was passen in 1720. Neither of them actually had anything to do with the industrial revolution, which was still a couple of generations away. They were passed mainly due to the heavy impact imported cotton had over the national wool and silk production, and people were naturally growing weary about the toll taken by the national economy (both in terms of actual production, and in terms of workplace et co.); apparently, those guys realized, three hundred years ago, that outsourcing can have some bad consequences :-). There was also a more or less xenophobic component: other European countries banned cotton trade as well, while England still allowed raw and undied cotton, which drove many cotton manufacture workers to England, where their job was still in demand. There was a fair amount of "nationalism" in the Calico acts.

(Yeah: England was actually one of the last European countries to implement this. When the first Calico act was passed, France, for instance, aws already forbidding cotton period.)

The ban was later maintained, partly due to intertia, partly because the cotton processing industry later had to be protected, but that was hardly that much of a showstopper. There was no ban on cotton use or processing -- nothing that restricted either producing cotton for internal use, or export to anywhere except England. There were other factors at stake that slowed down the development -- and the first textile mills in India (with Indian owners, no less) opened in the early 1850s.