Now Lancashire could beat the world for both quality and price. In 1750, India’s muslins and calicoes were the envy of weavers everywhere. A century later, despite wages that were four or five times higher than in India, Lancashire was able to flood even India with cheap cotton cloth, some of it manufactured from Indian raw cotton that had made a 13,000-mile round trip. This was thanks entirely to the productivity of Lancashire’s mechanised mills. That is how much difference having fossil fuels made. No matter how low his wages, an Indian weaver could not compete with the operator of a
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