It was all kind of tedious, the very definition of labor intensive, and few ever really enjoyed it.* That hardly means there wasn’t money to be made, with the British the first to become interested at scale. It began by using ultracheap Indian labor (that’s South Asian “Indian,” not North American “Indian”) to do all the tedious, annoying work. The East India Company, founded in 1600 to bring in spices to make English food less soul-crushing, transitioned by the century’s end to more heavily focus on distributing Indian cloth throughout the empire.
