quoted pamphlet of 1788 states that, whilst the average sales of Indian muslins for the years 1780–6 had been 185,964 pieces, they rose in 1787 to 304,762, and that prices fell 30 to 50 per cent.[1] The writer is making out a case in the interests of British manufacturers for the exclusion of all piece-goods from India, which ought on mercantilist principles to supply Great Britain only with raw materials, and his statistics need handling with caution; but there seems no doubt that the supply of Indian textiles, which had dwindled during the wars of the previous period, had recovered under the peaceful regime of Cornwallis.
'I have been with Mr. Salte at the India House,' writes Samuel Oldknow on 18 October to his brother;
the Private Trade Sale comes on tomorrow and the Company has declared for a very large Sale the 25th of next month—no less than Six Ships Cargo—and another Private Trade Sale will be in Feby next, so that there are more India Goods coming into the Market than has been known of these many years in so short a time. We must drop making some articles.
And on the next day, after attending the sale, he sends a list of the articles to be dropped for the present, and adds:
I was in hopes to have discovered an opening for the increse of our weavers, but it will be wise to reverse it—in every sort of goods that we have 60 pieces we will not make any more of till that number be reduced to about 10. … Very fine thin goods sold high—so that very fine thin goods we must make our aim. Mr. A. sent us some 85 this week and we shall have some still finer the next. … Tell Wm. he need not do anything towards fixing another yarn-beam till I come home for I shall show him how—I am desirous of making such things as no body else is making and to have them done in our own Shop—so that do push forward the Looms and the finishing Waterside house.
These forecasts as to the effects of Indian competition in the immediate future are fully justified by the sales recorded in Oldknow's day-books. For May, June, and July 1787 the total had been £15,959, and during the same three months of 1788 they sank to £11,972. But in 1789, in spite of the fact that at the March sale of this year there were some 70,000 pieces of Indian muslin left over from the sale of the previous September, to be seen at the Bengal Warehouse, East India House,[2] Oldknow's total sales for May, June, and July rose to the unprecedented amount of £27,054; and as the total for the seven months recorded is £54,912, that for the year cannot well have been less than £80,000, so that this was almost certainly one of the two successive years referred to by Robert Owen when Oldknow's
