In the autumn of 1675, the East India Company’s Agent and Council at Fort St. George drafted a letter brimming with frustration.
The calicoes from Madras, they complained, had grown “much thinner and of less body than formerly.”
The merchants, they said, were “a people so false and so addicted to deceit.”
The weavers were careless; the washers “have already felt the smart of the whip.”
Across its stiff bureaucratic English, this document reveals the use of violence to produce order but also frustration and anxiety — the anxiety of some white British men facing a brown world that refused to obey.
Calico Printing in England, c. 1830s
Courtesy: Wellcome Collection, UK
Sidebar: Calico means many different things so I did go down the rabbit hole to figure out what exactly Calico might mean in this 1675 record. And I found it here!
Threads of Control
The Council’s response to Edward Terry, the factory’s English overseer, is a catalog of managerial anxiety with a full serving of the trope of lazy and deceitful Indians they have to endure.
“Unless we stand continually over them with rods in our hands,” they wrote, “they will not act honestly.”
Every process in this record — weaving, dyeing, washing, packing — is transformed into a moral drama of obedience and deceit. But this insistence on discipline betrays the anxiety of a system depended on Indian artisans and middlemen whose knowledge, skill, and timing were beyond the Council’s control.
“We have often treated with the merchants, weavers, and washers, exhorting them to perform their several duties faithfully, and have severely punished such as we found faulty… but they are a people so false and so addicted to deceit, that unless we stand continually over them with rods in our hands, they will not act honestly.”
Cleverness
Even as the letter rails against deceit, it admits that the weavers and merchants “have taken all advantages of time and opportunity to advance the price of their yarn and labour.”
To me it appears that the artisans understood the rhythms of the market and the vulnerability of European buyers. Perhaps by adjusting production, claiming “scarcity of cotton” or “want of weavers,” they manipulated price and pace in ways that safeguarded their autonomy. They were, in effect shaping global textile flows long before industrial capitalism claimed that genius as its own.
Colonial Morality and the Language of Deceit
The repetition of “false,” “idle,” “deceitful” is less a description of behavior than an assertion of power. In my opinion, the British East India Company (EIC) imposed their own moral lexicon to recast negotiation as treachery. The visualization below shows exactly how many times words attached to an honor code or moral behavior is mentioned in this document that is roughly about 5 full (plano) foolscap papers long.
Moral and disciplinary vocabulary in the 1675 British East India Company document (please do not reproduce this image without permission)
When the Council ordered that “the Company’s mark be struck only by the warehouse keeper in presence of two witnesses,” they sought not quality but control — to erase the old circuits of trust that had governed textile exchange for centuries. Where local trade relied on relationships, memory, and credit, the Company introduced signatures, seals, and punishment; the tools of a surveillance economy.
But what if what the Company read as dishonesty was, in fact, something else?
When the Council complained that the merchants “have taken all advantages of time and opportunity to advance the price of their yarn and labour, pretending scarcity of cotton and want of weavers, though we know the contrary,” might this not suggest an older rhythm of commerce — one attuned to monsoon, credit, and caste, rather than to the clock and the ledger? When Edward Terry noted that the merchants “plead & remembrance of their contract with your Honours,” could it be that he was witnessing a different kind of contract altogether, one rooted in mutual obligation and reputation rather than fixed-price exchange? And when the weavers mixed different grades of cotton or paced their production unevenly, were they really being “careless,” or simply working according to environmental knowledge and inherited craft systems that the English failed to grasp? The constant refrain of “false,” “idle,” and “deceitful” perhaps tells us less about the artisans’ moral character and more about the Company’s discomfort before a market it could not encode to its wishes and perhaps a local economy that operated by its own logics of trust, time, and texture.
The Politics of Quality
The Company’s repeated complaint about “thin cloth” feels, on the surface, like a matter of quality control, but it really signals something larger. In calling for “callicoes… more substantial than those of former years,” they weren’t simply asking for better workmanship. They were trying to define what counted as good, honest labor. “Quality” became a way to talk about control: a language through which to police bodies, assign blame, and justify intervention. A flaw in the weave could be read as a flaw in character; a delay in curing cloth as a sign of laziness. In the name of improvement, the EIC factory remade itself as a kind of moral workshop, where every bolt of cotton could testify not just to skill, but to obedience and, even, morality.
Resistance in Routine?
At the close of the letter, the Council recorded the names of twenty-nine merchants and master weavers. Some of the names recorded were “Moodoo Naigue, Lutchmee Chetty, Narayana Chetty, Appa Naigue, Ramasamy Chetty.” These men, the Company claimed, “promised to observe the Honourable Company’s orders.”
Read literally, it sounds like submission.
It makes one wonder if these merchants and weavers knew what they were signing. That they were signing a record confirming not just a textile production contract but also their purported immoral behavior and their corruption. Their names in this document marks presence rather than obedience, because in later years too these types of complaints were levied on merchants by generations of EIC officials.
Every directive in this 1675 document — view all cloth in the white, whip the washers, restrain the dyers — reveals how deeply the empire depended on the people it sought to discipline. Each repetition of “order” testifies to disorder, each attempt at control to the artisans’ quiet refusal to be mechanized without physical and monetary coercion and surveillance.
Preferred Citation: Deepthi Murali, “‘Unless We Stand Continually over Them with Rods in Our Hands...’: Intimidating Indian Textile Workers in 17th Century,” DeepthiMurali.com, [date accessed], www.deepthimurali.com/textiles-talk/a-1675-british-east-india-company-textile-workers-memorandum
