How 1 British Company Destroyed a Market Without a Battle

Support the channel - https://ko-fi.com/withronny In 1772, a former East India Company insider named William Bolts published a forensic exposé of how the Company was destroying Bengal's textile economy — not with an army, but with a contract. He was arrested, deported, and erased from history. His book is in the British Library today: shelfmark T.1280. This video breaks down the dadni advance-contract system: the forced advances, the dictated below-cost prices, the gomastah enforcers, and the legal lock that turned the world's finest weavers into bonded labourers who legally could not quit. Named villain: Governor Henry Verelst, who codified it — with Charles Grant, architect of the 1813 tariff, as the thread connecting this to the previous episode. The mechanism Bolts mapped has a modern name: monopsony. It runs underneath gig-economy contracts and platform supply chains today. Sources from the British Library, the National Archives at Kew, plus an honest contested-claims breakdown. SOURCES & FURTHER READING A note on method: This video makes one central, documented claim — that the East India Company destroyed Bengal's textile economy through an engineered contract system, and that an insider wrote it all down in 1772. Below are the sources, with honest flags on what's settled versus contested. Spot an error? Comments are open. That's the point. THE PRIMARY SOURCE William Bolts, Considerations on India Affairs; Particularly Respecting the Present State of Bengal and Its Dependencies (London, 1772; expanded edition 1772–1775). British Library shelfmark T.1280. The forensic account of the dadni system, forced advances, gomastah enforcement, and below-cost pricing. This is the spine of the video. Henry Verelst, A View of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the English Government in Bengal (1772) — the Governor's own self-justifying defence of Company administration. Read alongside Bolts for both sides in their own words. Verelst's administrative regulations / Bengal revenue correspondence — The National Archives, Kew (records of the East India Company / Board of Control). For the codification of agent powers. THE COERCION MECHANISM & THE WEAVER ECONOMY Hameeda Hossain, The Company Weavers of Bengal: The East India Company and the Organization of Textile Production in Bengal 1750–1813 (1988) — the standard modern academic study of exactly this contract system. The single best scholarly source for the dadni mechanism. Sushil Chaudhury, From Prosperity to Decline: Eighteenth Century Bengal (1995) — on the pre-Plassey competitive market and the post-1757 monopsony shift. Om Prakash, The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, 1630–1720 — establishes the multi-buyer free market that existed before the English Company's dominance. Prasannan Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India 1720–1800 (2001) — on weaver bargaining power before colonial control. THE CONTESTED CLAIM — THE THUMB STORY The widely repeated claim that weavers cut off their own thumbs to escape Company contracts is treated cautiously here. Bolts documents coercion, forced advances, below-cost pricing, imprisonment, and weavers fleeing — all firmly. The specific self-amputation detail appears in later second-hand compilations and is regarded by careful historians as probable embellishment of a real horror. The video deliberately does not rest its argument on it. Full discussion in the Reading Room companion. THE BRIDGE TO EPISODE 1 (CHARLES GRANT / 1813) Ainslie Embree, Charles Grant and British Rule in India (1962) — confirms Grant's arrival in Bengal in 1768 and his rise through the post-Plassey administration. (Episode 1 sources — Charter Act 1813 tariffs, R.C. Dutt, Bairoch's manufacturing-share figures — listed in that video's description.) THE BOLTS BIOGRAPHY & ERASURE N.L. Hallward, William Bolts: A Dutch Adventurer Under John Company (1920) — the standard biography; covers the deportation, the London litigation, and his bankrupt death in Paris, 1808. MODERN MONOPSONY / PLATFORM-ECONOMICS TIE-IN (interpretive — analogy, not historical causation) The gig-economy and platform-supply-chain parallels are the author's structural argument, presented as analogy, not as a claim of direct historical descent. For the economics of monopsony in labour markets: Alan Manning, Monopsony in Motion: Imperfect Competition in Labor Markets (2003) — the standard modern reference.