BRITAIN AND THE OTHERS^227
accomplish anything by machinery that can be performed by human
labour."^27 One reason for this "general indifference": no one seems
to have had a passionate interest in simplifying and easing tasks. Both
worker and employer saw hard labor as the worker's lot—and as
appropriate. Indifference, moreover, was promoted by segmentation:
it was not the cloth merchant's job to find, assemble, and deliver the
raw materials. He advanced capital, and it was up to weaver and
spinner to do the rest. This was significantiy different from putting-
out as practiced in Europe, where the merchant took part in the
production process.
In India, then, the final buyer was cut off from the means of
remedy. The worker did what he had always done, and so did the
merchant. Dutch records tell us that merchants kept weavers "on a
short leash," paying them by the day so that they could not get
ahead and run off, presumably with the goods.^28 Some merchants
hired agents to keep an eye on the weavers and check their progress.
The aim here was to prevent the weaver, who invariably consumed
his advance by the time he finished the work, from selling his
finished piece to another buyer. We hear of agents who would enter
the weaver's house and cut the cloth from the loom, even though
not completely done. Come back a day later, and it might be gone,
and nine tenths of a piece was better than none.
The European companies in turn learned to accommodate these
irregularities. Markets failed at times, but both Indians and
Europeans seem to have viewed these lapses as a fact of life. Like
famine: This too shall pass. The industry seems to have followed its
own leisurely pace, which was not irrational. (It is ends that
determine which means are rational.) In the Coromandel (southeast
coast), for example, the raw cotton was moved from the interior to
the spinning and weaving villages on and near the coast by huge
bullock trains numbering in the thousands and tens of thousands,
the whole shapeless mass feeding while shambling along at a rate of a
few miles a day. Since the trek covered some three hundred or more
miles, it took about half a year to deliver the goods.^29
Meanwhile the European companies' own rhythm of purchases
and shipments reflected the irregularities of shipping and of capital
availability, to say nothing of fluctuations in supply. Data, for
example, on shipments by the East India Company of textiles from
Bombay show a high variance, ranging from a few thousand (zero in
one year) to almost a million pieces.^30 The companies' remedy was to