Cotton

. Nothing did more to stimulate the appetite than the large-scale import of Indian cloth by the East India Company, beginning in the seventeenth century. (Import of Chinese porcelain had a similar effect on the demand for crockery.) Housewives wanted these things and adjusted their behaviour and budgets accordingly. Entrepreneurs sought to use new technology to imitate imported goods and then displace them.

Cotton was indeed the king of the British economic miracle. The textile sector accounted for around a tenth of British national income and cotton manufacturing achieved much the most rapid increases in efficiency. The factories of Manchester and the workshops of Oldham became the focal point of the transformation. The striking thing is that a very large share of British cotton production was not for domestic consumption. In the mid-1780s cotton exports were only around 6 per cent of total British exports. By the mid-1830s, the proportion had risen to 48 per cent, the bulk of it to continental Europe. Historians used to argue about which came first in Britain, the technological wave or the consumer society. On the continent, there is no doubt, Europeans acquired a taste for cheap factory-made cloth well before they learned how to produce it themselves. ~ Page 201 (From "Civilization" by Nail Ferguson)