text: East India Company During the second half of the 17th century, the newly established factories of the East India Company in South Asia started to produce finished cotton goods in quantity for the British market. The imported Calico and chintz garments competed with, and acted as a substitute for Indian wool and the linen produce, resulting in local weavers, spinners, dyers, shepherds and farmers petitioning their MPs and in turn Parliament for a ban on the importation, and later the sale of woven cotton goods. Which they eventually achieved via the 1700 and 1721 Calico Acts. The acts banned the importation and later the sale of finished pure cotton produce, but did not restrict the importation of raw cotton, or sale or production of Fustian.
  The exemption of raw cotton saw two thousand bales of cotton being imported annually, from Asia and the Americas, and forming the basis of a new indigenous industry, initially producing Fustian for the domestic market, though more importantly triggering the development of a series of mechanised spinning and weaving technologies, to process the material. This mechanised production was concentrated in new cotton mills, which slowly expanded till by the beginning of the 1770s seven thousand bales of cotton were imported annually, and pressure was put on Parliament, by the new mill owners, to remove the prohibition on the production and sale of pure cotton cloth, as they wished to compete with the EIC imports.