The increased demand for Indian textiles in European markets in the sixteenth…

Concept: European trading companies met the sixteenth-seventeenth century boom in demand for Indian cloth through advance-payment (dadni) or “putting-out” contracts: agents paid weavers in advance to lock in future supply. This arrangement both expanded the allied processing crafts needed to prepare cloth for export and bound the weaver's output and pattern to the paying agent's specification.

Application: Rising export volumes meant more raw cotton/yarn had to be spun, and more cloth had to be bleached and dyed to finishing standard before shipment, so crafts of spinning, bleaching and dyeing expanded (statement A). Securing this larger, contracted supply is exactly what the dadni system of advance payments from agents achieved (statement D). Because weavers now worked against agent contracts and agent-set patterns, their independence in how they worked did not grow, and design choices followed the buyer's order rather than the craftsperson's own creativity, so A and D describe the actual changes, while a rise in independence or creative variety does not.

Cross-check: The same advance-payment relationship that explains the expansion in A and D also explains why the opposite claims fail:

• Independence did not rise; an advance tied a weaver to one agent's order, quantity and delivery schedule, reducing the weaver's say in the work.

• Design creativity did not rise; patterns were typically set to match the taste of the European buyer, so the craftsperson executed a specified design rather than inventing new ones.