The East India Company used the political power it wielded to further its commercial interests. Emboldened by the Company's victory in the Battle of Plassey in 1757, some of its employees who were engaged in illegitimate private trade, began to claim exemption from customs duties, a privilege till then enjoyed only by the Company. In less than ten years, until the Company abolished private trade by its employees, the avaricious company officials had elbowed out the local Bengali traders.
What was even more deplorable was the arm-twisting resorted to by the Company to compel Indian artisans to work exclusively for them, at low wages and against their will. Those who refused to work were flogged and confined within the company premises until they complied.
At the beginning of the 19th century, cotton and silk goods from India sold well in England because they were 50-60 per cent cheaper than British made goods. Britain's cloth mills would have come to a stop had not the government come to their rescue. The British government slapped an import duty of 70 to 80 per cent on cotton goods imported from India.
While heavy duties were slapped on cotton goods imported from India, there were no duties on British goods imported into India.
"Had India been independent," wrote Wilson, "she would have retaliated. She would have imposed prohibitive duties upon British goods and would have preserved her own productive industry from annihilation." And Indian industry was annihilated.
At the beginning of the 19th century, in just three districts of Bihar – Shahabad, Bhagalpur and Gorakhpur, there were 8,25,526 women who spun cotton yarn and 76,104 weavers working 23,368 looms. The money involved in this major economic activity ran into several crores. It was this thriving industry that was throttled by the English. Wilson ruefully records, "...and the foreign manufacturer employed the arm of political injustice to keep down and ultimately strangle a competitor with whom he would not have contended on equal terms."
Wrote the historian Romesh Dutt, "...in India, the manufacturing power of the people was stamped out ...and then free trade was forced upon her so as to prevent a revival."

While Dutt diagnosed the ills that plagued the Indian economy under British rule, it was left to Mahadev Govind Ranade to prescribe the antidote. Ranade did not want India to be reduced to the status of a supplier of food grains and raw materials to Britain and at the same time provide a market for British goods. Ranade wanted India to manufacture.
Ganesh Vasudev Joshi gave concrete shape to Ranade's plans when he established the first Swadeshi trading store in Poona in 1873. Thirty years later Swadeshi was used as a powerful weapon of protest against the British in Bengal.