INEVITABLY, various commercial circles throughout the world, and. especially between Manchester' and Osaka, have been agitated by the announcement made last week that the Indian Cotton Excise Duty is to be removed. Curiously enough Shanghai is not particularly exercised upon the matter, although she is a great cotton manufacturing centre, but this is simply for the yeason that her relations with) India are for the time being principally that of buyer' of} material, while the cotton) manufactures she sends to that country are infinitesimal compared-with the other trade which she supplies, This has not always been the ud it may) ogam be very different in the future, and. accordingly the importance of this act of the Indian] Government calls for a full relization of the position. We need not now go into the reason why this particular. excise duty, was imposed, and will content ourselves with pointing ott that in 1896 a duty of three and a alf per cent. was imposed by Government on piece goods produced in Indian mills. It is) difficult to imagine a more un-Popular tax, for cotton has become essentially one of the great indigenous industries of India, if rot its greatest, yet the products of the factories have had to bear this burden while—silk, jute, wool, leather and the like have gone free. Meanwhile there has been a duty of eleven! per cent, on imported cargo, and this means that native Indian cloth has been protected to the extent of seven and a half per cent. against rival material coming from abroad, in recent years principally from. Lancashire and/ Japan, Now there is an effective' eleven per cent, and that is why both Lancashire and Japan are in a measure agitated, the latter to no small extent.
The importance of the measure just adopted by the Indian Gov-cement will be fully realized when a short survey of certain years of the Bombay cotton industry is presented. About the! beginning of the present century India was an exporter of cotton) cloth, and two, of her most. important customers were China end. Japan, where the industry was as yet in its infancy. The moment, however, that the cotton exports to the Far East havi
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.