The paper first provides a broad overview of the structure of textile manufacturing and procurement in India in the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century. It then takes up for a detailed analysis the changes in this structure in the second half of the eighteenth century as a result of the assumption of political authority by the English East India Company in the subcontinent with special reference to the case of Bengal where such authority was exercised most intensively. A market-based system was replaced by one embedded in coercion of the intermediary merchants and the manufacturing artisans. In the concluding section, the paper makes a plea for a distinction being made between the distributive justice dimension and the implications for output dimension of the changed scenario and argues that the picture of a ruined textile industry in Bengal might be in need of substantive revision.