ABSTRACT
The merchants control both the supply of raw material and the collection of the woven piece goods. They consider their own profits first and then adjust prices. There is always a very small margin for bargaining for the weavers. When the market is dropping, a smaller share of profits is given to the weavers than when the market is better. Unfortunately, the market for this kind of native weaving is shrinking, since the modern machine-made cloth has come to compete with it and sets a limit on the price of native woven cloth. Thus, the very small profits in weaving are constantly diminishing, with the merchants5 taking the lion's share of the profits; what remains is insufficient even to maintain the livelihood of the actual producers. These weavers may seem to maintain the position of independent producers with their own materials and their own tools, but actually this supposed independence does not exist. In fact, the weavers are, to some degree, slaves of the merchants.
