ABSTRACT
While discussing the question why the industrial revoluion was delayed in India for more than a century and a half, it is pertinent to analyse the social attitudes of principal trading communities. The present analysis of the social attitudes of the three main trading communities of northern and western India shows that the Jains and Vaisyas and Khatris were unable to cast off the cocoon of traditionalism in the seventeenth century. When the English and the Dutch arrived in the seventeenth century, the Jains after initial hesitation began to help them. Like the Jains after the arrival of the English and the Dutch in the seventeenth century, they concentrated their attention on financing European trade and rendering services to them as middlemen. Absence of any radical occupational change meant little or no change in social attitudes. As distinguished from the Jains, one important effort was made to rise above the socially enforced asceticism in the midst of material plenty.
