It's a rather simplistic take, overlooking Britain's exceptionally developed state before the classic industrialisation age or European domination of Asian markets.

India was indeed the 18th-century world's foremost exporter of cotton textiles, but that's because it was big and the crop grew there, unlike in Britain which until the 1780s had under a twentieth as many people. But India wasn't a major exporter of woollen cloth which as early as 1700 earned Britain some £2½m (91% of it in sales to Europe) or 3% of GDP, a greater share of national income than India's cotton shipments. By that (or as it happens any other) measure, Britain was more industrialised than India 70 years before the innovations of Watt or Arkwright, despite the outstanding scale and quality of India’s cotton textile output. (British imports from the whole of Asia at this time reached only £¾m, half of it cottons.)

Colonies and oceanic trade were important to British development, as was the protectionism cited in the piece. Slave labour provided Lancashire with the raw material for the revolution in cotton manufacture, but the cotton sector itself accounted for only 5% of British GDP in its heyday, at most a sixth of industrial output. The slave trade itself earlier contributed both material and strategic capital to British growth, but its gross annual value amounted to under 1% of GDP at its height, and cumulative profits over the 18th century totalled a like proportion of national wealth: Caribbean slave plantation produce made a similar or slightly greater contribution, the gross value of all imports from the region exceeding 2% of GDP in the century’s later decades.

Empire sustained Victorian prosperity as British industrial leadership eroded, but that's a different matter to saying it – or slaves, or distant commercial predation – "caused" the industrial revolution. Europe took 85% of British exports in 1700 and half 70 years later, with the bulk of the rest going to North America: to the extent that Britain was already a world economic leader with a large manufacturing export, viewing industrialisation trough the lens of 19th-century exports to Asian or African territories is to look down the wrong end of the telescope.

That isn’t to say that Britain’s motives or conduct were exemplary, even by the standards of the age: three million Africans suffered forced transportation across the Atlantic in British ships, perhaps a tenth dying en route. The East India Company’s takeover of Bengal and depletion of the provincial treasury was followed in a few years by millions of deaths in possibly the worst famine in Indian history. And discrimination against Indian producers first stalled and later decimated traditional textile manufacture, a fate later to be suffered by Chinese handicraft spinners.

It’s appropriate that we should recognise past injustices and seek to redress them. But to view past economic growth through the prism of overseas exploitation and expropriation while overlooking endogenous factors risks reducing complex development processes to a zero-sum game. There was more to Britain’s growth than colonies – or for that matter just cotton or coal.

Trade data are from Ralph Davis, English foreign trade 1700-1774, Economic History Review 15:2 (1962) and BR Mitchell, British historical statistics; cotton industry output and GDP derived from Deane & Cole, British economic growth 1688-1959.

The question is not entirely settled, and the piece linked touches on too many issues to deal with in depth. I'll focus here on the question of cotton textiles and protectionism, along the lines highlighted by Sven Beckert. The mysterious Pseudoerasmus wrote a fascinating essay on the question of the Calico Acts as industrial protectionism here. They give a wonderful examination of the main questions, and an overview of the debate, though they sit quite firmly on the No side. Here are my thoughts, if not a final answer.

There is a common rhetorical argument that goes like: "India had a large share of world GDP/cotton exports/whatever else until colonialism, and then Britain's share increased, ergo, Britain must have taken this share from India." This point comes up frequently in critiques of industrialisation, especially those launched from an Indian nationalist perspective. But it fails to account for the radically changing shape of the global economy across time. The size of the global economy is not fixed across time, indeed, it grows exponentially. Having a large share of the global textile trade in, say, 1700 is nothing like having the same share in 1850, because overall trade grew so enormously. In 1700, global trade was small and concentrated on luxury products; in 1850, it was enormous, and included a wide range of everyday items. The industrial requirements to dominate the global trade in cottons in 1700 was to be able to produce small amounts of high-quality cloths with desirable patterns at low prices. This meant small workshops run by master craftsmen employing cheap labour. By 1850, it meant being able to produce truly enormous quantities of standardised product, which meant giant factories packed with expensive, technologically sophisticated machines powered by non-human energy. Being able to succeed at the former is not meaningfully connected to success at the latter.

Comparative advantage in manufacturing thus changed with industrialisation; what would have been counter-factually necessary for India to have maintained its high trade share is not an absence of protection in Britain, but an Indian industrial revolution. The question then is, did tariff policy cause the industrial revolution in Britain? And would a different set of policies have produced the same effect in India? The analogy with the East Asian Developmental State model and Hamilton/List industrial policy makes the idea seem very tempting. But it has serious flaws in this context. These examples involve "follower" countries catching up and overtaking world leaders by copying existing technology. But the key technologies of the British industrial revolution simply did not exist before, neither in India nor anywhere else. While British manufacturers were shameless about copying Indian styles and patterns, and techniques for printing and dying, they did not generally copy Indian production methods. Indian artisanal methods produced high quality exportable cotton textiles, but did so at small scales, using a combination of handicraft expertise and an enormous amount of labour. British producers would have gone broke trying to produce in this way. These methods also do not exhibit economies of scale, do not become more lucrative with larger markets, and do not seem to have much to do with mechanisation.

As a side note, the argument "The Indian producer, for millenia [sic] held great control on the levers of production (a Marxian dream), he decided who to sell to, at what rates and the volumes he sold." is just strange. There was no single Indian producer, but thousands and thousands of artisans producing in small workshops, and competing with one another. India was not even a single unified political entity, let alone a giant cartel fixing global prices and volumes. The British East India Company might plausibly have had the scale to change (some) prices and volumes, though probably not in the case of cottons, but that certainly does not mean that Indian producers had that power before them.

The argument goes that Britain protected their home markets, which allowed their infant industries to prosper. But this does not explain the particularly British origin of the industrial revolution; many countries had protection for domestic manufactures, and indeed India did not even need such protection prior to the 19th century, as domestic cotton cloth was simply better and cheaper than imported cloth. It can't be about growing cotton, since many places can and did grow raw cotton. The trade was not monopolised, and Britain had no particular advantage. Any region that wanted to import the raw materials for cotton textiles could easily do so, and with no particular disadvantage against Lancashire textile manufacturers.

So, why did India itself not industrialise in the 18th century? It can't just be competition from Britain, because British cottons were simply not competitive in Indian markets until around the 1840s, according to Broadberry and Gupta. It can't just be British tariff policy, because there was an entire world to sell textiles to, including the enormous Indian domestic market; without mechanisation, Britain is just a cold, wet island in the North Atlantic. The author of the piece cites a decline in Indian textile sales to France, but French markets were not under British tariff control, and neither was most of the world; the reason Indian textiles sold less in France 1820 than 1720 is that European production had substantially mechanised, driving prices down such that Indian cottons had difficulty competing.

The reason India did not industrialise must lie in other factors. We do not have a comprehensive theory of industrial development, but the most popular is Allen's factor prices argument: industrialisation happens because there is an incentive to substitute workers with machines, and that incentive is created by high wages and cheap capital. India had among the cheapest workers in the world, and relatively scarce capital, and so the incentives to industrialise were low. One could tell other stories, about education, about craft organisation, political authority, and so on, and the debate is not over. Empire more broadly might have played a role in Britain by changing the optimal scale of production, though it could also be the case that expanding domestic markets were more important. But in general, it is hard to see how the Calico Acts, widely-undermined commercial policy from the 1720s in Britain, is the reason that Indian textiles declined in relative importance, or that British textiles came to dominate world export markets from Napoleon until WWI (though neither before nor after).

u/davepx and u/IconicJester have already given you wonderful answers. I wonder if I may add another?

Indian producer, for millenia [sic] held great control on the levers of production (a Marxian dream), he decided who to sell to, at what rates and the volumes he sold

This apart from being strange isn't even true. As Habib has shown the weaver depended on credit for his subsistence. The prices weren't decided by him and whatever he got was less than market price.

Eraly citing Moreland amongst others further speaks of the poverty and wretched state of the weavers who could seldom afford to finance their production and depended on credit. He further speaks of weavers being forced to labour for the elite for a pittance.

Michael J Twomey also mentions that the weavers were often remarked upon as a poverty stricken lot well before the British had gained the upper hand.

KN Chaudhuri in his book speaks of how vulnerable the weavers were and that when things started worsening in the eighteenth century, they migrated to Company towns.

Again there's general agreement that the weaver depended on advances to not only begin production but also to sustain himself.

Next we get to the export sector. Bear in mind, as per Ahuja that the experiences of weavers engaged in export oriented manufacture 'cannot be assumed to be representative even for all artisanal occupations'.

Further more the export trade in itself was tiny. As per Roy the proportion of textile export to total textile production was very small, at its peak not more than 1 to 2%.

To give a sense of scale, around 1795, India's net export of cotton cloth was 22 million yards, and domestic production was 1102 million yards. These calculations are from Roy's paper in Australian Economic History Review.

In a new paper Gupta states unambiguously 'the thriving world of Indian trade and commerce barely touched the vast majority of people'.

So even if one were to assume the very worst of the fate of Indian weavers who were in engaged in the export trade, one must bear in mind that they were not in any way representative of the Indian weaver at largen nor even the vast majority of the Indian textile industry. They were but a tiny part of that industry.

Gupta in a recent paper speaks of the interaction between the Companies and the weavers. As her paper outlines Indian exports of textiles increased massively with the arrival of the European Companies. The companies made profits from the trade. So destroying the industry was not in their interest. The Companies (mainly English and Dutch East India company) signed contracts with the weavers  through Indian intermediaries to buy textiles.

While Gupta is sure that some of the examples of harassment by the companies is correct, she however cites documented archival evidence of weavers defaulting on the contract and the companies not being able to do anything because they wanted to contract with them again.

According to her, it would make no sense for the trading companies destroy the weaving industry, which was the basis of their trade and their prosperity.

So what really happened? One could look at Indrajit Ray's comprehensive study.

Ray doesn't discount the negative impact of British commercial polices. However he points out that the tariffs were annulled in 1826, and thus British commercial policies cannot explain the industry’s downfall which started in the mid-1820s and perpetuated through 1860.

He further shows that, British policy was in no way responsible for the massive inflow of British cotton textiles into India that actually devastated the industry in Bengal.

He attributes this to Britain's comparative advantage in certain lines of production by via technological innovations.

According to him continuous reductions in the raw material costs and improved weaving technologies, allowed British fabrics to sweep the market at home and abroad, including the domestic market of Bengal.

British industry he says, gained further competitive strength with the spread of weaving machinery in the 1830s and its improvement in the 1840s, causing catastrophe to the Bengal industry.

He thus concludes that technological innovations in Great Britain led to the decline of Bengal’s cotton textile industry during the first half of the nineteenth century.

For another more general perspective there's the famous study by Clingingsmith and Williamson which attributes India's industrial decline to the destructive effects of wars (not all British caused) and climate shocks.

Sources:

Habib, I. (1964). Usury in Medieval India. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 6(04), 393.

Abraham Eraly, The Mughal World.

Twomey, M. J. (1983). Employment in nineteenth century Indian textiles. Explorations in Economic History, 20(1), 37–57.

KN Chaudhri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company: 1660-1760

Ahuja, R. (2002). Labour Relations in an Early Colonial Context: Madras, c.1750–1800. Modern Asian Studies, 36(04).

Roy, T. (2002). Economic History and Modern India: Redefining the Link. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 16(3), 109–130.

Roy, T. (2012) Consumption of Cotton Cloth in India, 1795-1940, Australian Economic History Review, 52(1), 61-84.

Gupta, B. (2019). Falling behind and catching up: India’s transition from a colonial economy. The Economic History Review, 72(3), 803–827.

Gupta, Bishnupriya, ‘Competition and Control in the Market for Textiles: Indian Weavers and the English East India Company in the Eighteenth Century’, in Riello and Roy (eds), How India Clothed the World, pp. 281–305.

Ray I. (2009). Identifying the woes of the cotton textile industry in Bengal: tales of the nineteenth century. The Economic History Review, 62(4), 857–892.

Clingingsmith, David, and Jeffrey G. Williamson. Deindustrialization in 18th and 19th century India: Mughal decline, climate shocks and British industrial ascent. Explorations in Economic History 45.3 (2008): 209-234.