Proto-industrialisation was the widespread growth of rural cottage industries before factories, which merchants often fostered by leaving restrictive guild towns. Yet in our Kumaon hills, the story differs—our wool-weaving *khadi* never saw guilds, but was a household art, disrupted not by merchant adventurism but by distant mill cloth. My notebook of Garhwali *lori* holds the same thread: what is written down survives when the market shifts. So, I say merchants left, but our crafts often stayed, and were forgotten by the world outside.
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