India Unbound - pg. 20

The American South was infamous for slavery, but it was famous for growing fine, long-staple cotton, which it supplied to the textile mills of Britain. The mills converted it to cloth and sold it around the world. Overnight, the American Civil War came and cut this supply chain. As the supply of raw cotton dried up, prices began to skyrocket. Traders in Bombay smelled an opportunity. The enterprising ones took off for the villages and convinced the farmers of western India to switch over to the particular long variety, suitable for the English mills. Soon the Indian farmers had converted, and with prices booming, a number of traders made huge fortunes in the 1860s supplying the cotton to Lancashire. Shiv Narain Barla was one of them. Some of these fortunes were reinvested in the first textile mills in bombay and Ahmedabad in the 1870s and 1880s.