Conceiving mobility: Weavers' migrations in pre-colonial and colonial India

During the past decade, historical work on artisans has moved away from old preoccupations. While scholarship once focused on the question of whether or not handloom weavers and others had been displaced from their occupation in the economic environment of the nineteenth century, recent work has stressed the ways in which artisans adapted dynamically to changes under colonialism, and sometimes made significant contributions to the character of the larger economy.’ I