AI-generated practice question — model-generated for extra practice, not a previous-year CBSE board question.
The variety of weavers' responses — migration, revolt, and abandoning weaving — reveals that no good option existed; only desperate choices were available. The Company's control stripped weavers of bargaining power: advance loans tied them to the Company, gomasthas enforced miserably low prices, and competing buyers were eliminated. Migrating merely relocated hardship; revolting was risky with little chance of success; shifting to agricultural labour meant abandoning a skilled trade entirely. These responses show weavers had lost all economic agency — they could neither negotiate prices nor sell freely — leaving survival, not prosperity, as the only goal.
Source: Chapter 4, Section 3.2 — What Happened to Weavers?
---