The Weavers Were Not Out-Invented
Dhaka muslin needed a particular cultivar, a particular river, and spinners trained from childhood. Recovering it now takes genetics and a research budget. In 1750 it was routine commercial production.
For most of recorded history, if you wanted the finest cotton cloth in the world, you bought it from India.
Indian weavers had techniques of spinning, dyeing and finishing that Europe could not replicate and in several cases could not explain. Dhaka muslin was so fine it had names describing how it behaved: woven air, evening dew. The trade was old enough that Roman writers complained about the silver leaving the empire to pay for it.
Within a single generation in the nineteenth century, India went from the world's largest exporter of textiles to a net importer of British cloth.
The usual explanation is that Britain simply invented better machines. That is part of it. It is not most of it.
Follow the actual chain, because every link is documented and the shape of it is the argument.
The raw cotton was grown in Egypt and the American South, on plantations worked by enslaved Africans, using agricultural technique that came in part from West African farming traditions the enslaved carried with them. It was shipped to England and processed in mills powered by steam, worked by people including children on twelve to sixteen hour days. The finished cloth was sold back into colonial markets, India among them, where tariff policy and administrative decisions had already made the indigenous industry unviable.