From the late 1920s onwards, the problems of the Bombay textile industry focussed in public discourse upon its allegedly inefficient and intractable labour force. For what came to be perceived as its ‘labour problem’, the colonial state prescribed rationalization. This official panacea for the industry's problems was conceived in a highly charged political context. In the 1920s, as chapter 6 has shown, the Bombay industry was forced to adapt to the imperatives of the domestic market, in which demand was stagnant and contracting, and which was in addition saturated with the cheap coarse goods produced by the expanding up-country mills. In the finer varieties, however, the Ahmedabad mills and the imports of Lancashire and, especially, Japan, had established a powerful, indeed daunting presence. Moreover, the Bombay mills were trying to adjust to an internal market which was reported to be the most open in the world. The Bombay millowners urgently sought tariff protection. But for the colonial state, keeping the Indian market open for British manufactures was one of its most important imperial commitments. Rationalization thus became the official alternative to tariffs and indeed, the progress made by the millowners to implement the former became, at least rhetorically, the yardstick by which the colonial state measured how much they deserved protection.