But that has the chronology wrong ... Western Europe was still a semi-peripheral region in the early 1800's, the catching up to and then passing East Asia did not occur until the middle of the 1800's.

Talking about actions of the East India Company in the late 1700's / early 1800's based upon the productivity advantage that English manufacture had developed by the 1850's is just a lazy reading of history, akin to the Eurocentric histories popular in the late 1800's which made the recent emergence of Europe as the core economy of Eurasia into an inevitable thing. Often including paeans to a Free Trade policy that would never have been of any use without the foundation of industrial development laid under the preceding protectionist policies.

The growth of English textiles in the Napoleonic Wars alongside growth in imports from India, and then the tariff protections once wartime demand began to ebb to protect the newly expanded domestic industry was only effective as infant industry industrial development because of the following increases in productivity. In 1813, most of it hadn't happened yet.

Much of this is obscured by the later fight to repeal protectionist policies once they had done their job and the industries that they had protected no longer required that protection.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.