Synopsis This study is essentially an attempt to examine, at the level of the locality, the 'total history' of the weavers in the Northern Coromandel region during a period when India was being incorporated into the modern world economic system. The concept of totality is not invoked here in the Rankean sense of collecting all the ‘facts’, but rather in the Annaliste sense of recognizing the necessity of adopting a holistic perspective, and of perceiving the integral nature of the several interesting spheres in which the weavers functioned, namely the cultural, the economic, the political, and the social.