Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Calico Acts were laws passed by the Parliament of England and the Parliament of Great Britain in 1700 and 1721. The 1700 act banned most imports of cotton textiles, while the 1721 act went further and prohibited the sale of most cotton textiles, whether imported or domestically made, exempting only thread fustian and raw cotton.
Parliament passed the Calico Acts as a form of economic protectionism in response to cheap Indian cotton textiles, particularly from Bengal, which dominated world cotton textile markets at the time. Domestic weavers, spinners, dyers, shepherds, and farmers petitioned Parliament, and the East India Company's offices were stormed by mobs over the issue.
The 1700 act specified penalties for wearing or selling banned goods but included no punishment for selling cotton cloth already within the country. As a result, smuggling of the popular material became commonplace, and the first act did not achieve its intended effect.
The 1721 Calico Act exempted raw cotton from its prohibitions, allowing merchants to import raw fibre legally. This exemption, which began with around two thousand bales of raw cotton imported annually, drove the development of mechanised spinning and weaving technologies and fuelled the growth of cotton mills. By the 1770s annual imports had reached seven thousand bales, and after repeal in 1774, demand doubled repeatedly every decade until the 1840s.
The Calico Acts were repealed in 1774. Repeal triggered a wave of investment in mill-based cotton spinning and production, and demand for raw cotton roughly doubled within a couple of years.
India, and Bengal in particular, dominated world cotton textile markets when the Calico Acts were passed. By the 19th century, Britain had surpassed India as the world's leading textile manufacturer. According to the Indian historian Prasannan Parthasarathi, mechanisation allowed British producers to out-produce not just the quantity but the quality of Indian textiles.