The British Cotton Trade, 1660-1815 Vol 1

Beverly Lemire

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138757936
• eBook ISBN: 9781000559507
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

First published in 2010. Cotton was the first industrialized global trade. This four-volume reset edition charts the rise of British trade in cotton from the days of small-scale trading between the Middle East and India to the domination of British-led industrialized manufacture. Part contains 'Early Years of Trade and British Response to Indian Cottons to the late 1600s'.

INTRODUCTION

The Early Cotton Trade with India and its Impact

India is the starting point, in terms of the origins of the trade, the markets served and the continuing importance of Indian technologies throughout the period covered by these volumes. Thus, it is particularly appropriate to begin this study by looking at India’s role in long-distance trade before 1500. Indeed, linkages among societies over the period ad c. 500-1500 created networks of overlapping commerce of immense significance.¹ Employing combinations of archaeological and textual evidence, a growing cohort of academics has pointed to the important scale of trade over this era and the powerful forces exerted through these recurring contacts. As Jerry H. Bentley observes: ‘In the large, settled agricultural societies of China, India, southwest Asia, and the eastern Mediterranean region, long-distance trade was voluminous enough to help shape the organization of industrial production’.² Thus, production at a scale to sustain vast and diffuse markets pre-dated the industrial age. China’s region of Jingdezhen thrived as the international supplier of porcelain, at the same time as other manufacturing specializations in textiles, such as silks and cottons, developed in Asia. On the Indian subcontinent cotton production flourished in the Punjab, Gujarat, Bengal and the Coromandel Coast, and these multiple centres served both domestic and foreign markets. This was more than simply the small-scale circulation of luxuries for elite buyers in distant capitals. Merchants, artisans, seafarers and caravan leaders (and the religious and other travellers who accompanied them) forged ties that have left material and written records of these long-distance, long-term commercial links.³ Markets for Indian textile extended from the Indonesian islands and the lands abutting the China Sea to the east, across the Indian Ocean to East Africa, along land routes through Central Asia and Persia and through the Red Sea and Persian Gulf to the eastern Mediterranean.

Bentley posits an ‘impressive degree of interconnection’ in the area ‘from East Asia to the eastern Mediterranean’ with volumes of trade that were significant for their time and place, ‘much larger than modernocentric economic historians have generally recognized’,⁴ These mercantile patterns shaped the formation of states and the rise of cities, along with the spread of food crops like lemons and bananas and industrial crops such as cotton and indigo. With the flow of goods came the movement of peoples and in the surviving accounts of the fourteenth-century traveller Ibn Battuta (1304-68/9), theologian and scholar, these trade routes and the commercial environment come more clearly into focus. The fourteenth century was a particularly dynamic era.⁵ And while relatively few individuals from the most distant of these zones encountered residents in the others, it was certainly possible for the curious and the intrepid to venture along these maritime or land-based routes recording the wonders and everyday facets of life they encountered.

Ibn Battuta was born in Tangiers in 1304 and left as a young man to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. This began thirty years of travels during which his reputation as a sage and learned man grew. Hearing of the Sultan of Delhi, Battuta determined to journey to India to serve him and, following a circuitous path, eventually made his way to the Sultans court. But this was not a permanent stop. So extensive were Battutas travels and so numerous his adventures that a bare summary does not do him justice. However, his routine observations about the materials of life are of particular interest. Battuta travelled with caravans and voyaged on trading vessels and, while not a merchant, he recognized and recorded details with commercial connotations. Even before he arrived in India he had evidence of the long-distance trade in cottons. Coming from Medina, the group of pilgrims he was with were met by Bedouins: ‘with sheep, melted butter, and milk, which they sell to the pilgrims for pieces of coarse cotton cloth. That is the only thing they will take in exchange.’⁶ Once resident in the Sultans court some time later Battuta described the form of bedding, noteworthy no doubt because of its novelty, attention to cleanliness and the materials employed in construction:

The beds in India are light, and can be carried by a single man; every person when travelling has to transport his own bed, which his slave boy carries on his head. It consists of four conical legs with four crosspieces of wood on which braids of silk or cotton are woven. When one lies down on it, there is no need for anything to make it pliable, for it is pliable of itself. Along with the bed they brought two mattresses and pillows and a coverlet, all made of silk. Their custom is to put linen or cotton slips on the mattresses and coverlets, so that when they become dirty they wash the slips, while the bedding inside is kept clean.⁷

Battuta’s encounters with cotton continued throughout his journey. His blue cotton tunic, worn ‘during my retreat’ as a mendicant, assumed symbolic importance and remained a poignant reminder of his religious practice whenever he saw it. A cotton field became a haven for a time, a place to hide when being pursued by bandits. Cotton figured as an ever-present facet of Indian life wherever he went. Battuta made his way to Bengal on his journey, commenting on the things he saw, like the vastness of the landscape, abounding in rice, and nowhere in the world have I seen any land where prices are lower than there... I saw too a piece of fine cotton cloth, of excellent quality, thirty cubits long, sold for two dinars’.⁸

Ibn Battuta journeyed during a time of thriving trade, across the breadth of the Eurasian continent, following routes traversed by merchants and peddlers. One of the important western terminals of this trade was Cairo. Wealthy and more modest dealers made this city their base or travelled through this great entrepot. Surviving documentary sources are scarce, yet those that remain paint a picture that confirms the intense commercial interest in the Indian Ocean trade among Cairo’s commercial residents, including among the Jewish merchants in that city.⁹ Equally intriguing is the thousands of small scraps of Indian cottons at Fustat, the site of Old Cairo, excavated at the turn of the twentieth century. These textile fragments provide physical evidence of the dynamism of these commercial links over many centuries.

Ruth Barnes, curator at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, undertook a detailed assessment of the Newberry Collection, comprised of more than 1,200 pieces of excavated printed cotton fragments from Fustat held in the museum.¹⁰ A number of these items were carbon dated and the results signal the flow of trade textiles from the eleventh to the fifteenth century. Further research in the Ashmolean collection uncovered additional intriguing evidence giving a fuller measure of this Eurasian trade, with a connection made between a full piece of Indian printed cotton from Indonesia and one of the Newberry Collection fragments. Interestingly, both pieces of cotton display almost identical designs; carbon dating also placed both fabrics in the fifteenth century. Barnes concludes that: ‘the considerable number of Indian cotton fragments that have survived in Egypt from the medieval Islamic time onwards give us only a relatively small and late glimpse of a much larger, continuous trade network of considerable time depth’.¹¹ These textile fragments reflect a trade in utilitarian and practical fabrics, along with some better quality cloth; sometimes these were finely printed but some also show basic patterning on coarse cotton, designed for a variety of buyers. Among the many strengths of the Indian trade was the capacity of producers to serve the full range of the market, with fabrics plain and patterned, coarse and fine, to suit the tastes of their multicultural customers.

Over the medieval period Venetian and Genoese merchants looked longingly at the cargoes of Indian cottons circulating in the eastern Mediterranean and manoeuvred to capture a share of this trade. Both the era of the Crusades and the expansion of Italian merchants into the eastern Mediterranean brought increased contact with cotton textiles - cotton itself had spread from India by this time and was an established crop and regional industry in Syria, Asia Minor and Egypt, all based on the Indian exemplar. Ultimately these fabrics found their way to Italy, where the first European attempts at cotton manufacture took place. Fustian (a mixed cotton/linen fabric) and various plain cotton cloths became a successful part of the textiles sector in northern Italy. Other manufacturing efforts took root in Southern France and Catalonia in Spain. But it was in northern Italy that the greatest success was achieved.¹² These fabrics became the model for new-style lighter textiles, the influence of which slowly spread north through Europe, destabilizing tastes and patterns of consumption in the succeeding centuries.

The riches of the Indies grew in the imagination of all who learned of the eastern regions. Italian merchants and navigators, as well as Jewish and Islamic dealers resident in North Africa and (until the late 1400s) the Iberian Peninsula were well aware of the commercial networks channelling Asian wares into the Mediterranean world. Some had family or business involvement in this commerce. There was a growing interest in finding ways to reach further along these commercial routes and capture more of the wealth. In the fifteenth century Prince Henry of Portugal (1394-1460) planned the conquest of a key Moroccan port and thereafter encouraged voyages down the coast of West Africa, in regions unknown to Europeans. African trade routes which intersected with those based on the Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan caravans likewise carried gold, slaves and goods north to the Mediterranean Sea. These riches were a further incentive to extensive voyages along the African coast and by the 1440s brought the Portuguese south of the Muslim-dominated trade networks, opening ever-wider opportunities before them. Gold and slaves flowed into Portugal and the Portuguese appetite was whetted for ever-longer voyages and possibly greater profits. By the 1490s it was clear that the African continent could be circumnavigated. In 1497 Vasco da Gama left Lisbon, passing into the southern Indian Ocean by the end of that year and in 1498 the Portuguese landed in Calicut, a major port on the south-west coast of the subcontinent. Da Gama’s return to Portugal in September 1499 opened a new chapter in the political and commercial life of the world.

The cotton trade is enmeshed in such momentous incidents. As John Richards notes: ‘human societies shared in and were affected by several worldwide processes of change unprecedented in their scope and intensity’.¹³ Direct seaborne contact between Western Europe and Asia was one of the ‘unprecedented’ events. However...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents Page
• Acknowledgements Page
• General Introduction Page
• Glossary Page
• Introduction to Part I Page
• Changing Patterns of Consumption and the Early Debates in Britain
• Editorial Notes