Cotton and Cotton Textiles

Giorgio Riello (University of Warwick)

Introduction

Raw cotton, spun yarn and cotton textiles are among the most traded and treasured commodities worldwide. Cotton is the material of our clothing and furnishing and – notwithstanding the success of synthetic fibres in the twentieth century – is still the most common fabric for everyday use. This was not the case just a few centuries ago. When European traders reached India in the early sixteenth century, they were astonished by the variety and quality of cotton textiles for sale. India was the major world producer of cotton and cotton textiles, though other areas of Asia were developing their own cultivation and cotton manufactures. Over the following centuries three major global changes affected this commodity. First, its consumption became truly global when Asian cottons started to be consumed not just in Europe but also in many parts of Africa and the Americas. Second, new areas of the globe started to be cultivated with raw cotton, in particular the Americas where plantations were cultivated by slaves bought in West Africa. And finally, Europe emerged as a new area of production of cotton cloth to rival and eventually replace India. Mechanised production led to an ‘industrial revolution’ that changed the economic trajectory of the West and of the ‘rest’ of the world.

Markets for textiles in the Indian Ocean

John Huyghen van Linschoten in his Voyage to the East Indies (1598) provides us with a view of cotton production in India at the end of the sixteenth century. He noticed how “there is excellent faire linnen of Cotton made in Negapatan, Saint Thomas, and Masulepatan, of all colours, and woven with divers sorts of loome workes and figures, verie fine and cunningly wrought, which is much worne in India, and better esteemed then silke, for that is higher prised than silke, because of the finenes and cunning workmanship”.[1] Indian cotton textiles were the centre of the manufacturing life of the Subcontinent. Three areas in particular produced commodities to be sold across the entire Asian continent and beyond: Gujarat in north-west India, the Coromandel and Malabar coasts in South India and later Bengal in the West of the Subcontinent.