Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean

An Ocean of Cloth

Pedro Machado, Sarah Fee, Gwyn Campbell, Pedro Machado, Sarah Fee, Gwyn Campbell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319582658
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

This collection examines cloth as a material and consumer object from early periods to the twenty-first century, across multiple oceanic sites—from Zanzibar, Muscat and Kampala to Ajanta, Srivijaya and Osaka. It moves beyond usual focuses on a single fibre (such as cotton) or place (such as India) to provide a fresh, expansive perspective of the ocean as an "interaction-based arena, " with an internal dynamism and historical coherence forged by material exchange and human relationships. Contributors map shifting social, cultural and commercial circuits to chart the many histories of cloth across the region. They also trace these histories up to the present with discussions of contemporary trade in Dubai, Zanzibar, and Eritrea. Richly illustrated, this collection brings together new and diverse strands in the long story of textiles in the Indian Ocean, past and present.

© The Author(s) 2018

P. Machado et al. (eds.)Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian OceanPalgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58265-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Ocean’s Many Cloth Pathways

Pedro Machado¹ and Sarah Fee²

(1)

Department of History, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

(2)

Department of World Cultures, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, ON, Canada

End Abstract

Nearly thirty years ago, a collection of essays by eminent scholars reminded readers what had nearly been forgotten after centuries of industrialization: that arguably, more than any other type of material object, cloth has been central to the human experience.¹ From pieces of cotton sheeting dyed with indigo to fabric produced from raffia and finely woven silk textiles, cloths have served myriad commercial, symbolic, representational and cultural purposes throughout all regions of the world. Textiles have been central to the production and reproduction of a wide range of social, cultural and political practices. These observations hold true not only for individual communities or societies, but also on translocal and transregional scales, reaching over great distances and waterways, across the basins of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Merchants, producers, settlers, state officials, rulers and consumers have utilized cloth as currency to facilitate commercial exchange , created new or reinforced pre-existing adornment practices, supported patronage structures through their diffusion, elaborated ritualistic practices, and forged identities by displaying and wearing cloth in distinctive styles and fashions. Cloth was thus critical in enabling and animating the diverse commercial and cultural terrains of these oceans and their surrounding lands, being traded and consumed not only in local contexts, but also traversing great distances to reach markets throughout Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. People wore, displayed, collected and used cloth in bodily practices to reflect status and wealth, and therefore to claim a place in the material worlds in which they found themselves.

Of the world’s great ocean basins, it was in areas bordering the Indian Ocean that cloth in the broadest variety and types of finish was most widely produced, exchanged and consumed over the greatest length of time. This vast oceanic space connects over 100,000 km of coastline running the length of eastern Africa, the underside of the Arabian peninsula, tracing the shores of Pakistan, India and Southeast Asia and its thousands of offshore islands, further drawing in the waters of the Red Sea, the Gulf and the China Sea (Map 1.1). From early times, monsoon winds, religion, paper technologies, trade and conflicts encouraged the movements of people, products, and ideas around these waters, deep into the hinterlands of their shores and beyond. Our focus on the Indian Ocean in this book reflects a commitment to furthering the challenge (already well under way) to conventional geographies mapped around either national frameworks or Area Studies divisions. The Indian Ocean has increasingly drawn scholars into excavations of its polyvalent strands of interconnectivity produced historically by the wide-ranging and temporally deep movements of goods, people, ideas and texts. They have been compelled by the possibilities of this “complicating” sea to destabilize spatial scales, undermine “existing templates of transnational history” and thereby identify alternative interpretations of globalization as a multicentric and multilayered process whose valences were not determined by a Euro-American Atlantic centre.² Much of this work has tended to focus, however, on the western reaches of the Indian Ocean, and the circulations and mobilities of intertwined social geographies linking eastern Africa, the Red Sea, the Arabian Peninsula, the Gulf and India, inadvertently eliding the broader currents of connection that stretched across this oceanic space. For instance, these currents brought Kampala in Uganda into relation with Osaka in Japan through the production , distribution and consumption of kanga cloths, as discussed in Chap. 5 in this volume by Hideaki Suzuki. Broadening our analytical lenses beyond any sub-oceanic region avoids the danger of geographic segmentation and allows for a more capacious perspective that captures otherwise occluded intra-oceanic histories.

Textile Trades , Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean thus endorses an expansive view of the ocean as an ‘interaction-based arena’ that, while connected to other oceans and seas, had an internal dynamism and historical coherence created by widespread human relationships that were themselves undergirded in significant ways by the kinds of material exchanges and histories represented by the trades and consumption of textiles discussed in this book.³ In taking such a perspective, we endorse the analytical possibilities and empirical pathways opened up by the Indian Ocean and its social and cultural geographies, from destabilizing nation-based framings of the past to unsettling continental or conventional regional boundaries. Careful to avoid reifying ocean space, the volume traces the connections created along shifting circuits of social, cultural and commercial engagement to chart cloth’s many pasts among groups scattered along the coasts and interiors of an array of translocal⁴ nodes within the Indian Ocean.⁵ These were enabled by dense webs of relationships and textiles that moved around the ocean along maritime routes whose contours expanded or contracted according to opportunities afforded by local and, in later periods especially, imperial shipping; the two often co-existed and complemented one another.⁶

The Indian Ocean’s deserved status as the historic epicentre of textile innovation and trade is owed in large part to the area which gave the ocean its name. India—and South Asia, more broadly—occupied a privileged place in this ocean’s crosscurrents as its artisans produced and supplied textiles of varying qualities and sizes to markets that stretched from insular and island Southeast Asia to the Gulf, Red Sea and the eastern African coast from the Horn of Africa down to the Mozambique Channel, Madagascar and adjacent islands. Indeed, its productive capacities and the widespread involvement and circulation of the subcontinent’s maritime merchant networks resulted in Indian textiles reaching markets well beyond the Ocean, including northwestern Europe and West Africa, the eastern Mediterranean and the Americas. Among the greatest strengths of the Indian textile industry was its specialization in serving distinct and well-structured networks of long-distance trade that connected it to multiple regions, its adaptability, the qualities of the cloth —such as design and the durability of dyes, and its capacity for product differentiation. Silk and, especially, cotton cloths were produced in great quantities in distinctive manufacturing areas, with the Coromandel Coast and Gujarat accounting for the bulk of exports before the sixteenth century, while Bengal, the Punjab and Sind emerged in later centuries as prominent centres with equally strong connections to global trade networks. With the majority of cotton goods in global trade originating in the Indian subcontinent before the eighteenth century, India thus emerged both as a key nodal point in the textile histories of the ocean and as an important centre in the early modern global economic and material worlds—its cloth serving in one recent assessment as “one of the agents lubricating the wheels of commerce”—that were undergirded by diverse consumer cultures and dense commercial relationships.⁷

India’s long histories of textile production —especially cotton textile production—have garnered unsurprisingly much attention among scholars, from early Indian economic nationalist historians, who argued that the exigencies of British rule had resulted in the de-industrialization of the subcontinent’s production, to the work of scholars such as K.N. Chaudhuri, whose dense econometric analysis and description of the East India Company’s extensive trade in cotton piece goods revealed the extent of their place in its commercial economy both within and beyond the Indian Ocean. As widely traded commodities across a variety of cultural, social and political arenas, their utility enhanced by their function also as currencies of exchange and stores of value in merchant units of account, Indian cottons were arguably the most important material artefact in the economic life of Indian Ocean societies.

More recently, historians have reinvigorated the history of industrialization, long understood to be connected to the mechanization of cotton textile production , by examining the role of consumer demand and notions of fashionability and taste that were shaped by the importation of high volumes of Indian cottons into Europe over the late seventeenth century and, especially, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Questions of innovation , technology and knowledge transfer, and competition, among others, have been explored anew as scholarship has dramatically reshaped our understandings of the process and praxis of European industrialization. Influenced to no small degree by the global historical ‘turn’ of the past decade and a half that has urged the adoption of translocal and relational approaches to pasts once seen to be encompassed by national or regional ‘containers’, this scholarship has also reappraised the causes and paths of divergent economic development in Eurasia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather than being attributable to a kind of European exceptionalism defined by innate cultural variables and rationalized institutional structures, ‘divergence’ was caused by a number of historical conjunctures, reciprocities and contingencies that were themselves the products of a long process involving a variety of interactions and encounters among and between different areas of the world. The European ‘take-off’ in the production and trade of cotton textiles, as argued recently by Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, is thus regarded increasingly as both the “result of a long, arduous and not always successful deployment of factors of production’ and the ‘putting in place of complex mechanisms of knowledge transfer, assessment of quality, fashionability , etc.”⁸ Indian cotton textiles were critical to this process and helped shape the tastes and sensibilities of a growing number of consumers whose identities were informed in new ways by adornment practices expressed through publicly visible clothing choices and reinforced through the rearrangements of domestic furnishings and sartorial imaginaries.⁹

Equally, the importance of cotton textiles —and, especially, cotton more broadly—to our understandings of the emergence of the modern world has in the past few years produced major works that have begun even to question conventional histories of capitalism. Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton , for instance, makes a compelling case for the centrality of cotton—especially American cotton—to our understandings of the origins of capitalism and, hence, to the unfolding of a global economy in which socio-economic inequalities grew amidst struggles over labour, capital and land, and in which “war capitalism” spawned the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: The Ocean’s Many Cloth Pathways
• Part I. Regions of Production
• Part II. Trade, Exchange and Networks of Distribution
• Part III. Cultures of Consumption
• Back Matter