Cotton: the Fabric that made the Modern World

"The cotton industry was one of the key drivers and the most traditional explanation used for the industrial transformation of Europe. Then, later, it was taken up in explaining industrial revolutions in other parts of the world. So many of the approaches that we had to the cotton industry had been Europe-centered, particularly British-centered, and even Lancashire-centered. This book set the whole framework of the development of the cotton industry in its wide global context. It showed that the really important framework was not just technologies and the development of access to cotton resources, but the markets for Indian cottons. It was Indian cottons—their quality, the way that they had been dyed with fixed dyes and the way that they could be printed in vibrant and colourful patterns—that were a huge attraction to Europeans, to people in Southeast Asia and the Americas and markets in many parts of the world. There was this big trade in these cotton goods from India from very early on, the 14th and 15th centuries, and a smaller trade centuries before this. These cottons from Gujarat travelled up through the Middle East and East Africa­—there were big markets in East Africa as well. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Indian merchants, with their versatile sailing ships, the dhows, sailed right round India down into Southeast Asia, trading their cottons into Southeast Asia for spices, the cottons then being traded with Chinese merchants. So this was a big Asian and African product before it was a European industrial commodity. It was also a high-quality product. Printing and the fine quality of the cottons were very, very important to its story. Very few, before Riello wrote this book, claimed anything other than that Britain could produce this cotton cheaper because it developed machines to do so. The traditional view posed that the low cost of cotton goods drove consumers to replace their linens, silks and woollens. But this book offers very much a consumer-led explanation, an explanation based on cotton’s quality, fashion and design. It transformed the whole way that we have looked at why the cotton industry took off as and when it did. Yes, there was a huge demand for cotton goods. There were blockages in the market from India, especially after the middle of the 18th century. There were access problems as demand rose rapidly. What happened in Britain, first of all, was that textile manufacturers produced a combination of linen and cotton, called fustian. It was a cheaper fabric. It was dyed and printed, but the quality difference was huge. So there was a big drive on to improve the technologies in order to use more cotton and less linen. This required access to high-quality cotton, because those early machines—the jenny, the water frame, the mule—all worked best with high-quality cottons. In their early phases, those high-quality cottons were brought from Brazil and the Caribbean using slave labour. Slavery is fundamental to that early transition of the British and European cotton industries. Riello demonstrates this and how British markets developed in competition with producers in India. There was a drive to imitate those Indian textiles and to produce these in European colourways and designs. The British didn’t produce something better, but they did produce a version that was attractive to wide markets. They had real problems with the African market. The African markets were highly specialized and demanded high luxury cotton textiles; they sought out Indian textiles. It took a long time for the British to break into those markets, but they needed these markets because they traded textiles for enslaved people."