How India Clothed The World

Cloth has always been the most global of all traded commodities. It is an illuminating example of the circulation of goods, skills, knowledge and capital across wide geographic spaces. South Asia has been central to the making of these global exchanges over time. This volume presents innovative research that explores the dynamic ways in which diverse textile production and trade regions generated the first globalization . A series of experts connect this global commodity with the dramatic political and economic transformations that characterised the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Collectively, the essays transform our understanding of the contribution of South Asian cloth to the making of the modern world economy.

Today's world textile and garment trade is valued at a staggering $425 billion. We are told that under the pressure of increasing globalisation, it is India and China that are the new world manufacturing powerhouses. However, this is not a new phenomenon: until the industrial revolution, Asia manufactured great quantities of colourful printed cottons that were sold to places as far afield as Japan, West Africa and Europe. Cotton explores this earlier globalised economy and its transformation after 1750 as cotton led the way in the industrialisation of Europe. By the early nineteenth century, India, China and the Ottoman Empire switched from world producers to buyers of European cotton textiles, a position that they retained for over two hundred years. This is a fascinating and insightful story which ranges from Asian and European technologies and African slavery to cotton plantations in the Americas and consumer desires across the globe.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition originally scheduled to be held at the Royal Ontario Museum from April 4, 2020 to September 27, 2020.

This book examines the textile and clothing Industry of India and its trade scenario from a global perspective. New developments in international policies related to trade and investment and falling barriers to trade worldwide as well as within individual regional communities have transformed the structure of production and global competition in the textile and apparel industries across the world. Furthermore, with the incorporation of textile trade in the GATT framework following the removal of quantitative restrictions, and the subsequent liberalization of investment opportunities, the Indian market is now home to several international brands, which has led to the present upsurge of FDI in this very important sector of the Indian economy. The book closely examines the nature and impact of such external changes on the industry’s structure and labour-related issues. The key feature of this book is that it presents a snapshot of all the domestic and international policies related to this sector, from the earliest relevant period to the present, and analyses the topical issues in significant detail. The book also offers some empirical analyses to show the impact of external changes on the concentration of firms in this industry and the regional inequalities that have emerged from regional variations in firms’ employment, labour-income and profit levels. Further, it addresses another striking feature, namely the role of preferential trading blocs or Regional Trading Arrangements (RTA) in creating trade-diverting effects related to this sector apart from the implications of foreign collaborations and cross-border mergers and acquisitions. Many economists fear that the benefits of these RTAs for the partner countries are much greater than those for India, with net gains of incremental exports from India being small or even negative. This book discusses these critical issues in the context of India’s textile and apparel trade.

In Clothing Gandhi's Nation, Lisa Trivedi explores the making of one of modern India's most enduring political symbols, khadi: a homespun, home-woven cloth. The image of Mohandas K. Gandhi clothed simply in a loincloth and plying a spinning wheel is familiar around the world, as is the sight of Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and other political leaders dressed in "Gandhi caps" and khadi shirts. Less widely understood is how these images associate the wearers with the swadeshi movement -- which advocated the exclusive consumption of indigenous goods to establish India's autonomy from Great Britain -- or how khadi was used to create a visual expression of national identity after Independence. Trivedi brings together social history and the study of visual culture to account for khadi as both symbol and commodity. Written in a clear narrative style, the book provides a cultural history of important and distinctive aspects of modern Indian history.

This book shows how India has been the centre for the global textile trade from the middle ages to today.

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 rivalry for trade in tea and textiles between the English and Dutch East India companies is very much a global history. This trade is strongly connected to emblematic events such as the opening of Western trade with China, the Boston Tea Party, the establishment of British Empire in Bengal and the Industrial Revolution.