Indian Cotton Textiles In West Africa

This book focuses on the significant role of West African consumers in the development of the global economy. It explores their demand for Indian cotton textiles and how their consumption shaped patterns of global trade, influencing economies and businesses from Western Europe to South Asia. In turn, the book examines how cotton textile production in southern India responded to this demand. Through this perspective of a south-south economic history, the study foregrounds African agency and considers the lasting impact on production and exports in South Asia. It also considers how European commercial and imperial expansion provided a complex web of networks, linking West African consumers and Indian weavers. Crucially, it demonstrates the emergence of the modern global economy.

In this holistic approach to the study of textiles and their makers, Colleen Kriger charts the role cotton has played in commercial, community, and labor settings in West Africa. By paying close attention to the details of how people made, exchanged, and wore cotton cloth from before industrialization in Europe to the twentieth century, she is able to demonstrate some of the cultural effects of Africa's long involvement in trading contacts with Muslim societies and with Europe. Cloth in West African History thus offers a fresh perspective on the history of the region and on the local, regional, and global processes that shaped it. A variety of readers will find its account and insights into the African past and culture valuable, and will appreciate the connections made between the local concerns of small-scale weavers in African villages, the emergence of an indigenous textile industry, and its integration into international networks.

This collection of essays examines the history of cotton textiles at a global level over the period 1200-1850. It provides new answers to two questions: what is it about cotton that made it the paradigmatic first global commodity? And second, why did cotton industries in different parts of the world follow different paths of development?

Textiles and clothing are interwoven with Islamic culture. In Islamicate Textiles, readers are taken on a journey from Central Asia to Tanzania to uncover the central roles that textiles play within Muslim-majority communities. This thematically arranged book sheds light on the traditions, rituals and religious practices of these regions, and the ways in which each one incorporates materials and clothing. Drawing on examples including Iranian lion carpets and Arabic keffiyeh, Faegheh Shirazi frames these textiles and totemic items as important cultural signifiers that, together, form a dynamic and fascinating material culture. Like a developing language, this culture expands, bends and develops to suit the needs of new generations and groups across the world. The political significance of Islamicate textiles is also explored: Faegheh Shirazi's writing reveals the fraught relationship between the East – with its sought-after materials and much-valued textiles – and the European countries that purchased and repurposed these goods, and lays bare the historical and contemporary connections between textiles, colonialism, immigration and economics. Dr Shirazi also discusses gender and how textiles and clothing are intimately linked with sexuality and gender identity.

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.

Drawing on new research on textile trade and production in the regions that depended on the Indian Ocean, the book contributes to a new understanding of the role that Indian cloth played in the making of the modern world economy.

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.

This volume undertakes the important task of envisioning a regional history of Asia based on its unique internal characteristics, going beyond the usual West/non-West dichotomy. The “regional trade zone of modern Asia” was debated in the 1980s. Since then, Japanese historians of the socioeconomic history of Asia have explored how the traditional trade relations that had developed over the centuries in Asia responded to the so-called Western impacts in the mid-nineteenth century, including the opening of ports and tariff reduction under free trade regimes and the advance in transportation technology. Against this academic background, the four chapters in this volume examine how overseas Chinese, some of the key actors in regional and local trade, dealt with their Western counterparts, and how Asian commodities penetrated other parts of the world through the newly created web of global commerce. The book reviews discuss theoretical issues to explore various connections among and comparisons of the economies in the region. This volume provides readers with critical insights into the Asian region in the past and present by investigating the long-term trajectory of its linkages to the global economy.