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This document explores the differing paths of cotton textile manufacturing in Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, highlighting how competition with Indian textiles influenced these regions. While Britain innovated and adapted to the challenge, the Ottoman Empire maintained a focus on consumption rather than production, leading to a reliance on Indian imports. The chapter also discusses the impact of these dynamics on local economies, particularly in Egypt, where rising cotton prices contrasted with stable cloth prices due to abundant Indian imports.

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5

| State and market: Britain, France

and the Ottoman Empire

Introduction
While Indian competition propelled British innovation in textiles in the
eighteenth century, Britain was not the only nation in Europe – nor was
Europe the only region in the world – to face the competitive challenge
of India. And much as in Europe, cloth producers around the globe
began to imitate Indian-made goods. This dynamic of competition and
imitation reached great heights in several centers in the Ottoman
Empire, where vast quantities of Indian cloth were consumed in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Ottoman centers, unlike
Lancashire, failed to forge a revolutionary response to the Indian chal-
lenge, however. And Ottoman textile manufacturers, in contrast to
those in Britain, did not reverse the longstanding east–west flow of
cottons and establish a new global manufacturing order. The purpose
of this chapter is to answer the question why Britain followed a differ-
ent path in cotton textiles from the Ottoman Empire as well as its major
competitor in Europe, the kingdom of France.
The divergent paths of Britain and Ottoman provinces cannot be
attributed to technological stagnation in the Ottoman Empire.
In military matters, Ottoman authorities kept up with technical
improvements taking place in Europe and until the 1770s developed
or imported from Europe cutting-edge knowledge and technologies
for the production of gunpowder, the casting of cannon and the
manufacture of small guns.1 When it came to cotton textiles, how-
ever, the economic philosophy of the Ottoman state was different
from that of states in Western Europe in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. While European state officials focused on pro-
duction and protection for local enterprises and workers, Ottoman
officialdom was concerned with consumption and the adequacy
of supplies of goods at the right price without regard to their
place of origin. Therefore, Ottoman and European attitudes towards

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116 The divergence of Britain

the import of Indian cottons diverged, which shaped the potentials

and possibilities for cotton manufacturing in these two regions.
While state thinking on the economy differed between Western
Europe and the Ottoman Empire, in Europe itself mercantilist think-
ing was widespread, but the development of cotton manufacturing
was uneven. French cotton manufacturing, for instance, lagged behind
the British, although both polities followed mercantilist principles.
The divergence between Britain and France was in part due to differ-
ent applications of mercantilist ideas, which yielded very different
policies on the ground. At the same time, Britain and France did not
relate to the Atlantic economy in the same way, especially to the trade
in slaves from West Africa. These varied orientations to the Atlantic
Ocean, from which the Ottoman territories were completely cut off,
meant that different forms of consumer demand shaped the cotton
industries of Britain and France. Atlantic connections were favorable
to the development of lighter cotton cloths of the sort made in
India and these impulses from the sea were more powerful in
Britain than in France. The paths of economic development in the
eighteenth century were shaped not by the state or the market alone,
but rather by a complex interaction between state policies and market
opportunities.

Indian cottons in the Ottoman Empire

From its position straddling the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean,
Black and Red Seas the Ottoman Empire was open to a vast array
of influences emanating from the Indian subcontinent, the Arabian
peninsula, Iran, Central Asia, East and North Africa, Russia and
Southern, Central and Western Europe. Despite the variety of connec-
tions, the history of trade in the Ottoman Empire has focused on
exchange with Europe.2 The abundance of European sources accounts
in part for this historical bias. The customs accounts, merchant
records and other materials in the archives of Marseilles and London
provide a resource that no other trading partner of the empire can
match. More important than even source materials, however, is the
deeply embedded assumption that Europe was the center of economic
activity and, as such, the preeminent shaper of the global economy in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Because of this European
bias, historians of the Ottoman Empire have turned from the East and

directed their gaze westward. While several generations of historians

have explored the impact of the West on the Ottoman economy and
searched for the origins of western economic dominance in the east-
ern Mediterranean, very few have investigated the impact of the
Indian Ocean trading system on Ottoman economic life. The author
has not been able to find any books or monographs on the subject,
while there have been dozens, if not hundreds, on Europe’s impact on
the Ottoman Empire.3 A notable exception is found in monetary
history where the Indian connection is difficult to avoid. The outflow
of precious metals to the Indian subcontinent was an inescapable
feature of Ottoman economic life in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries and is one sign that the Indian Ocean trading world had a
major impact on the Ottoman economy. This monetary history sug-
gests that historians have paid a heavy price for neglecting the eastern
connections of the empire.4
Indian cottons had been exported to the Middle East via sea
and land since at least medieval times, but the explosion in global
commerce in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – fueled by
American silver – led to an enormous expansion in this trade. Cloth
was carried overland along caravan routes that continued to operate
well into the eighteenth century, bringing goods from northern,
western and southern India to Iran and Iraq. The Ottoman Empire
was also linked to the subcontinent via the sea and vast quantities of
cloth and other goods flowed into ports in the Persian Gulf and the
Red Sea from where they were transported by land and water to eager
buyers in Egypt, Syria, Anatolia and southeastern Europe. Before the
plague of 1772–3 in Iraq, according to one estimate, three-quarters of
the merchandise on the caravan trade from Baghdad to Aleppo con-
sisted of Indian textiles.5
Although the exact volume of trade from the Indian subcontinent
to West Asia and the eastern Mediterranean will never be known,
scattered estimates attest that it was sizable. In 1690, servants of the
English East India Company reported that annual exports of cloth from
western India to Iran and the Ottoman Empire were five times the size
of cloth exports to Europe.6 This was at the height of the “calico craze”
when massive quantities of Indian cloth were pouring into London,
Amsterdam, Paris and countless smaller cities and towns of Europe.
The Ottoman Empire continued to receive Indian cottons in the
eighteenth century and it appears that much more cloth was imported

into the empire from India than from Europe. From the 1730s, France
became the major source of European cloth in the Ottoman territories,
almost all of it woolens shipped from Marseilles. Reliable data on the
size of this trade is available in French customs registers and these
show that between 1750 and 1754 Marseilles exported annually 8.5
million livres of cloth to the Levant. Between 1786 and 1789, this
figure fell to 6.6 million livres per year. Some of these goods were re-
exported from the Ottoman Empire to Iran, but how much is not
known.7 As reported in Chapter 2, in 1785 a French merchant based
in Istanbul estimated that 12.6 million livres of Indian cotton cloth
were consumed every year in the Levant. In addition to these cotton
textiles, 1.6 million livres of shawls and 1 million livres of cotton yarn
were imported from India, for a total import figure of 15.2 million
livres of cloth and yarn.8 These are rough figures, but they show that
in the 1780s French cloth exports to the Levant were less than half the
value of the exports of India. Even the larger French export figures for
the middle of the eighteenth century were substantially less than the
Indian cloth exports of 1785.
According to Donald Quataert, there were “vast increases in the
import of Indian textiles” into the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth
century, which led to concerns among the political class about
the outflow of silver to India and the deleterious impact on local
manufacturing.9 In the final years of the century, Sultan Selim III,
who reigned from 1789 to 1807 and sought to reform the state and
build the economy, complained that he always wore “Istanbul-made
and Ankara-made cloth. But my statesmen wear Indian-made and
Iran-made cloth. If they would wear the cloths of our country, local
goods would be in demand.”10 From this, Quataert has concluded
that “the competitive assault [on Ottoman textile manufacturers] was
not coming from European makers, but, rather, from the East.”11
The strategies that British manufacturers used from the late eight-
eenth century to sell cotton cloth in Ottoman markets provide
further evidence that Indian cottons had a longstanding and broad
appeal. “Given the popularity of Indian cotton goods, beginning in
the second half of the eighteenth century the European cotton
exports to the Ottoman Empire consisted primarily of imitations
of Indian products. As late as the mid nineteenth century the latter
varieties constituted the bulk of European exports to the Levant,”
Halil İnalcık has reported. British manufacturers marketed their

cloth in the Ottoman Empire with Indian names, evidence of an

effort to lure customers away from the consumption of an Indian-
made good.12
The boom in exports of raw cotton from the Ottoman Empire to
Europe in the eighteenth century is another sign that Indian cloth was
consumed in growing quantities in Ottoman markets. Over the course
of the century, European demand for the fiber grew rapidly. Marseilles
imported less than 5 million pounds of cotton and yarn a year from
Ottoman territories between 1702 and 1704. By the late 1780s, this
figure had grown to more than 24 million pounds. Therefore,
the transformation of the Ottoman Empire into an exporter of raw
materials – the classic colonial pattern of trade – began long before
European goods manufactured with industrial methods invaded the
market. The export of raw cotton was made possible by the import of
low-priced cloth from the Indian subcontinent. It is likely that Indian
goods satisfied demand for cotton cloth in the Ottoman territories,
freeing up the raw material for export to overseas markets. The rise of
the cotton trade, combined with Indian imports, therefore, appears to
have had a profound impact on the eighteenth-century Ottoman
economy. The next several pages will examine in greater detail the
effects of cloth imports from India on Egypt and Anatolia, two popu-
lous and important regions of the empire.

Egypt
The rapid growth in European demand for raw cotton in the eight-
eenth century appears to have hit Egypt hard. Egypt was not a major
exporter of the fiber, but it was a major consumer, importing raw
cotton from growing areas in Syria. As Syrian cotton was diverted to
European markets, the price of cotton in Cairo skyrocketed, more
than quadrupling between 1718 and 1789. Much of this increase
came after 1740, as can be seen in Table 5.1. Cotton was one of
several fibers used in Egyptian textile manufacturing, the others
being linen, wool and silk. The shares of these different fibers in
textile output are not known, but cotton was by no means insignifi-
cant. A variety of pure cotton cloths as well as mixtures of cotton
and other fibers were mainstays of production for local markets and
for export. Consumers in France, for instance, prized the cotton
dimities of Rosetta.13

Table 5.1 Cotton prices in Cairo, 1687–1797 (paras per qantar,

in constant prices, 1687 ¼ 100)

Price Index

1687 278 100

1718 273 98
1729 426 153
1731 234 84
1732 300 108
1733 273 98
1734 266 96
1735 259 93
1736 238 86
1742 361 130
1747 558 201
1754 575 207
1782 817 294
1784 1021 367
1789 1200 432
1790 1200 432
1797 1320 475
Source: André Raymond, Artisans et commerçants au Caire au xviii siècle,
2 vols. (Damascus, 1973), vol. I, p. 65.

While there was an enormous run-up in the price of raw cotton,

cloth prices in Cairo increased much less over the century. A price
index assembled by André Raymond, and given in Table 5.2, shows
that there were short-term price fluctuations, but between 1700 and
1789 cloth prices increased by only about a third. Although Raymond’s
index is based on prices for both linens and cottons, it is very surprising
that a fourfold increase in the price of raw cotton did not lead to a
more substantial increase in the price of these textiles.14
This lack of correspondence suggests that the prices of raw cotton
and cloth were determined in separate and unconnected markets,
even though cotton was a key input into Egyptian cloth manufactur-
ing. The price of cotton was set by European demand, which was
increasing rapidly with the expansion of cotton manufacturing in
France, Switzerland and Germany. The price of cloth was set by
supplies of cotton cloth from the Indian subcontinent and these
abundant imports set a cap on prices. It is possible that French cloth

Table 5.2 An index of cotton and linen cloth prices

in Cairo, 1700–1789 (1700–1709 ¼ 100)

Years Index

1700–09 100
1710–19 134
1720–24 174
1731–39 98
1740–49 115
1750–59 122
1776–81 109
1786–89 136
Source: Raymond, Artisans et commerçants au Caire au xviii
siècle, vol. I, p. 65.

had the same effect as Indian goods (and this conclusion would be
consistent with the European focus of Ottoman historiography), but
the bulk of French exports to Egypt consisted of woolen cloth, which
was not a direct competitor with lighter cottons and linens. France
started exporting cotton cloth to Egypt only in the final quarter of the
eighteenth century.15
Indian cottons would have competed directly with the cottons and
linens of Egypt. Painted, printed and plain cotton cloth in a wide
range of qualities – from coarse to superfine – had long been imported
via the Red Sea into Egypt. André Raymond has concluded that in the
eighteenth century “the total importation of ‘Indiennes’ is unknown,
but it was certainly considerable.”16 The flood of imports from the
subcontinent appears to have squeezed textile manufacturers in
Cairo, especially in cotton, making it difficult for them to pass on
their higher costs for raw material. They were caught in a price
squeeze with rapidly rising costs for raw cotton but comparatively
stable cloth prices. Higher raw cotton prices also reduced the com-
petitiveness of Egyptian textiles, the export of which also declined in
the eighteenth century. Other evidence points to distress among
Cairo’s textile workers in the period, including a decline in the
assets of artisans, in whose ranks cloth workers were heavily repre-
sented. The size of the average artisan estate fell by 40 percent in the
eighteenth century.17

Anatolia
In the final decades of the eighteenth century, Anatolia overtook
Syria and became the major source of the Levant cotton exported to
Europe. Much of this cotton was shipped from İzmir, which was
transformed in the eighteenth century from an insignificant trading
center to the major Anatolian port. In the early eighteenth century,
İzmir accounted for about 10% of the cotton exports from the ports of
the Levant to France. By the early 1750s, this figure was close to 45%
and by the late 1780s had risen to 70%. Before 1750, the quantity of
cotton exported annually was typically under a million pounds. By the
1780s, this figure was several millions.18 The cotton from İzmir was
grown in rich soils which lay within a 100-mile radius of the city and
there is little evidence that the acreage devoted to cotton cultivation
increased significantly in the eighteenth century.19 As a consequence,
the enormous growth in European demand for cotton pushed up the
price, which tripled between 1700 and 1789. Much of this increase
took place in the second half of the century when European demand
for cotton grew rapidly.20 The price increase in İzmir was almost as
great as that in Egypt (where cotton prices rose almost fourfold) and it
is likely that the impact on local textile manufacturers was much the
same, given the extensive evidence for the widespread consumption of
Indian cloth, which, as in Egypt, may have constrained the ability of
local manufacturers to pass on higher cotton costs.
In 1812 Christophe Aubin, an agent for a Glasgow cotton manu-
facturer, traveled through Anatolia to collect information on the
market for cloth. In İzmir, Aubin found that Indian muslins and some
dozen varieties of calicoes and chintzes were enormously popular. He
also noted that British imitations of Indian goods were making inroads
in the market, which had led to a fall in prices for Indian goods. “India
Muslins were five or six years ago of great consumption . . . The Turks
were in those days very much prejudiced against all English Manufac-
ture in imitation of India goods; but they have now changed their
mind and buy what is cheapest. Thus the English goods have almost
replaced the India Muslins which however may still be sold to a
certain extent, but at lower rates than formerly,” Aubin wrote.21
The largest market for Indian cotton goods, not only in Anatolia but
in the Ottoman Empire as a whole, was Istanbul, one of the largest
cities in the world at the time. Aubin found that the city “draws a good

many India Cotton Goods from Bagdat [Baghdad] but for some time
fine India Goods have not been received from that Quarter and
consequently they are now wanting. About 25 years ago considerable
quantities of India Goods were received by way of Suez.”22
Eighteenth-century sources, including materials found in the
Ottoman state archives, confirm Aubin’s observations. On the basis
of Ottoman sources, Halil İnalcık found that an extraordinary variety
of Indian cotton textiles were consumed within the empire, ranging
from very fine muslins – used as turbans by prosperous men and veils
by wealthy women – to inexpensive chintzes that were mass produced
in Gujarat specifically for export to West Asia. It was much the same
in the case of the Iranian market, where cloth was sent by the boatload
as well as overland from Gujarat and Sind to the Persian Gulf.23

Ottoman imitations of Indian cloth

In much of Europe the import of Indian cottons introduced consumers
to a wholly new fiber and new type of fabric. In the Ottoman Empire,
however, the spinning and weaving of cotton had a long history and
was central to economic life in a number of regions. In the case of
seventeenth-century Anatolia, Halil İnalcık has concluded that “the
cotton industry, in terms of dimensions of its production and trade,
constituted the most important sector of the Turkish economy after
grains.”24 There was also a sizable trade within the empire in cotton
textiles, with production centers in Anatolia sending cloth north to the
Black Sea, up the Danube River and even to markets outside the
Ottoman territories. Ottoman imitations of Indian goods, then, took
place in a very different context in which textile workers possessed
extensive knowledge about cotton and its manipulation.
It is not clear when the Ottoman imitation of Indian cloth began,
but by the seventeenth century imported goods were being copied in a
number of regions of the empire, including the Balkans, Anatolia,
Syria and even Cyprus. The imitation of Indian goods may have begun
in Iran and from there transmitted to the Ottoman territories, which is
a distinct possibility since many Ottoman buyers first learned of chintz
from Iranian imitations of the Indian cloth. These Iranian copies were
manufactured in Tabriz and Isfahan and reached some Ottoman
markets before the real thing from India.25 The Ottoman imitations
of Indian goods spanned the spectrum of imports. Spinners and

weavers copied the twills and light cottons of the subcontinent while
dyers and printers created their versions of the colorful calicoes
and chintzes from Gujarat and Masulipatnam. According to Gilles
Veinstein, “There was hardly a single type of Indian fabric that did not
have an equivalent in local production.”26
By the eighteenth century, these imitations of Indian goods were
even exported. In the late 1750s, M. de (Charles) Peyssonnel found
that a “prodigious quantity of indiennes or painted cloth of Tocat and
Kastambol” were consumed every year in the Crimea.27 The main
market in Europe for the Ottoman textiles was Marseilles, where both
printed and plain goods were demanded in the eighteenth century. In
the early part of the century, the French called this cloth “indiennes de
Constantinople.” Some of this cloth may indeed have been made in
Istanbul but it would have been supplemented with the products of
Bursa, Tokat and other cloth-printing centers in Anatolia. From the
1720s, substantial quantities of plain white cottons were exported to
Marseilles to supply the “raw material” for the expanding printing
works in the city. From the 1730s, the printers of Marseilles
demanded dimities, primarily from Egypt but also from Cyprus, and
from the 1750s quantities of plain white cloth from near Aleppo were
added to the list.28
This export record suggests that Ottoman textile manufacturing
achieved some success with its imitations of Indian cloth and found
buyers both at home and abroad. Despite these achievements, Ottoman
manufacturers encountered several hurdles. First, the Ottoman imita-
tions were confined to lower-quality goods, which generated less
income than finer cloth. Ottoman textile workers had enormous diffi-
culties copying the superior varieties of calicoes and muslins.29 Second,
the rise of locally made substitutes for Indian cloth did not stem the
growing tide of imports from the subcontinent. “Ottoman weavers
successfully imitated Indian textiles; but, as customs registers indicate,
this did not end or diminish their imports,” İnalcık concluded.30
By the late seventeenth century the relentless import of Indian cloth
plunged the Ottoman Empire into a monetary crisis. The Ottoman
products demanded in the Indian subcontinent consisted of dates,
coffee, horses and above all silver. For decades the precious metal
had flowed out of the empire into the subcontinent to pay for cotton
cloth, which led to shortages of money and instabilities in the monet-
ary system. “Toward the end of the seventeenth century,” İnalcık has

written, “Ottoman demand for Indian shawls as well as fine Indian

cotton fabrics (muslin and twill) and the unusual growth of imports
signal the beginning of a crisis in the Ottoman economy.”31 The
chronicler Naima, who died in 1716, was concerned that “so much
cash treasury goes for Indian merchandise and the Indians buy nothing
from the Ottoman realms nor even have need of anything . . . The
world’s wealth accumulates in India.”32 The Ottomans “could not
prevent the outflow of specie to the east arising from the trade deficits
in that direction,” according to Şevket Pamuk, and as a consequence,
“fluctuations in these commodity and specie flows brought increasing
pressure on the Ottoman monetary system.”33
From the seventeenth century, the large-scale import of Indian
cottons sparked efforts to imitate these textiles in both the Ottoman
Empire and Britain. By the late eighteenth century, Ottoman authorities
were dealing with an economic crisis spawned in part by the unrelenting
import of Indian cloth and a corresponding outflow of silver, while in
Britain textile manufacturers were exporting ever-larger quantities of
cotton yarn and cloth and even moving into the production of high-
quality muslins. In markets in West Africa, Europe and the eastern
Mediterranean, British cotton cloth was beginning to challenge the
dominance of Indian cottons. And by the second decade of the nine-
teenth century, it was apparent that Britain had successfully responded
to the Indian challenge and British cotton manufacturers were sup-
planting the subcontinent as the world’s source for cotton cloth.
These divergent paths suggest that competition with the Indian
subcontinent alone cannot account for British technological break-
throughs in cotton. The other crucial factor was the state and its
policies. In Britain, Indian competition was managed and regulated
with policies that created a more hospitable economic climate for
cotton manufacturers to fashion their imitations of Indian goods. In
the Ottoman Empire, by contrast, political authorities did little to
assist cotton cloth production.

State policy and textile manufacturing: the British case

The policies of the British state played a critical role in the develop-
ment of cotton manufacturing, the most important being protection
for local manufacturers from Indian competition. This measure was
adopted upon the urging of silk and wool interests, but the fledgling

cotton works of Britain were the primary beneficiaries. It is a bedrock

conviction of mainstream economics that restrictions on trade are
harmful and reduce economic efficiency and social welfare.34 This
belief has led many economic historians to downplay the role of
protection in the development of British cotton manufacturing.
Robert Allen’s British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective,
for instance, contains no discussion of restrictions on Indian cloth
and Joel Mokyr’s Enlightened Economy dismisses protection on
the grounds that it was rent-seeking rather than value-creating.35
The historical record, however, does not support these views, and
the protectionist response to the Indian competitive challenge facili-
tated the development of skills, technology and markets, which were a
precondition for the growth and expansion of the British cotton indus-
try. As shown in the previous chapter, the focus on the market as the
motor of economic change in cotton manufacturing is itself a product
of the nineteenth century, supplanting the mercantilist framework that
shaped both policy and history in the eighteenth.
In Britain, demands to restrict the import of Indian textiles were
voiced from the mid-1670s, shortly after the “calico craze” com-
menced. For a decade, Parliament debated barriers on the import of
Indian cottons and in 1685 a duty of 10% – on top of a pre-existing
duty of 7.5% – was levied on Indian cloth. In 1690, the extraordinary
duty was doubled to 20%. The cumulative effect of these measures,
according to P. J. Thomas, was to discourage the use of Indian calicoes
“to a certain extent,” but they continued to be imported in sizable
quantities because of the enormous demand for them.36
Because these taxes failed to reduce the import of Indian cloth –
Thomas reports that “England was flooded with Indian calicoes and
silks” – the clamor for protection reached even greater heights in the
closing years of the seventeenth century. Wool and silk interests
argued that tariffs were insufficient and demanded an outright ban
on the importation of Indian cloth. A bill to this effect was introduced
into Parliament in 1696, but it failed to gain sufficient support in the
House of Lords, which was filled with friends of the East India
Company, the importer of these goods. When news of the bill’s defeat
reached the streets of London, several hundred silk weavers “went in a
body to Westminster” and petitioned Parliament for protection from
Indian competition. The weavers also marched down Leadenhall
Street to the offices of the East India Company and protested the

Company’s imports of Indian cottons.37 Again, in 1698, a bill to

restrict Indian imports was defeated in the House of Lords, sparking
massive weaver protests on the streets of London. Finally, in 1700,
after intense lobbying and widespread weaver agitation, a bill pro-
hibiting the import of Indian textiles passed in both houses of Parlia-
ment. Several varieties of cloth were exempted from the ban, however,
most importantly white calicoes and muslins, which meant that the
small British printing industry could continue to work with Indian
material. And Indian cloth of all sorts could be imported as long as it
was re-exported. A system of bonded warehouses was created to ensure
that these textiles were not smuggled into the domestic market.38
The prohibition on Indian printed and painted cloth gave British
printers a monopoly over the home market, which gave them a tre-
mendous boost to production. Without Indian competition, British
printing works rapidly enlarged their operations. For a few years they
also benefited from the fact that the Parliamentary Act of 1700
sharply reduced the duties on Indian white cloth. (A 15 percent duty
was restored in 1704.) Since it could no longer import printed and
patterned cloths, the East India Company turned its efforts to procur-
ing white cloths of all qualities and the cloth printers of Britain eagerly
seized them for their works. The printing of calicoes had started in
Britain in the 1680s, but it was on a small scale. After 1700, behind
protectionist walls cloth printing in Britain took off.39
British printers soon fell victim to the envy and hostility of competing
textile interests, however. In 1707, woolen manufacturers complained
to Parliament that the competition of the British printing works was
“more prejudicial to us than the importation of painted calicoes was
before the passing of that act.” The woolen workers lamented that
formerly “the calicoes painted in India were most used by the richer
sort of people whilst the poor continued to wear and use our woollen
goods, the calicoes now painted in England are so very cheap and so
much the fashion that persons of all qualities and degrees clothe them-
selves and furnish their houses in a great measure with them.”40
Four year later, the printers of London confirmed that the ban on
imports of Indian calicoes had enabled them to make great progress
in the manufacture of handkerchiefs, a popular accessory. “Since the
wearing India Silks and Callicoes Printed or Stained . . . has been
restrained by an Act . . . The Article of Handkerchiefs has been
greatly improv’d, and at length rendred so good and cheap, that

great Quantities have been, and daily are exported to Her Majesty’s
Dominions Abroad,” they wrote in 1711.41 Fearing the further
expansion of the industry, competing manufacturers turned their
attention to the printed cloth made in Britain, almost all of which
used cotton cloth from India.
In 1719, wool and silk manufacturers joined forces and mobilized for
a complete ban on the importation of Indian cloth. In the summer of
that year, the silk weavers of Spitalfields rioted in the streets of London,
“tearing calicoes off the women’s backs and throwing aqua fortis on
their clothes.”42 The debate on the Indian trade moved quickly from
the streets to the printing press and both critics and defenders of the
trade voiced their positions in a series of pamphlets. From there, the
debate shifted to the halls of Parliament and by the end of 1719 both
the Lords and the Commons had been flooded with weaver testimonies
from throughout Britain that blamed the imports of cheap Indian
calicoes for the deterioration in their trade. Because of this pressure,
in 1721 Parliament enacted a prohibition on the consumption of “all
stuffs made of cotton or mixed therewith, which shall be printed and
painted with any colour or colours, or chequered or striped.” Once
again, a few varieties of cloth were exempt from the Act, including
muslins, neckcloths, fustians and calicoes dyed all blue.43
The exclusion of Indian goods gave a spur to their production in
Britain itself. An anonymous “History of the Cotton Trade,” which
appears to have been penned in 1776, stated, “The prohibition of the
wear of strip’d and check’d East India goods in the year 1722 gave
further encouragement for Manchester to attempt the manufactures of
various sorts of cotton stripes which have been so much improved of
late years as to beat out the wear of Turkey strip’d goods in Britain
and nearly of India strip’ed goods in America . . . and now great
quantities are exported to the coast of Africa.”44
The Act of 1721 also put an end to British printing on Indian cloth
for the domestic market, but permitted it for export. This enabled
British printers to use white cottons from India to supply chintzes to
markets in Europe, Africa and the Americas, but the British cloth-
printing industry had to find another way to meet the growing
demand for calicoes within the British Isles. To satisfy this demand,
British printers began to experiment with cloth from other materials,
the chief alternative to cotton being linen, which had been used for
printing even before the Prohibition Act of 1721. British cloth printers

turned to the linen of Scotland, Ireland and central Europe as the

material for their work. Chintzes made from linen, however, were
considered inferior to those made from cotton. Recall the words of
Claudius Rey from the previous chapter, who reported that in the early
eighteenth century British consumers preferred printed cottons over
printed linens, presumably because the former took and held colors
better than the latter.
The British ban of 1721 on the import of plain, white Indian cottons
fueled the search for a domestically manufactured cotton cloth that
was suitable for printing. “It was protection which was almost entirely
responsible for the use of English-made cottons by the printers. Had it
not been for the artificial stimulus provided in 1721, it seems doubtful
whether there would have been sufficient incentive to produce a
satisfactory material in any quantity,” Julia de Lacy Mann con-
cluded.45 The first breakthrough came in the 1730s with the weaving
of a light cotton–linen mix. This cloth, which used linen as the warp
and cotton as the weft, was not as heavy as the traditional cotton and
linen mixtures that had been made in Europe for centuries and was
close in weight and feel to the cotton calicoes of India. Still, it was not
a perfect substitute for the Indian good, as we saw in the previous
chapter, and it did not have the look, feel or color of a purely cotton
chintz. Nevertheless, there was widespread opposition to this new
cloth on the grounds that it violated the Act of 1721, which dictated
that cotton could only be used in the manufacture of traditional
fustians and other heavy linen–cotton mixtures, but the British state
intervened again, this time in support of cotton. The cotton masters of
Lancashire successfully lobbied Parliament and had their new fabric
classified as fustian for legal and excise purposes.46 Four decades later,
an anonymous historian of the cotton trade wrote, “In the year 1736
when the wear of printed cottons was permitted the manufacture of
cottons for printing was begun at Blackburn.”47
This new, lighter fustian was only the first step in the tortuous path to
an all-cotton calico. Behind protectionist walls, British cotton masters
experimented with methods to make the cotton yarn that was essential
for such cloth. It took another forty years and the crucial breakthrough
was, of course, the invention of the water frame, which could spin yarn
strong enough to withstand the tensile pressures of being stretched in
the loom to form the warp. In these decades, British cotton producers
were given a protected market in which they had great power to set

prices, captive consumers for their goods, and room to learn and
experiment with new techniques and methods. Since most varieties of
Indian cloth were excluded from the market, British manufacturers also
knew that the successful innovator would be able to supply the growing
British market without fear of Indian competition. Over the course
of the eighteenth century, British demand for cottons grew steadily, as
has been documented by Beverly Lemire and John Styles and was
described in Chapter 2. Indeed, these efforts to manufacture an all-
cotton cloth may have been stimulated even earlier in the century with
the passage of the Calico Act of 1700. According to Patrick O’Brien,
Trevor Griffiths and Philip Hunt, that legislation alerted cotton manu-
facturers to the growing protectionist sentiment in Parliament and
signaled “that the home market might not remain open to Indian
imports, even in plain form, and that the capacity to spin and weave
cottons within the realm might be profitably expanded.”48
The era of protection for cotton did not end with the great spinning
inventions of the late 1760s and 1770s. In a final act of support for
British cotton manufacturing, a sizable tariff was imposed on Indian
muslins in 1787. After Crompton’s invention of the mule, Lancashire
began to spin very fine yarns, and a British muslin industry took off in
the 1780s. Despite its early success, Indian cotton goods loomed large
in the minds of British muslin manufacturers and continued to be
perceived as a threat. The papers of Samuel Oldknow, the lone muslin
manufacturer from the period whose records have survived, reveal a
keen interest in the muslin imports of the English East India Company.
His papers contain a Company auction catalog listing the varieties of
Indian muslins that were imported and their selling prices. Oldknow
also engaged in an extensive correspondence with his London agent on
the Company’s sales, the quantities of Indian muslin imports, and the
market for them in the city.49
In the mid-1780s a depression in the muslin trade drove many
manufacturers to the brink of bankruptcy. The muslin masters attrib-
uted the downturn to “the interference of a foreign article, of the same
fabric and quality, introduced by the East India Company into the
British market” and they organized themselves into an association of
“Cotton Spinners and Manufacturers of Callico and Muslin” to pres-
sure Parliament for protection from the competition of Indian
muslins.50 In taking this action, they observed: “it has ever been the
wisdom of the British Legislature to protect and nourish every home

manufacture progressively, as it advanced to maturity – And that the

cotton-trade, in particular, has already, on several occasions, experi-
enced the fostering hand of the British Government.”51 Parliament
responded with a duty of nearly 100 percent on imports of Indian
muslins, which effectively shut them out of the British market. With
this protection Lancashire muslin makers were given a monopoly of
the market and higher prices for their goods, which allowed them to
expand their works and perfect the process of manufacture.
From the late seventeenth century, British cotton manufacturing
expanded in tandem with state policies of protection. The ban on
imports of Indian painted and printed cloth in 1700 gave a great boost
to a British cloth-printing industry, which was given the exclusive right
to supply the home market. The ban on imports of Indian white calico
in 1721 led British manufacturers to search for and develop a locally
made substitute for what had formerly been imported from the sub-
continent. This search was successful in the 1770s with the invention
of Arkwright’s water frame and then Crompton’s mule. But the era of
protection was not over. Tariffs on Indian muslin imports in the
1780s helped British muslin manufacturers to expand and improve
their manufacturing capabilities. Trade policies were integral to the
development of the British cotton industry.

Economic philosophy and state policy: the Ottoman Empire

In the Ottoman Empire, in contrast to Britain, the import of Indian
textiles was never restricted. As a consequence, Ottoman textile
manufacturers faced sustained and relentless competition from
Indian goods. The lack of protection for manufacturing reflected an
Ottoman economic philosophy that was radically different from that
of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, and Europe more
widely. Ottoman economic thinking centered upon provisioning the
empire. The goal of the state was to ensure abundant supplies of
essential commodities at reasonable prices with little concern for
where the goods were produced. In this framework, high-quality
cotton cloth from the subcontinent was viewed as a welcome add-
ition to Ottoman markets. According to Mehmet Genç, “With
respect to foreign trade, provisionism sought to keep the supply of
goods and services to the internal market at an optimal level. Export
was not encouraged, but rather curtailed by prohibitions, quotas,

and taxes. Imports, by contrast, were fostered and facilitated.” Genç

adds that provisionism “did not require an import substitution policy
as long as imports helped maintain the steady supply of goods and
services.” The state promoted local production to replace imports
only in extraordinary circumstances, typically having to do with
military supplies.52
Consistent with this economic and political philosophy, the Ottoman
state supported only two major textile manufacturing efforts in the
eighteenth century. The first was the manufacturing of woolen cloth to
replace imports, which received state encouragement from 1703 to
1732. Fine woolen cloth was essential for military uniforms and the
Ottoman state supported local production in order to reduce depend-
ence on foreign suppliers. In the words of the Grand Vizier, the goal
was to “make provisions to be self-sufficient of woolens from non-
Muslim countries.” State support consisted largely of financial assist-
ance for a manufactory in Istanbul, but there was no attempt to
restrain the competition of cheap European imports. “The survival of
local woolen manufacturing under such market conditions required
strong protectionist state policies,” according to Mehmet Genç, but
these were lacking and as a consequence the undertaking failed to yield
cloth of the necessary price or quality.53
A second state-sponsored scheme produced sailcloth for the Ottoman
navy. This enterprise was located in the Istanbul arsenal and began
production in 1709. It was more successful than woolens manufacture
and it continued to operate on a small scale into the nineteenth century.
A number of factors contributed to its greater longevity, including
superior technology of manufacturing and steady naval demand for
sailcloth. The most important, however, was that in contrast to the
woolens manufacture of the early eighteenth century it was given a
monopoly over the local market, which meant that it faced little
competition.54
The Ottoman economic philosophy of provisioning was a far cry
from the mercantilism that dominated Europe at the time. In contrast to
the Ottoman focus on plentiful goods for consumption, Europeans
approached economic policy from the point of view of production.
The aim of state actions was to expand productive capacity in order
to broaden the economic base for taxation. The power of the state,
therefore, was linked explicitly to the development and expansion of
production. It was this thinking that led states in Europe to protect

manufacturing from external competition. In the case of Indian cottons,

with the exception of Holland, from the late seventeenth century pro-
tectionist measures were adopted across Western and Central Europe,
even though they increased the prices of goods for consumers. As
Sir Thomas Smith argued in 1549: “It were better for us to pay more
to our own people for wares than less to strangers; for how little gains
so ever go over, it is lost to us clear. But how much so ever the gains be,
that go from one of us to another, it is all within the Realm.”55
Restrictions on imports and encouragement for local production
were found widely across Europe, but in Britain mercantile thinking
was even more expansive. From the sixteenth century, British policy
protected local economic activity, but it also sought to encourage the
domestic production of imported goods. In perhaps the most revolu-
tionary move, the British state supported the importation of raw
materials that were not found at home so that they could be worked
up to replace imported manufactures. This is why the import of raw
cotton for the manufacture of cloth in imitation of Indian goods was
neither novel nor unprecedented.56

The Atlantic market

State mercantilist policies were critical to the divergent paths that
cotton manufacturing followed in Britain and the Ottoman Empire.
Mercantilism alone, however, cannot explain why the British cotton
industry diverged from those of other nations in Europe where protec-
tionist measures against Indian cloth were also enacted, most import-
antly France, which had a sizable cotton industry in the eighteenth
century. One difference between France and Britain was in the form of
the protectionist policies, which Patrick O’Brien, Trevor Griffiths and
Philip Hunt have noted.57 France imposed an outright ban on cotton
consumption, which hampered the development of the cotton industry
for decades. (The consequences of this policy will be examined in
more detail shortly.) A second difference between France and Britain
has to do with the fact that British merchants participated in broader
trading networks than their French counterparts – combined with
state interest in these networks – which provided more lucrative
commercial opportunities for British cotton manufacturers. The most
important of these were found in the Atlantic world and included West
Africa, North America and the Caribbean. To a greater extent than

French producers, British cotton masters were meeting the demands

not only of local consumers, but also those at a far remove in the
rapidly expanding trading world of the Atlantic Ocean. Britain also
differed from the Ottoman Empire in this respect.
For much of the eighteenth century, the Atlantic was the most
important overseas market for British cotton goods. Between 1752
and 1754, nearly 95% of British cotton exports found buyers in
the Atlantic world. Twenty years later, between 1772 and 1774,
this proportion had fallen, but still stood at 80%.58 Until the mid-
eighteenth century, West Africa was the most important of these
Atlantic markets. Between 1752 and 1754, 60% of British cotton
cloth exports were exchanged for slaves in West Africa. Even in the
early 1770s, when the American market had grown in importance,
West Africa absorbed nearly 45% of total British exports of cottons.59
The bulk of African demand was for checked and striped cloths, which
were manufactured from cotton yarn that was dyed blue and red and
then woven with plain white yarns to create intricate and colorful
patterns. Some examples of British cloth for these markets are given in
Figure 5.1, which shows two swatches of cloth woven in Blackburn and
attached to a letter from the manufacturer to the Company of Merchants
Trading to Africa as evidence of the high quality of the goods his weavers
could make. A sizable fraction of these checks and stripes were destined
for export and in 1759 almost half, and in 1769 almost three-quarters, of
Lancashire’s output of these textiles was shipped to West Africa.60
Smaller quantities were also sold in the plantation economies of the West
Indies, but the precise amount is not known.
In West Africa, British manufacturers competed directly with Indian
goods and this competition propelled the development of the cotton
industry. The previous chapter showed that African buyers preferred
the all-cotton cloth made in India over the linen and cotton mixtures
that Manchester had to offer, which compelled the cotton men of
Blackburn and other centers in Lancashire to improve their wares.
This fueled the search for improved methods of cotton spinning which
culminated with the innovations of the 1760s and 1770s. In the
markets of West Africa, British cotton manufacturers served their
apprenticeship under Indian masters.
British cotton manufacturers, therefore, operated in a combination of
protected and unprotected markets. They had protected markets at home
and, as we shall see shortly, in their American colonies, where there was a

Figure 5.1 Swatches of Blackburn cloth woven for the West Africa market, 1751,
National Archives of the United Kingdom: Public Record Office, T70/1517.

sizable demand for light printed cloth akin to the calicoes of India. At the
same time, they competed directly against Indian goods in West African
markets where cotton textiles were indispensable for the conduct of the
slave trade. Therefore, it was a pairing of protection and competition – in
a context of growing demand for cotton goods in both Europe and the
Atlantic World – from which British cotton masters benefited.
From the late 1770s, West African markets absorbed larger quan-
tities of British cottons, but they accounted for a smaller proportion of
cotton exports, which may be seen from Figure 5.2. West African
markets became more peripheral for two reasons. First, British
cotton goods began to be exported to Europe where they had not

70
Exports to West Africa, %
60

0
1751 1765 1779 1793 1807
Figure 5.2 Exports of British cotton cloth to West Africa as a proportion of
total cotton cloth exports, 1751–1807.
Sources: Exports to West Africa from Inikori, Africans and the Industrial
Revolution, p. 444. Total exports from Schumpeter, English Overseas Trade
Statistics, Tables X and XI.

traditionally been sold in large quantities. In the closing decades of the

eighteenth century, European consumers had a voracious appetite for
new varieties of velvets that came to be known as Manchester cottons,
which become significant in the British customs records from 1775.
And from the 1780s, the British breakthroughs in spinning produced a
boom in cotton yarn and cloth exports to France, the Low Countries,
and the Swiss and German territories. This further shrank West
Africa’s share of British cotton exports.
Second, West African markets became less important as North Ameri-
can demand took off. For much of the eighteenth century, North Amer-
ica had been the second market in the Atlantic for cotton goods, but it
had tremendous potential for growth. The population of European
settlers grew rapidly in the century; the settlers had high incomes, which
they could devote to following consumer fashions; and their tastes
closely tracked those of Europe. From New France to Philadelphia, the
Carolinas and New Orleans there was a steadily growing demand for
cotton goods in the eighteenth century, much as in Britain and elsewhere
in Europe. North American merchant inventories indicate that by the
1760s and 1770s the appetite for cottons had reached sizable propor-
tions.61 The European settlers in North America also preferred printed

stuff over other varieties of cotton cloth and in the late 1760s it was the
largest overseas market for British printed cottons and linens.62
Since North America and the Caribbean were colonial markets,
British cotton masters had a monopoly in them. With eager consumers
in protected outlets British cotton manufacturers had an added incen-
tive to experiment with perfecting the relatively new manufacture. Since
the seventeenth century, with the aid of the Navigation Laws, a number
of markets in the Atlantic were maintained as exclusive preserves for
British manufacturers and shippers. Ralph Davis noted that the laws
were vitally important to England in the early decades of the colonial
development; they excluded, as they were designed to exclude, the exercise
of Dutch commercial, financial and maritime skills, which were well fitted
to engross a large part of transatlantic trade. In time, changing conditions
reduced the practical importance of the Navigation Laws, for they moulded
the infant colonial trade so effectively that it developed the required charac-
ter, and eventually matured in a form which was largely independent of the
legal strait-jacket . . . Generation after generation the population of the
colonies had become accustomed to take manufactures from British sources
and sell through British factors.63
The research of David Ormrod has reinforced Ralph Davis’ conclu-
sions: “It was the mercantilist state which decisively shifted the bal-
ance of power and influence towards London, through the creation of
a national entrepôt with an imperial trading network . . . Beneath the
advantages conferred on England by geography and location lay the
hand of a strong, centralized state, supporting and extending London’s
dominance with and beyond.”64 Therefore, British economic domin-
ance of the Atlantic world did not emerge from the logic of the free
market, but was supported by state action.
This discussion of the Atlantic shows that in the Ottoman case,
unsupportive state policies included more than the lack of protection
and encouragement for a nascent cotton industry. The Ottoman state
did not use its political might to capture markets for its manufactures.
As a consequence, the more limited outlets in which Ottoman produ-
cers could vend their imitations of Indian stuff also acted as a brake on
the expansion of cotton. Most critically, Ottoman manufacturing was
cut off from the Atlantic, which was booming in the eighteenth
century. It was the “Golden Age of the Colonial Atlantic,” in the
words of one historian.65 Vasco de Gama may not have sounded the
death knell for the Ottoman, and more generally Mediterranean,

economy in the sixteenth century, as was once believed. Nevertheless,

by the eighteenth century, access to the Atlantic Ocean offered enor-
mous possibilities for the development of manufacturing, from which
the Ottoman Empire and, in fact, many parts of Europe were cut off.

French cottons: state policy and the Atlantic trade

The cotton manufacturers of France were less connected to markets
in the Atlantic than their counterparts in Britain, which combined
with state policies to limit the prospects of French cottons in the
eighteenth century. Marseilles led the way in cotton printing in
Europe, establishing printing workshops in 1648, three decades
before those of London, Paris and Amsterdam. The goal of these
early works was to produce at home imitations of the calicoes
imported from Istanbul, Diyarbakir and Aleppo. Although these
textiles came to France from the Ottoman Empire, they were most
likely manufactured in Iran and the Indian subcontinent.66 In the
next twenty years another dozen printing works were set up in
Marseilles and from there spread to other centers in France, including
Avignon, Nı̂mes and Arles. Marseilles’ easy access to technologies
and skilled craftsmen from the eastern Mediterranean contributed to
its early entry into the novel manufacturing process and the city
served as a bridge between the Levant and Europe for the transmis-
sion of techniques in the printing and dyeing of cotton.67
Although France led Europe in the development of cotton printing,
it was also the first state to restrict the consumption of cotton cloth.
In 1686, a royal decree prohibited both the manufacture and the
consumption of printed cottons throughout the kingdom. In 1689,
the prohibition was expanded to include printing on wool and linen
and, in 1691, the import of all white cottons and muslins was banned,
except in Nantes, which supplied Indian cloth to French slave
traders.68 These prohibitions were enacted at the urging of wool
and silk manufacturers who feared that they were losing markets to
the new fiber. However, they had a devastating impact on the
fledgling cotton manufactures. According to Olivier Raveux, the
decrees “reduced to nil the developments which had taken place in
Marseilles since 1648. Like all other French cities Marseilles had to
cease production.”69 The printing industry was dismantled in France
and reassembled in neighboring states. Masters and workers migrated

to Avignon, which was under Papal control, Tuscany and other Italian
regions, and Geneva and other Swiss cantons where they founded new
enterprises and resumed the work of printing upon cotton cloth.70
In Britain the import and consumption of Indian calicoes was
banned, but the domestic printing of cloth was never restricted. In
France, however, not only the consumption but also the act of printing
cloth was made illegal, which set back the development of the French
cotton industry by several decades. While the manufacture of cottons
was fairly easy to suppress, it was more difficult to eliminate the
consumption of these goods. Edgard Depitre has observed that “all
the severity of the regulations in the eighteenth century was concen-
trated on the manufacture: the diverse regulations of consumption
were far more lax, far more imprecise in their enforcement.”71 There-
fore, in the eighteenth century French consumption of cotton goods,
both the lighter and heavier varieties, conformed to the north Atlantic
pattern of steadily growing demand, but French manufacturers
were not allowed to supply this expanding market. As already noted,
between 1700 and 1789 cottons went from comprising 3 to 8 percent
of the garments in Parisian wardrobes to between 20 and 40 percent,
and the taste for cottons appears to have grown steadily over the
century.72 Painted and printed cottons from the Indian subcontinent
continued to be smuggled into France and were widely available in the
early eighteenth century, according to Serge Chassagne. These may have
been supplemented with printed cloth from Holland and Britain.73
The ban on cloth printing was relaxed several times between 1686
and 1759, when it was finally repealed. These openings were not
sufficient to allow the industry to grow significantly, however. As a
consequence, cotton cloth manufacturing developed more slowly and
fitfully in France than in Britain. In Marseilles, the longstanding
freedom of the port was confirmed in 1692 and 1703 and the city
was exempted from the act of 1686 and permitted to work with
cotton. While this allowed a resumption of printing, it “did so slowly
over two decades. Even if it was of short duration, the interruption left
traces.”74 Between 1733 and 1750 cloth printing actually declined in
Marseilles, going from 24 workshops with 280 workers to 14 work-
shops with 100 workers.75 Only from the mid-eighteenth century did
the industry pick up as it printed on white cloth imported from the
Levant. Its final products were exported to Spain, the Italian states,
the Guinea coast, the Antilles, Spanish America and New France.76

Despite the restriction on the manufacture and consumption of

painted and printed cloth, cotton began to be used more widely
in eighteenth-century France. In contrast to Britain, much of the cotton
manufacturing was devoted to heavier varieties of cloth made from
mixtures of cotton and other fibers, as is elaborated in the appendix to
this chapter, rather than the imitation of the light cottons of India,
which proved to be the revolutionary path of development. The cottons
of India possessed a global market, while that for the heavy cottons of
Europe was far more restricted. In 1788, Charles Taylor, himself a
fustian manufacturer in Lancashire, admitted that calicoes and muslins
were of “greater consequence to the commercial interests of this king-
dom” than fustians and other heavy cotton cloth varieties.77 The
efforts to replicate Indian cloth also propelled efforts to substitute
cotton for linen in the warp, which led to innovation in spinning. In
the heavier varieties, linen yarn was adequate for the warp.
The limits on printing were the first reason why the imitation of
Indian cloth was less extensive in France than in Britain. The small
scale of the printing industry in Marseilles meant that there was little
demand for cloth that resembled the all-cotton calicoes of India.
And for much of the eighteenth century the printers of Marseilles found
adequate supplies of white cloth in the Ottoman Empire.78 The second
reason was that the French had fewer outlets for their cloth than the
British in the Atlantic world. In North America, the population of
French colonies was much smaller than that of the British. From the
early eighteenth century, the French commenced a thriving trade with
San Domingue, but in general the market for cotton goods was smaller in
the West Indies than in North America. French cotton cloth export data
is not available, but it was unlikely to have been much different from that
of the British who in the mid-1780s shipped only 7 percent of their cotton
exports to the West Indies. By contrast, in the same period 29 percent
of British cotton exports went to the United States and Canada.79
In the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century, West Africa
was a major battleground for competition between Indian cloth and
British imitations, but France trailed Britain in that trade. In the
final years of the seventeenth century, slavers from France trans-
ported 1,000–2,000 Africans a year to the French West Indies and
the figure rose to about 3,000 by 1713.80 By contrast, between 1698
and 1709 the British carried nearly 14,000 slaves across the Atlantic
each year.81 The French trade grew after the Treaty of Utrecht in

1713, but still lagged behind the British, and for the eighteenth
century as a whole, the French purchased 1.18 million African
slaves, the British 2.53 million.82 This, of course, meant that smaller
quantities of French manufactured goods were exported to West
Africa, including the cotton textiles which were in such high demand
in that market.
For their indispensable cargoes of cotton cloth, French slave
traders drew upon Indian imports, with a smattering of pieces from
the Levant and Iran. A comprehensive inventory of France’s exports
to West Africa, such as that compiled by Marion Johnson for Britain,
does not exist, but scattered evidence indicates that French slavers
relied more upon Indian cottons. Three-quarters of the cargo of the
Prince du Conty, which voyaged to West Africa in 1750, consisted
of cotton textiles, and nearly 97 percent of these were of Indian
manufacture. According to Gaston Martin, the ship carried “7,505
pieces of merchandise from India, except some tapsels counterfeit
(contrefaits) or a net total of 7,263 pieces from India.” The label
contrefaits or counterfeit suggests a French or European imitation of
an Indian good.83 More revealingly, in the late 1760s and early
1770s, 600,000 livres (25,000 pounds sterling) worth of cotton
goods from Rouen, the leading cotton manufacturing center in
France, was exported every year to West Africa.84 In those same
years, British slave traders annually sold in West Africa 80,000
pounds sterling worth of British-made cotton goods, or more than
three times the French total. And this was before the mechanization
of spinning had penetrated very deeply into cotton production in
Lancashire.
The importance of Indian cottons for France’s trade with West
Africa is reflected in the geography of French slave shipping. In the
eighteenth century, almost half the slave-trading ships that departed
from France set sail from the port of Nantes.85 Nantes attained this
position because it was also home to the French East India Company
whose sales were conducted there for many decades. According to
Pierre Boulle, “The great demand in Africa for Indian textiles was a
factor in Nantes’ decision to enter the slave trade.”86 The East India
Company shifted its operations to Lorient in 1733, but the slave
traders of Nantes were still well placed to purchase their cargoes of
Indian calicoes, chintzes and checked and striped cloths. The mer-
chants of Nantes also had easy access to the markets of Holland where

the French Company’s offerings of Indian goods could be supple-

mented with those of the Dutch East India Company.
From the 1720s cotton manufacturing arose in Nantes to make
cloth for export to West Africa, thirty or forty years after the
establishment of similar ventures in Lancashire. Slave trading inter-
ests organized and financed several of these schemes and the largest
came to be known as La Grande Manufacture and contained as
many as 100 looms at work weaving cotton cloth for export to West
Africa. La Grand Manufacture remained in existence till 1786.
Nevertheless, Boulle has concluded that “none of these new manu-
factures and industries made much of an inroad into the import–
export ratio of the port of Nantes. If anything, the Atlantic city
imported increasing amounts of goods for the slave trade from
abroad as the century progressed.”87
The prohibition on printing in France also hindered the produc-
tion of cloth for West Africa and French slave traders relied upon the
Indian subcontinent and Holland for their supplies of this variety.
(“In the case of one type of textiles – printed cloth – Nantes’ slave
traders were thwarted for a long while from finding local alterna-
tives to foreign and Indian imports by stiff regulations.”)88 These
cloths were fairly easy to obtain during peacetime, but supplies were
disrupted during wartime. In the 1740s, after the disruption caused
by the War of Austrian Succession, the slave traders of Nantes
successfully pressured the French state to repeal the prohibition on
printing and in 1744 Marseilles was allowed to print cloth for export
to West Africa.89
From the mid-eighteenth century, the political climate in France
became friendlier to cotton and to the imitation of the Indian goods
that were needed for the West African trade. French political author-
ities also realized that the restrictions on the manufacture of cotton
had not stemmed demand for cotton goods but instead encouraged
smuggling and illegal consumption. In 1759, the ban on printing was
lifted, which led to the founding of a large number of printing works,
including the famous workshop of Christoff-Philipp Oberkampf in
Jouy. Even before the lifting of the ban, however, cotton manufactories
began to spring up in Amiens and Angers, where a workshop “boldly
produced imitation Indian textiles under the protection of local
authorities.”90 But, by then, the cotton men of Lancashire had gained
an insurmountable lead.91

Conclusion
As shown in this chapter, a broad constellation of state actions and
inactions had a profound impact on economic fortunes in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries. States used their power in a variety of
ways to meet pressing economic needs and to achieve political and
economic goals, whether it was to protect local manufacturing, as
many rulers in Europe did, or to capture and retain markets, as the
British did in the Atlantic. Neither type of state action was universal in
the eighteenth century, as revealed by the Ottoman case. Ottoman
political authorities approached the economy from a different per-
spective and with the different goal of provisioning, or satisfying the
consumption needs of its people, as opposed to the European focus on
the expansion of production. This difference had far-reaching eco-
nomic consequences. Therefore, whatever one’s theoretical position
on the optimal or proper role of the state may be, on empirical
grounds alone the state must be an integral part of the historical
account, for political actions shaped economic life.
Longstanding explanations for why states intervene in the economy
focus on the problems of market failure and the absence of critical
factors for economic growth. State action is then seen as necessary to
correct the failure or supply the factors. Market failures are a widely
discussed theme in economic theory and economic history. State sup-
port for education, in particular, figures in the literature in economic
history, and is taken up in the final chapter of this book. The problem
of missing factors has also been a staple of writings in economic
history. Alexander Gerschenkron provided a classic statement with
reference to the scarcity of capital in nineteenth-century Russia where
“the compulsory machinery of the government . . . through its tax-
ation policies, succeeded in directing incomes from consumption to
investment.” “There is no doubt that the government . . . discharged
its role in a far less than perfectly efficient manner . . . But when all is
said and done, the great success of the policies . . . is undeniable,”
Gerschenkron concluded.92
The British and French state policies examined in this chapter do
not fit either of the above frameworks and they were not responses to
market failures or to missing factors. British seizure of markets in the
Atlantic through violence and force had nothing to do with problems
with the workings of the market. Nor did British and French bans on

Indian cloth imports correct any market shortcoming. These actions

were taken to reshape market outcomes which were deemed to be
unacceptable. They were self-conscious actions to protect and expand
the national economy.93
In the case of Britain, Joan Thirsk, David Ormrod, Patrick O’Brien,
Martin Daunton and others have described the variety of policies
which were used from the sixteenth century to develop the British
economy and transform the place of Britain in the European and then
global economic order. We have already encountered the words of
Thomas Smith who argued in 1549 that it was better to produce
“within the Realm.”94 For nearly three centuries Smith’s call to maxi-
mize production at home and minimize importation from abroad
became the basis for a vision of economic progress. According to Joan
Thirsk, Smith also “introduced new principles on which industries
might be set up in England. They might use raw materials drawn from
other countries.”95 This new approach expanded the possibilities for
the growth of manufacturing, but their execution demanded vigorous
state support, as Thirsk shows, including the resettling of foreign
workers in England, the granting of monopoly privileges to manufac-
turers, and protection from foreign competition. By the early seven-
teenth century, these new projects were “yielding rewards to
projectors, and giving work to large numbers of people in many
different parts of the country.” They illustrated the early benefits of
a state that rejected the outcomes of the market.96
Although there were shifts in terminology (the language of projects
and projectors became rarer over time), and policies did not have the
coherence or reach of those that were to emerge in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, the state continued to play a crucial role in the
economic transformation of Britain before 1800. In a series of art-
icles, Patrick O’Brien has argued that the navy and an exceptional
fiscal system were critical to the growth of the early-modern
British economy. The British navy captured and protected markets
while the fiscal state created a political institution that was strong
enough to promote economic improvement.97 The making of
economic policy became more sophisticated with time and by the
early eighteenth century “variation of the tariff structure together
with the redistribution of a large and growing customs revenue, via
bounties, drawbacks and tax exemptions, provided the means to
promote industrial interests, to encourage import saving, to stimulate

the growth of re-exports vis-à-vis domestic consumption, and to

modify the terms of trade between British exports and imports of
foreign goods and raw materials.”98 This is the context in which the
British state restricted the imports of Indian cloth. The purpose of
these interventions into the economy was not to correct market
failures or to supply missing factors, but to interfere in the operation
of the market in order to preserve British employment and manufac-
turing and to transform Britain’s place in the global trading order.
And behind these protected walls, British cotton masters experi-
mented with an imported raw material and sought to imitate and
surpass Indian goods. State intervention of this sort was to be a staple
of British policy making well into the nineteenth century and Martin
Daunton has labeled it “the visible hand.”99
The centrality of the state for economic life in both Europe and Asia
suggests a deeper point about the relationship between the state and
the market. Differences in the efficiency of markets across the
advanced regions of Europe and Asia do not explain divergent paths
of development. Of course, with all other things being equal, well-
functioning markets are preferable, but the purpose of state policy in
Europe was not to exploit market outcomes – even if they were
efficient – but to reshape the impact of the market in order to promote
economic change and growth. Rather than the efficiency of markets,
the effectiveness of states and their political and economic philoso-
phies were more important for economic development.
The approach of this work is to ask not if states should intervene in
the economy but how state actions shaped economic paths. That is, it
begins with the empirical fact that state policies, whether to constrain
the operation of markets or to maintain a regime of free trade, had
profound economic consequences. A non-interventionist state was not
always superior, as the Ottoman case shows, where the unconstrained
import of Indian cotton cloth led to monetary and manufacturing
problems. For eighteenth-century actors, it was clear that state policies
had a great impact on economic life, which is why many individuals
in Britain and France devoted time and energy to shaping these
policies. And these actors understood that protection could promote
the development of manufacturing and industry. In the late 1780s,
the muslin manufacturers of Britain, for instance, were unequivocal
on the contribution that protection made to the development of
British cottons.

It was not only state policies on trade that varied between Britain,
France and the Ottoman Empire. These states also differed sharply in
their relationships to labor. The regimentation and intensification of
work, the massive increase in working hours, and the rise of new
forms of work organization such as the factory were crucial for
growth and industrialization in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Britain. These changes increased the efficiency of labor and
cheapened the costs of production, which made it possible for British
manufacturers to compete more effectively. Writing of Samuel
Oldknow, George Unwin said, “The effect of the competition of
India combined with that of Lancashire and Scotland was to give
Oldknow a stronger impetus towards the adoption of the factory
system.”100 This remaking of the lives of laborers to meet the needs
of manufacturers was dependent upon state policies and regulations,
including measures such as the combination acts, limits on the
mobility of workers, and the regulation of labor contracts.101 Such
state policies had a long history in Britain, but they received further
justification from mercantilist thinking, which was deeply concerned
with the efficient deployment of labor for national wealth and
competitiveness.102
The relationship between state and labor that was found in
eighteenth-century Britain had no counterpart in much of Asia. In
the Indian subcontinent, the use of state power to discipline labor
became a staple of policy only with the establishment of British colonial
rule.103 Until then, laboring groups had greater power in the political
and economic order than their counterparts in Britain. Laborers in the
subcontinent were in a stronger position in dealings with their super-
iors. They possessed more secure contracts, whether in weaving, agri-
culture or other services. And, perhaps most importantly, there was
little state regulation of the labor market in support of those who
utilized labor.104 Such exercise of state power was foreign as well to
the Ottoman Empire where guilds continued to flourish in the eight-
eenth century. Artisans, therefore, enjoyed monopoly privileges and
power in the marketplace for longer than in Britain. In France as well,
laboring groups were in a stronger position than in Britain. “Despite a
distinct preference for a harsh brand of discipline on the part of most
master artisans, entrepreneurs, and local officials, the laboring classes
were not cowed and not without influence. Labor legislation under
Louis XVI demonstrates that, for many influential government

decision makers, both in theory and in practice, the laboring classes

had to retain significant autonomy of action on the shop floor,” a
study of French industrialization between 1750 and 1850 con-
cluded.105 Therefore, the political institutions governing labor in
Britain were not necessarily the norm even within Europe and
they too contributed to Britain’s eighteenth-century economic
divergence.

The French path of heavy cottons

Before the restriction on cotton printing was lifted in 1759, French

manufacturers in Rouen – and in several other centers where Rouen
goods began to be copied – focused their energies on making the
heavier mixtures of cotton and linen rather than on imitating the
lighter cloths of the Indian subcontinent. The focus on heavy cotton
varieties may have begun with the arrêt of 1709 by the Parlement of
Rouen, which permitted the use of cotton wefts, and these began to be
used with silk warps to weave siamoises, an imitation of the robes that
ambassadors from Siam had worn for an audience with Louis XIV in
1684 and 1686.106 Linen warps soon replaced the silk in order to
produce a lower-priced cloth. Other mixed textiles were also woven
with cotton and linen in Rouen, including fustians and even some
lighter cloths such as handkerchiefs, which the growing popularity of
snuff made an essential accessory.107
The expanding use of cotton in Rouen was not free of tensions and
troubles, however. After a decade of rapid growth, city officials
became concerned that cotton spinning in the surrounding countryside
was creating shortages of workers for agriculture. For about ten years,
there were heated debates between the supporters and opponents of
restrictions on the cotton industry, but the Parlement of Rouen opted
to give fairly free room for its development. From the 1730s,
according to Serge Chassagne, “nothing more hindered the victorious
expansion of cotton,” but the French cotton manufacturers were
already several decades behind those of Britain.108
A survey conducted in 1727, the findings of which are contained in
Table 5.3, reveals that 59 percent of the cotton workers in Rouen, the
major cotton manufacturing center in France, produced siamoise. In
the eighteenth century, the term siamoise encompassed a large variety
of linen, silk and cotton mixtures, but until at least mid-century these
cloths were heavier than the cottons of India. A source from 1722
reports that the cotton goods made in Rouen replaced “little cloths

148

Table 5.3 Distribution of cotton workers in Rouen, 1727

Type of cloth Number of workers Percent of total

Siamoises 14,988 59
Striped toiles, linen and cotton 2,664 11
All cotton toiles 3,160 13
Fustians 400 2
Linen and cotton handkerchiefs 344 1
All cotton handkerchiefs 3,704 15
Source: Depitre, Toile peinte, pp. 147–8.

made of wool.”109 According to the eminent textile historian Florence

Montgomery, “Their similarity to English worsteds, especially to
striped camlets, is unmistakable, and doubtless these less expensive
fabrics were made in the hope of capturing from England the bulk
of the trade with Spain, including the more important West Indies
and South American colonies. . . Striped siamoises made of linen and
cotton were used for inexpensive coverings, summer slipcovers, bed
covers, and hangings from 1737.”110
Later in the eighteenth century the term “siamoise” was
extended to lighter textiles. In 1762, the French Manuel historique
listed thinner cotton and silk dress goods under the category of
siamoise, but no samples of these cloths survive. By the 1770s,
siamoise also designated a plain white cloth made from cotton or
cotton and linen and twenty-seven such swatches are contained in
the John Holker, Jr., papers, dated 1779. The absence of thinner
siamoise swatches from earlier in the century, however, suggests
that they were not manufactured before the 1750s or 1760s.111 For
much of the eighteenth century siamoises were cloths that were
heavier than the average Indian calico and most definitely thicker
and more substantial than muslin.
The activities of John Holker, Jr., who from the 1750s played a key
role in the transfer of British cotton know-how to Rouen, also
indicates the prominent place that heavier cottons held in the city.
French officials saw Holker as useful “because he was familiar with
the manufacture of fustians in Lancashire, and this implied a know-
ledge of cotton velvets.”112 In his first visit to England to recruit
workers for Rouen, Holker financed an apprenticeship for one Peter

Morris to be trained in the cutting and shearing of fustians. Morris

arrived in Rouen in 1755. In his first batch of a dozen English
workers, Holker brought over at least three men who were expert
in fustian manufacture. The other workers possessed knowledge of
calendering and of loom and equipment manufacturing. Calendering
was of special interest to the French because they believed that their
velvets were inferior to those made in Britain because of poor finishing.
Experts in fustians and velvets also loomed large in later contingents of
migrants from Lancashire to Rouen. It is striking that not a single
worker that Holker recruited is identified as an expert in any of
the vast array of cloths that Lancashire manufactured in imitation
of Indian goods.113

Downloaded from Cambridge Books Online by IP 210.212.129.125 on Sun Dec 23 05:54:40 WET 2012.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511993398.006
Cambridge Books Online © Cambridge University Press, 2012

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5

| State and market: Britain, France

the import of Indian cottons diverged, which shaped the potentials

Indian cottons in the Ottoman Empire

directed their gaze westward. While several generations of historians

cloth in the Ottoman Empire with Indian names, evidence of an

Table 5.1 Cotton prices in Cairo, 1687–1797 (paras per qantar,

1687 278 100

While there was an enormous run-up in the price of raw cotton,

Table 5.2 An index of cotton and linen cloth prices

Ottoman imitations of Indian cloth

written, “Ottoman demand for Indian shawls as well as fine Indian

State policy and textile manufacturing: the British case

cotton works of Britain were the primary beneficiaries. It is a bedrock

Company’s imports of Indian cottons.37 Again, in 1698, a bill to

turned to the linen of Scotland, Ireland and central Europe as the

manufacture progressively, as it advanced to maturity – And that the

Economic philosophy and state policy: the Ottoman Empire

and taxes. Imports, by contrast, were fostered and facilitated.” Genç

manufacturing from external competition. In the case of Indian cottons,

The Atlantic market

French producers, British cotton masters were meeting the demands

traditionally been sold in large quantities. In the closing decades of the

economy in the sixteenth century, as was once believed. Nevertheless,

French cottons: state policy and the Atlantic trade

Despite the restriction on the manufacture and consumption of

the French Company’s offerings of Indian goods could be supple-

Indian cloth imports correct any market shortcoming. These actions

the growth of re-exports vis-à-vis domestic consumption, and to

decision makers, both in theory and in practice, the laboring classes

The French path of heavy cottons

Before the restriction on cotton printing was lifted in 1759, French

Table 5.3 Distribution of cotton workers in Rouen, 1727

Type of cloth Number of workers Percent of total

made of wool.”109 According to the eminent textile historian Florence

Morris to be trained in the cutting and shearing of fustians. Morris

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