Les Cahiers d’Afrique de l’Est / The East

African Review
51 | 2016
Global History, East Africa and The Classical
Traditions

Note—Cotton and the Great Divergence: The Asian

Fibre that made Europe Rich
Giorgio Riello

Electronic version
URL: https://journals.openedition.org/eastafrica/319
DOI: 10.4000/eastafrica.319
ISSN: 2790-1076

Publisher
IFRA - Institut Français de Recherche en Afrique

Printed version
Date of publication: 1 March 2016
Number of pages: 63-76
ISSN: 2071-7245

Electronic reference
Giorgio Riello, “Note—Cotton and the Great Divergence: The Asian Fibre that made Europe Rich”, Les
Cahiers d’Afrique de l’Est / The East African Review [Online], 51 | 2016, Online since 13 September 2019,
connection on 09 December 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/eastafrica/319 ; DOI: https://
doi.org/10.4000/eastafrica.319

Les Cahiers d’Afrique de l’Est / The East African Review

 Global History, East Africa and the Classical Traditions.

Note - Cotton and the Great Divergence: The Asian Fibre that made Europe Rich

Giorgio Riello

Today the world textile and garment trade amounts to a staggering 425 billion US$ in val-
ue. We are told that under the pressure of increasing globalisation, it is Asia – India, China
and Turkey in particular – that is the new world manufacturing powerhouse. However the
recent growth of Asia into the world’s leading textile manufacturer is not a new phenom-
enon. Until the industrial revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, both India and
China were leading economic areas and their skills in cotton textile manufacturing were
far superior to those of Europe. Asia manufactured great quantities of colourful printed and
painted cottons that were sold across the Indian Ocean and reached faraway places such as
Japan and Europe where they were craved as exotic fashionable goods.

Historians have argued that this ensured for Asia – and in particular India – widespread
prosperity, as well as high rates of economic growth and technological development, but
that sometime after 1750 Europe experienced a sudden and radical economic transforma-
tion: the continent industrialised. Mechanisation was first experienced in the textile sector.
The spinning machine allowed one late eighteenth-century European woman to produce as
much yarn as 300 women in India. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, India,
China and the Ottoman Empire switched from being world producers to being buyers of
European cotton textiles, a position that they retained for the following two centuries.

My book Cotton (2013) and Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2015) have argued that
unlike other commodities such as cod or salt, cotton came to transform the global econ-
omy: with differing emphases, both books claim that cotton and cotton textiles were not
just commodities with a global appeal or products that drew on global networks of labour,
materials and knowledge.1 Cotton came to reshape the relationship between different areas
of the world, transformed productive processes, created new systems of capital and labour
and significantly innovated technologies.

Notwithstanding the simplicity of this narrative and the global role that cotton and cotton
textiles had over centuries, most historians are far more familiar with the role of cotton in
the process of industrialization of Europe. Students sometimes seem to ignore that cotton
was not a fibre grown in Europe and that Lancashire did not have cotton
cotton plantations.
plantations.

ITherefore I wish
wish to turn to to
first turn
thefirst to the
issue issue of industrialization
of industrialization to reassess
to reassess the rolethe role played
played by
by cotton
textiles. My argument is that the story of cotton should be interpreted as one of economic

Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Sven
Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (London: Vintage, 2015). My book developed over the years through the activities

Network project (GEHN) funded by the Leverhulme Trust: http://www2.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/Research/GEHN/

Home.aspx. Among the results of this network were two volumes, both published in 2009. Giorgio Riello and Prasannan
Parthasarathi, eds., The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 63
2009); and Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, eds., How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles (Leiden:
Brill, 2009).
 Global History, East Africa and the Classical Traditions.

development
between richer and poor parts of the globe a topic that is closely linked to the issue of
economic divergence that has dominated debates in global history in the last decade.
However, in my work on cotton textiles I have also attempted to de-emphasise the
disruptive nature of divergence as conceptualized by Kenneth Pomeraz and his followers
(and indeed critics) to emphasise instead continuities across time. 2

In essence this means a re-assessment of the meaning of the British industrial revolution
(and European industrialization), something that in my work is not seen as a sudden and deep
transformation of manufacturing (the adoption of new technologies and the high economic
growth that this ensued) but more a process of economic and socio-cultural transformation
that was as reliant on factors endogenous to Europe as it was on external stimuli.

Cotton and the Industrial Revolution

Let me start therefore by considering a traditional narrative that posits that Europe (and
Britain in particular) became rich (developed and industrialised) because of an industrial
revolution based on cotton. Eric Hobsbawn was eloquent and forceful in equal measure
when he said “Whoever says Industrial Revolution, says cotton”.3

Indeed this is the message reiterated in dozens of economic history textbooks. But the
association between cotton and industrialisation is not new and has not been created
by historians. Nineteenth-century commentators already posited it as a truism and their
explanation was accepted in places as far away from Britain as Japan (Figure 1).

This image is part of several dozen such prints produced in the 1870s and mostly deals with
the subject of the relationship between Japan and the West. With the opening of Japan’s
borders in the 1860s, a wave of ‘Occidentalism’ gripped the country as Japanese people
wanted to know more about the West. Prints were produced on a varied range of topics
that include Thomas Carlyle, the modernity of the United States, and the exoticism of
European dress, among the many. The caption says the Englishman represented in the
image “struggled with making a machine to spin a cotton yarn for several years, which
made his family impoverished.

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000). On the critique of divergence see: P.H.H. Vries, “Are Coal and Colonies Really Crucial?
Kenneth Pomeranz and the Great Divergence,” Journal of World History 12/2 (2001): 407-46; Prasannan Parthasarathi,
Past & Present 167 (2002): 275-93. Recent contributions that revise the concept of
divergence are: Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence:
The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Peer Vries,
Escaping Poverty: The Origins of Modern Economic Growth (Vienna: Vienna University Press, 2013); Id., State, Economy
and the Great Divergence: Great Britain and China, 1680s-1850s (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). For critical assessments, see:
Joseph M. Bryant, ‘The West and the Rest Revisited: Debating Capitalist Origins, European Colonialism, and the Advent of
Modernity,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 31/4 (2006): 403-44; Patrick K. O’Brien, “Historical Foundations for a Global

and Reliable Knowledge”, Journal of Global History

64 Capitalism”, Journal of Early Modern History, 19/1 (2015): 1-43.
Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 34.
 Global History, East Africa and the Classical Traditions.

Figure 1. Sir Richard Arkwright, inventor of the spinning machine, second half of the nineteenth century.
Chadbourne collection of Japanese prints, Library of Congress. hōsho paper. LC: FP 2 - Chadbourne,
no. 30.

Seeing him wasting money without success, driven by the anger, his wife broke a scale
model. Arkwright got so mad at her that he kicked her out of the house. After that event, he
successfully invented the machine and made fortunes on it.”4

The scene represents the famous inventor sending his wife to her parents as she deliberately
broke his machine. The main character of such a story was none other than Sir Richard
Arkwright, the inventor of the waterframe, the first mechanical spinning machine patented
in 1769 in England. The machine was actually much bigger than represented in the print, and
the story goes that it was not the wife to destroy it, but that there was fear in the 1770s that
a mob might want to destroy it as it put out of work hundreds of workers, mostly female
spinners.

4 /

/ /

. 65
/ . See Riello, Cotton, pp 211-13.
5

3
 Global History, East Africa and the Classical Traditions.

context of conjugal disharmony, a situation that would have resonated better in a nation not
yet industrialised than an image representing factories and the English working class. This
amusing image is also a reminder that the story of cotton is one that has long been set in the
eighteenth century, heavily reliant on technological innovation and application, and above
all, that it is a narrative that is quintessentially English. All of this seems at odds with the
fact that cotton textile manufacturing had been a major sector of many economies across
the world for the best part of half a millennium before Arkwright invented his celebrated
machine. How is one to tell the long story of the economic engagement with cotton textile
production without narrating it as the prequel to the industrial revolution or as a cavalcade
across the centuries towards the ineluctable capitalist development of textile production?

Cotton and its Long History

Although cotton cultivation and its transformation into cloth was already a developed
sector before the Common Era, it was around year 1000 CE that cotton textile production
developed into a large-scale economic sector in several areas of the Afro-Eurasian landmass.
During the period from the eleventh to the sixteenth century the production and trade of
cotton textiles achieved global relevance and several regions of South Asia gained
international domination with their production. Cottons were traded by Indian and other
merchants and were eagerly purchased by consumers who appreciated their colours, design
and material properties. One can see a process of ‘globalisation’ of cotton textiles that is not
just important per se
and cultural encounters especially in the period between 1400 and 1800.5 By the European
later middle ages, Indian cotton textiles were a common item of apparel and furnishing in
many regions within the Indian Ocean and beyond, from Southeast Asia to West Africa,
Japan, and Europe. Eventually the use of cotton textiles became commonplace across the
Atlantic both in Latin and North America (Figure 2).6 The trade of finished goods (yarn but
more commonly cloth) coincided also with the spread of cotton cultivation and associated
technologies (for cleaning cotton and spinning it). Many areas of the world became
producers of cottons in their own right.

Yet whilst several areas of the world – most notably Eastern China, parts of Southeast Asia,
West Africa and the Ottoman Empire – produced cotton textiles, it was India that excelled
globally in their production.7

I call this a period of the ‘The First Cotton Revolution’. In this period India was the core
of a global system that was only loosely coordinated by the Subcontinent. Whilst enjoying
the competitive advantage provided by the high quality of local production, most

5
Giorgio Riello, The Globalization of Cotton Textiles: Indian Cottons, Europe, and the Atlantic World, 1600–1850. In Riello
and Parthasarathi, eds., Spinning World, pp. 261–87.
6
See the recent contribution by Robert DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the
Atlantic World, 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
66 7

and Roy, eds., How India Clothed the World, pp. 1-27.
 Global History, East Africa and the Classical Traditions.

Figure 2. A large palampore produced on the Coromandel Coast for the European market, c. 1720-40.
307 x 248 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, IS.36-1950. Given by G.P. Baker.

North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

of the areas with which India interacted engaged in their own right in the cultivation of
raw cotton, its processing and manufacturing into cloth. Together they formed a system
of competition as well as symbiosis. Trade was structured through networks of Asian
intermediaries and consumers were keen to mix local and exotic commodities, the
latter being often customised in accordance with tastes and local meanings attributed to
cloth. Cotton textiles were central to the articulation of a global system structuring itself
mostly through ‘nodes’ of trade.

India indeed emerged as a core area but its position was over time weakened by processes
of osmosis dominated by what I call a ‘centrifugal’ logic: resources, technologies and
commodities tended to diffuse across the system described. This was the case from at least
three points of view.

First, in terms of materials: cotton cultivation spread from India across Asia to form other
poles of production and trade with which India interacted. It was around year 1000 CE
when cotton became a successful crop in China, the Middle East and Africa. Second, such
a process was limited not just by environmental constraints but also by the capacity of the
receiving areas to learn and put into practice techniques and technologies that transformed

spinning and weaving technologies across most of Asia and Africa - and to a certain extent
also Europe – meant the development of a new economic sector and changes to both the
agrarian and manufacturing economies of Eurasia. Finally, products also diffused across 67
 Global History, East Africa and the Classical Traditions.

space. Indian cottons were appreciated for their visual and tactile properties and ensured for
India a central role in global trade. However the ‘diffusion of artefacts’ was one also based
on inspiration and copying, with the design and aesthetics of Indian cloth being appropriat-
ed and reinterpreted in different areas of Afro-Eurasia.

Cotton and Divergence

My own concerns have been to understand how cotton was central to the creation of a ‘new
global system’ increasingly presided over by Europe, not Asia. As previously said, this is a
story that has been normally narrated in terms of the industrialisation of Europe. However,
I argue that technological development was just one among the many factors explaining
this transition. My research underlines the importance of raw materials, markets for prod-
ucts and consumers’ preferences as well.

come from one of Angus Maddison’s pioneering attempts at quantifying GDP in different
parts of the world and in different eras. As such they should be viewed with caution due to
the lack of reliable data. However, they provide an explanation for a couple of important
topics that have dominated the global economic history agenda over the past two decades.
First, the concept of divergence as proposed by Ken Pomeranz in his eponymous book
published in 2000 in which he argued that the two extremes of the Eurasian landmass
‘diverged’ economically sometimes, he says, after 1750, producing a gap that widened be-
tween the ‘rich’ and the ‘poor’ parts of the world between the mid eighteenth century and
the second half of the twentieth century.

The second topic of debate is about ‘convergence’. This is not part of the agenda of history
but belongs to the debate on globalisation. Essentially it deals with the narrowing of the
gap, its eventual closure and inversion. This is explained by the rise of China and India once
again, cheap manufacturing, and in particular textile and clothing and other consumer
goods seems to be central to this narrative.

Behind this curve lies one of the most complex problems in recent economic history. There
is a certain amount of disagreement over the chronology and intensity of these processes,
in particular whether Europe was already more developed than China or India in c. 1500.
There is also a big debate on what is going to happen next: whether the US will remain
an economic and political hegemonic; and whether China will be able to reshape the global
system, in particular the system of production, something that has not yet happened. Yet,
one has not to forget the necessity to explain the ‘in between’. No one will deny the fact
that today Europeans are on average fourteen times richer than ten generations ago. Not
just that, but we are also globally ten times more numerous (in Europe possibly five-six
times more numerous than three centuries ago). The wealth of the world has multiplied
exponentially over the past three centuries, something that had not happened since the
invention of agriculture. However this increase of wealth has not been equally distributed.
68
 Global History, East Africa and the Classical Traditions.

Figure 3. Comparative levels of China / Western Europe GDP per Capita, 1400-2050
(in 1990 dollars; log. scale).
Source: Angus Maddison, (Paris: Development Centre
Studies, 2001), p. 44.

Today’s poor countries are much poorer compared to the rich countries than three centuries
ago. In this sense, divergence is the correct expression to identify the fact that part of the

until recently the Western World with its antipodean offshoots of Australian and the West
in the East: Japan.

Why has this happened? Over the last century explanations ranged between two poles:
that of the ‘Exceptionalism of the West’ and the idea that it all happened because of
‘contingencies’ (incidents of history). There is a gradient of ‘agency’ in the process of
divergence on the part of the West. Exceptionalism tends to emphasise that Europe had
something special that no-one else had (a special culture or religion – Weber; a special
technological creativity – Landes; a special political ability to conquer – Jones, etc.).
Contingencies are lucky coincidences. Europe had good and cheap reserves of coal, as
noted by Pomeranz, and there has also been a more recent emphasis on Europe’s good
institutions.8

8
Among the many see: James M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric
History (New York: Guilford Press, 1993); David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Are Some So Rich
and Others So Poor? (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998); E. L. Jones, The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and
Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 3rd ed. 2003); Ian Morris, Why the
West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and 69
Giroux, 2010); Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (London: Allen Lane, 2011).
 Global History, East Africa and the Classical Traditions.

One should note that today exceptionalism is out of fashion and politically incorrect. Our
‘great inventor’ as portrayed in the 1870s Japanese print is therefore equally out of fashion
as it implied that Europe had inventive minds (or more generally a culture of invention)
that other cultures did not have.

In my work I claim that there was nothing distinctive about Europe that made it more likely
to become the rich, rather than the poor part of the world. However, I emphasise the
fact that it was Europe’s relations with other parts of the world that started a long process
of change: Europeans launched into both exploration and the understanding of the world
beyond their continent that brought about both intentional and unintentional outcomes. I
call this a process of ‘learning’ (a rather unfortunate label I later realised), meaning that
Europe had to acquire knowledge of cotton textiles in terms of production, trade and
bre.

This was a long process.

the use of cotton textiles, the European chartered companies provided useful knowledge
in order to engage with a complex variety of cotton fabrics that they purchased in India:
Europeans had to learn how to successfully trade and market such fabrics. This was a

production of such products at home and their trade within the Atlantic Ocean. But learning
involved consumers as well as traders. Unlike much of the literature, I argue that consumers
in Europe (and elsewhere for that matter) did not seize the opportunity to purchase novel
fabrics such as cotton textiles.9 Quite the opposite, they had to be convinced about the
appeal of cotton. Cultural historians have alerted economic historians to the importance of
consumption. Indeed the history of consumption has been over the past couple of decades
an arena of wide-ranging research that has led some historians to claim the existence of
a consumer revolution to counterbalance the more production-led industrial revolution.
Economic historians have done their best – and failed - to consider consumption as an
endogenous variable.

Both cultural, social and indeed economic history seem to agree on the dynamism
brought about by changes in patterns of consumption in Europe in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, something that I dispute in the case of cotton textiles. It took the
best part of a century for cotton to become fully integrated into the consuming patterns
of Europeans – a process that had to be aided by the East India companies through trial-
and-error and that was opposed by strong textile lobbies, especially those protecting the
interests of wool and silk textile producers.

My analysis gives a great deal of space to consumers whom I see as the ultimate arbiters of
production. The consumption of calicoes and chintzes became important not just in Europe.
Atlantic markets provided an entirely new space for these Asian fabrics and their European

9
This argument was originally presented in The Indian Apprenticeship: the Trade of Indian Textiles and the Making of
European Cottons. In Riello and Roy, eds., How India Clothed the World, pp. 307–46.
70
 Global History, East Africa and the Classical Traditions.

imitations in which to thrive. Cotton textiles changed the dress of African consumers and
slaves in the Americas. They allowed the development of new production centres in places
such as Manchester in England and Rouen in France whose production of cheap copies of
Indian cloths was nearly totally sold to African and American consumers.

This in turn allowed for technological experimentation, not in spinning as classic

narratives of industrialisation suggest, but in the printing and painting of cloth. Some
serious attempts to replicate processes of production of Indian cotton textiles especially
in printing and dyeing led to the creation of a thriving cotton printing industry in Europe a
century before Arkwright’s introduction of new spinning technologies.10

The process of learning involved however also the procurement of the raw material. Unable
to cultivate it at home, Europeans drew from the experience of sugar and set up a new form
of agrarian unit outside the borders of the European continent: the slave plantation. In this
case the relationship between cotton and other commodities (sugar but also coffee, cocoa,
indigo etc.) is of fundamental importance (Figure 4). Once again, the plantation economy
was not the ultimate goal of European endeavour but emerged over time as a viable solution
to the scarcity of raw cotton that had plagued European textile manufacturing since the
middle ages.

In explaining what Europeans had to learn, I made the conscious choice of ‘going

and encountered as traders in the Asian Ocean – and finish with raw cotton. It was over a
period of a couple of centuries that Europeans merchants and entrepreneurs came to master
a system that replaced different parts of a global commodity chain. Merchants started by

started printing on imported white cloth (as this allowed designs and colours better suited

This process of ‘learning’ was protracted. It has nothing of the triumphal narrative of
European ascendancy. In fact Europeans were late-comers and failed miserably several
times. Unlike narratives of divergence that claim the economic success of Europe to be
attributable to one factor, I see Europe’s economic transformation as the layering of
different factors that include direct access to Indian calicoes and chintzes; the ability to
integrate these fabrics into European patterns of consumption; the capacity to sell them
outside Europe (Atlantic markets) and the slow acceptance of cotton that made it possible
for Europe to engage with this new commodity and material, eventually making it part of
its own economy and patterns of consumption.

10
See also Giorgio Riello, “Asian Knowledge and the Development of Calico Printing in Europe in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of Global History 5/1 (2010): 1–28.

71
 Global History, East Africa and the Classical Traditions.

Figure 4. ‘Coton’, plate VIII of plate from M. Chambon, Le commerce de l’Amérique par Marseille
(Avignon, 1764). Private collection.

Cotton and Industrialisation Revised

Why didn’t Europe become yet another area among the many world areas in which cotton
spinning and weaving were carried out? How did this process of ‘learning’ mature into the
structuring of something quite new in Europe? My response here whilst acknowledging
the role of technology, pays attention to other factors as well. Unlike other world areas,
the European system did not cultivate its own raw cotton. Climate simply did not allow
that. The commodity chain had to be geographically broken as all raw materials had to be
imported from another continent. If there is something unique about the story of cotton, it
is not Arkwright’s machine, but the fact that for the first time in human history a very large
sector of a nation’s (indeed a continent’s) economy came to be totally reliant on materials
from another continent. This was the beginning of what Alfred Crosby calls ‘ecologic
imperialism’. I am not saying that cotton was free or that it was manna from heaven. Cotton
for the first time disconnected the agrarian and the manufacturing economies. It allowed
an expansion of the manufacturing economies of European countries on a scale that would
have been either impossible or disastrous if resources were to be found only internally in
England or Europe.

This is a tricky argument from a historical point of view that can only be proven through
72 counterfactual methodologies. In my book I consider an industrial revolution in England
 Global History, East Africa and the Classical Traditions.

and in Europe with no cotton – therefore with the same quantity of cloth made of wool
or linen. The result is that there would have not been any industrial revolution as we
know it. Essentially the elasticity of supply of a vegetable fibre was far superior to an
animal fibre like wool or to another vegetable but labour-intensive fibre as flax was. Even
more interesting is to imagine a world in which all the cotton was produced by peasants
(or slaves) in Europe, something that I claim would have changed European agrarian
organisation beyond recognition. Such a counterfactual history might appear somewhat
laughable but in reality one might say that the harsh European climate avoided a path of
economic development that would have been less conducive and surely less ‘revolutionary’
than what happened.
in the fibre. Yet, any sensible economic historian could point out that at the end of the day
Imachines
claim that the the
made revolutionary
difference.nature andmight
One data modernity of cotton
be sufficient to was in thethis
highlight fibre. Yet,inany
point: the
sensible
fifty years between 1780 and 1830 the production cost of a yard of calico cloth fell bythe
economic historian could point out that at the end of the day machines made 83
difference. One data might be sufficient to highlight this point: in the fifty years between
1780 and 1830 the production cost of a yard of calico cloth fell by 83 percent. Cotton
textile production increased tenfold between 1770 and 1790 and tenfold again in the
following dozen years. Economic historians see this incredible growth as the result of the
application of new technologies, something that is hard to dismiss and an opinion I do not
contend with. Yet as to why British and later European producers embraced machinery is
hard to explain. My explanation is that technological innovation was sought after but that
there was no overall plan or even understanding that it might lead to massive increases in
productivity. If there was really an overall rationale in increasing productivity, why not
look for technological innovation in woollen production – the major European textile
sector? Why instead focus on a small – and one might say insignificant – sector such as
on a small
cotton – and one might say insignificant – sector such as cotton manufacturing?
manufacturing?

My view of technological development follows a different explanation, put forward by my

colleague Maxine Berg. She claims that the quality of products was key both for governments
and entrepreneurs as competitiveness was a function of excellence in manufacturing. The
interpretation is that technologies were sought after in order to produce a product that was
as good as the Indian imported cloth.

In this sense the story of the rise of cotton manufacturing in Europe as a whole was not set
within its own borders. The terms of the debate on how best – and even more importantly,
if it was desirable – to develop cotton textile production in Europe were explicitly ‘global’.
For example, the textile producers and traders of Rouen – France’s leading cotton centre
in the mid eighteenth century – wrote a frank report underlining the weaknesses of the
country’s cotton industry compared to its Indian competitors.

This image from Chambon (Figure 5), to be found later in the eighteenth century in the
Encyclopedie, supports the argument that many contemporaries saw human capital, not
technological innovation, as the solution to compete with India. This is why in 1784 the
French government under the coordination of the intendant du commerce Jacques-Marie-
Jerome Michau de Montaran, organised for fifty skilled artisans from the Coromandel coast
to relocate to France. They arrived in Thieux (a couple of miles from present-day Charles
73
de Gaulle Airport) in October 1785.
 Global History, East Africa and the Classical Traditions.

The project was aimed at training local apprentices in the practices of spinning and
weaving adopted by the Indian workmen. Results were disastrous, to say the least. The
sickly and insubordinate Indians managed to produce cloth worth 12,000 livres against a
cost of 41,000 livres spent to support them. None of the apprentices completed their term
and the Indian artisans were sent back to the Coromandel at the end of 1787.11 This is a
nice vignette but it also tells us there was no pre-established rationale towards increasing
productivity and that even if increased productivity was sought after, technology might not
have been seen as the solution.

Conclusion: A New Global System

How did the world that cotton created look like once cotton textile manufacturing became
the most important sector of Western economies? Sven Beckert, in his recent book, sees it as
a capitalist world dominated by force (violence and exploitation) and power (especially of
the US as the prime producer of raw cotton). My work is more interested in understanding
the world of manufacturing and consumers. Whilst not denying the evils of slavery and
the profits of raw cotton production, my interest is in understanding how and why cotton
textiles continued to be such prized commodities worldwide.

In the same way in which calicoes and chintzes were continuously changed, adapted and
modified during the centuries to respond to consumer demand and fashion, so the industrial
cottons produced in the mills of Lancashire had to be ‘reinvented’ in order to be successful
global commodities. This was done materially and by selling at low prices. But here the
more nuanced forms of cultural power are also important. Imperialism imposed new
cultural models that in turn heavily influenced sartorial models: this is part of a history of
what we might call the ‘globalisation of western attire and consumption’.
In my book I claim that the West reshaped not just production and trade but also the logic
of the system. It created a global system of trade, consumption and manufacturing that I
see as ‘centripetal’ in nature, one based on the capacity of the centre to attract resources and
profits towards its productive and commercial core, rather than a ‘centrifugal’ one based
instead on processes of diffusion of resources, technologies, knowledge and sharing of
profits and the emergence of several industries around the world.

The new system was one of competition and exclusivity, rather than cooperation and
symbiosis; it was based on direct connections – often coordinated by the rising European
financial centres – rather than loose areas of exchange based on dynamics nodes. But most
of all it was a system whose prosperity was based on forms of intense global exploitation
of natural resources and markets. And in this sense formal or informal colonialism might
be seen as the political face of this.

11
See Riello, Cotton, p. 217.
74
 Global History, East Africa and the Classical Traditions.

Figure 5. ‘Coton’, plate IX from M. Chambon, Le commerce de l’Amérique par Marseille (Avignon, 1764). Spinning
was portrayed as an activity based on skills, thus visualising the gesture of a hand next to a machine for reeling.
Private collection.

75
 Global History, East Africa and the Classical Traditions.

Bibliography
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