Failure and the Industrial Revolution: The East India Companies’ Procurement and theRise of the British Cotton Textile Industry

Giorgio RielloEuropean University Institute and University of Warwick

Cotton and the Industrial Revolution
Patrick O’Brien in a series of publications co-authored with Philip Hunt and Trevor Griffiths
in the 1990s advanced a new and stimulating view of the process of British industrialisation.
Moving beyond classic analyses that posited the mechanisation of textile production as the
explananda of what is succinctly called the Industrial Revolution, O’Brien convincingly argued
for the importance of political economy.1 The British state fostered the growth of a small sector
such as cotton textile manufacturing especially in the north of England. Two conditions internal
to the kingdom brought about over time what was in no sense a coherent mercantilist – let alone
industrial – set of policies. First, the weight of linen imports on Britain’s balance of trade. As
woollens and worsteds were quantitatively by far the most important items of export – and they
had been so for several centuries – by the eighteenth century, linen was Britain’s major importespecially from continental Europe and Ireland. Whilst there was no clear idea that cotton yarn
and cloth might replace flax and linen, the British state understood that such a heavy relianceon foreign markets was both economically and politically hazardous.2 Second, it was thoughtthat the economic system internal to the British Isles might provide a solution to this problem.
England, climatically unsuitable for hemp and flax cultivation, had a thriving linen industry.

1

Patrick K. O’Brien, Trevor Griffith, and Philip Hunt, ‘Political Components of the Industrial Revolution: English

Cotton Textile Industry, 1660-1774’, EHR 44:3 (1991), 395-423; Trevor Griffiths, Philip A. Hunt and Patrick K.
O’Brien, ‘Inventive Activity in the British Textile Industry, 1700-1800’, JEH 52:4 (1992), 881-906; Patrick
O’Brien, Trevor Griffiths, and Philip Hunt, ‘Technological Change during the First Industrial Revolution: The
Paradigm Case of Textiles’, in Robert Fox (ed.), Technological Change: Methods and Themes in the History ofTechnology (Amsterdam, 1996), pp. 155-76.
2

Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 248-9; David Ormrod,

The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770(Cambridge, 2002), esp. pp. 152-154, 169-72.
1

Scotland and Ireland emerged instead within what might be considered an internal ‘colonial
system’, as areas for the cultivation of valuable flax.3

This explanation was complemented by the work of historians who put more weight onprocesses of product innovation than on political economy. The development of new draperies
in response to the commercialisation of lighter woollens in Continental Europe was part andparcel of the transformation of a number of productive sectors in late seventeenth- andeighteenth-century Britain that included glass, porcelain as well as textile production.4 Key tothe creation of new products was the inspiration gained from and the imitation of goods
imported not just from Continental Europe but also from Asia. The Chinese porcelain andIndian cotton textiles imported by the English and other European East India companies
stimulated not just new patterns of consumption but also attempts at substituting these imports
with home-produced wares. The economic categories of Import Substitution and Import
Substitution Industrialisation were reframed to consider the complex material (replacement of
one substance with another), cultural (creation of demand and issues of taste), as well as
technical and technological (new techniques and machinery) variables that were part ofprocesses of imitation, invention and innovation in European manufacturing.5
O’Brien et alt. were alert to the connection between the political economy internal to the British
Isles and the global repercussions of trade. The development of a thriving cotton textile industry
mostly geared towards the production of printed cottons was strictly linked to the import of3

Patrick O’Brien, Trevor Griffiths, and Philip Hunt, ‘Scottish, Irish, and Imperial Connections: Parliament, theThree Kingdoms, and the Mechanisation of Cotton Spinning in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, EHR 61:3 (2008),
625-50. See also Brenda Collins and Philip Ollerenshaw (eds.), The European Linen Industry in Historical
Perspective (Oxford, 2003).
4

D. C. Coleman, ‘Textile Growth’, in N. B. Harte and K. G. Ponting (eds), Textile History and Economic History:

Essays in Honour of Miss Julia de Lacy Mann (Manchester, 1973), esp. pp. 8-11; N. B. Harte (ed.), The New
Draperies in the Low Countries and England, 1300-1800 (Oxford, 1997); Maxine Berg, ‘New Commodities,
Luxuries and Their Consumers in Eighteenth Century England’, in Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (eds),
Consumers and Luxury in Europe, 1650-1850 (Manchester, 1999), pp. 63–85; John Styles, ‘Product Innovationin Early modern London’, Past & Present 168 (2000), 124-69; Id., ‘From Imitation to Invention: Creating
Commodities in Eighteenth Century Britain’, EHR 55:1 (2002), 1–30.
5Maxine Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century’,Past & Present 182 (2004), 85–142; John Styles, ‘Fashion, Textiles and the Origins of the Industrial Revolution’,East Asian Journal of British History 5 (2016), 161–89
2

Indian calicoes, a rising trade that began in the second half of the seventeenth century andcontinued over the next century. More than half a million pieces (each c. 15 yards in length) of
Indian cotton cloth on average were imported by the English East India Company (EEIC) every
year in the period 1660-1760. The size of this trade became so vast that it worried not just
British linen producers, but also woollen merchants and silk manufacturers. As in most otherparts of Europe, they convinced the British government to ban the sale of Indian cottons on
domestic British markets through acts passed in 1701 and 1721 respectively.6 Legislativeintervention was complemented by a system of duties, bounties and excise regulation thatencouraged domestic production both of printed linens and printed and patterned cottons.7
Lancashire – and most especially the Manchester hinterland – emerged as centres of cotton andflax spinning as well as the weaving of mixed cotton-linen textiles. The textile printing industry
also relocated to this area from Southern England, printing on both linen, mixed linen-cotton
cloth, and imported Indian white cotton cloth.8

I have here summarised a more complex and chronologically nuanced history of substitution,
imitation and industrial restructuring through political economy intervention. For the purposeof the present analysis it is worth highlighting two aspects of this explanation that this chapter
would like to query. First, when cotton textiles are considered, the political economy of the
British state has been considered different from that of its two main competitors: The
Netherlands and France.9 The long-term success of cotton textile manufacturing in Britain has
been attributed to its subtle policies. Unlike the blanket prohibition imposed in France on the
consumption and imitation of all types of fabrics imported from India, in Britain the printingof mixed cotton-linen fabrics as well as the printing of white Indian cloth destined for export

6

Riello, Cotton, pp. 117-120.

7

See William J. Ashworth, Customs and Excise: Trade, Production and Consumption in England, 1640-1845(Oxford, 2003), esp. pp. 38-40; Id., The Industrial Revolution: The State, Knowledge and Global Trade (London,
2017), esp. ch. 5.
8For a new analysis of the Manchester production before the spinning revolution see: Ariane Fennetaux and John

Styles (eds), John Holker’s livre d’echantillons (forthcoming, 2021).
9

There is no analysis of the political economy of the textile sector in the Dutch Republic. For France see: Felicia

Gottmann, Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism. Asian Textiles in France 1680–
1760 (London, 2016).
3

remained legal.10 In France this could only happen in special areas outside the jurisdiction ofcentral government. By contrast, mercantile Holland never imposed any restrictions on the
trade and consumption of Indian cottons and silks. Here again, the more protectionist position
adopted by Britain secured a sheltered niche in which the local production of substitute goods
could thrive.

The second point worth highlighting is the implicit assumption that the development of a cotton
textile industry in Britain was directly related to the success of Indian cottons. Numerous
sources confirm that this is the case and that – notwithstanding the ban and thanks to contraband– over the eighteenth century cotton became an important fabric to complement the other threenatural fibres: wool, linen and silk.11 As mentioned earlier, quantitative evidence shows thelarge textile cargoes of EEIC’s ships. Yet the inference that the EEIC was ‘successful’ in its
trade needs to be taken with a pinch of salt.12 This chapter argues that the opportunities that
arose from the development of a British cotton industry emerged because of an overall “failure”
on the part of the EEIC to satisfy demand both qualitatively and quantitatively. The assessmentof the distinctive political economy of Britain needs to consider the procurement of cotton
textiles. Even if the policies focused on manufacturing applied only to the British Isles, theirassessment requires us to look well beyond these geographies and incorporate a less wellknown story of the persisting problems encountered by the EEIC in securing sufficient andsuitable supplies of cotton textiles in India. This chapter is thus part of a new approach thatconsiders the political economy of what came to be the British Empire from the seventeenth
century onwards.13 As O’Brien has pointed out ‘the paradigm case of large scale reorganised
10

No restrictions were imposed on the consumption of Indian cottons in the British colonies, a large and expanding

market for the mother country in the eighteenth century. Jonathan Eacott, ‘Making an Imperial Compromise: The
Calico Acts, the Atlantic Colonies, and the Structure of the British Empire’, William and Mary Quarterly, 69(2012), 731-62. See also Id., Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600-1830 (Chapel Hill
- NC, 2016).
11

How successful is a matter of debate. See Beverly Lemire, Fashion's Favourite: The Cotton Trade and theConsumer in Britain, 1660-1800 (Oxford, 1991), Id., Cotton (Oxford: Berg, 2003); John Styles, The Dress of thePeople: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (London and New Haven, 2007).
12

For the trade repercussions see my ‘The Indian Apprenticeship: The Trade of Indian Textiles and the Makingof European Cottons’, in Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy (eds), How India Clothed the World: The World ofSouth Asian Textiles, 1500-1850 (Leiden, 2009), 309-46.
13

For silk see Karolina Hutková, The English East India Company's Silk Enterprise in Bengal, 1750-1850(Woodbridge, 2019).
4

textile production in Britain remains inseparable from mercantilism, imperialism, andconnexions with the rest of Europe’.14

European Textile Procurement in India

Since the early seventeenth century, Indian cotton cloth played an important role in European
textile consumption. A quantitative analysis of the four main European trading nations in South
Asia shows that in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century the Portuguese Carreira daÍndia imported into Europe 200-300 thousand pieces of cotton cloth a year. In the second halfof the seventeenth century it was the Dutch (VOC) and the English companies that imported
the lion’s share of Indian cloth, joined by the French East India Company (FEIC) in the period
1730-60. The English was throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the company
that most traded back with its home country while the Dutch VOC specialised instead in thevast intra-Asian trade.15 Cloth was the life and soul of the trade to Europe. Up until the 1780s
on average between 50 and 80 percent of the value of all commodities traded by the EEIC was
made up of cotton textiles.16

The EEIC was supplied with cloth from three main areas of production in India: Gujarat on thenorthwestern coast; the eastern coast of Coromandel; and Bengal in the northeast of thesubcontinent. While Gujarat had been the main area of provisioning in the first fifty years of
the EEIC’s operations in Asia, the following couple of generations from the 1660s to the 1720s
were one of particular expansion in procurement on the Coromandel Coast. Bengal became amajor provider of textiles from the 1720s onwards and from the 1750s fell under the direct rule

14

Patrick Karl O’Brien, ‘The Reconstruction, Rehabilitation and Reconfiguration of the British Industrial

Revolution as a Conjuncture in Global History’, Itinerario 24:3/4 (2000), 130.
15On Prakash, ‘The Dutch and the Indian Ocean Textile Trade’, in Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi(eds), The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2009), esp. pp. 147-54.
16

Riello, Cotton, p. 94.
5

of the Company.17 However the Coromandel Coast – and most especially Madras, the main
EEIC trading port (factory) – retained its centrality in British textile procurement.18

This paper focuses on Madras and the Coromandel Coast in the key period between the end of
the seventeenth century and the 1720s and 1730s at a time when, as we have seen, most
European nations enacted bans on imported Asian textiles. During this period the Coromandel
coast provided large supplies of cloth not just to Europe but also to Indian Ocean and West
African markets. Part of this trade was controlled by the VOC but the bulk of it was in thehands of Gujarati, Muslim and other traders operating across the eastern part of the Indian
Ocean.19 One of the points of strength of Coromandel production was its variety: here theEuropean companies could be furnished with both plain and patterned textiles. Among the mostcommon varieties for sale were loom-patterned rumals (handkerchiefs) and other chequered
and striped textiles for European as well as Atlantic markets.20 Printed and painted cotton
textiles (chintzes) were also an important category of Indian textiles for European export,though quantitatively they might have not been as important as generations of textile historianspresumed. Calicoes – ranging from coarse to finer qualities – were an important part ofEuropean cargoes as well as guinee cloth, longcloth and other plain white cotton fabrics.21 It is

17

Om Prakash, ‘The Dutch and the English East India Companies’ Trade in Indian Textiles in the Seventeenthand the Eighteenth Century: A Comparative View’, in Maxine Berg et alt. (eds), Goods from the East, 1600-1800.
Trading Eurasia (Baskingstoke, 2015), pp. 185 and 190.
18

For a detailed analysis of the English textile trade in Madras see Jeyaseela Stephen, Oceanscapes: Tamil Textiles

in the Early Modern World (New Delhi, 2014), pp. 321-86.
19

Om Prakash, The New Cambridge History of India. Vol. II.5: European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial

India (Cambridge, 1998), p. 108.
20

On varieties traded by the FEIC, see Richard Roberts, ‘Guinée Cloth: Linked Transformations in Production

within France’s Empire in the Nineteenth Century’, Cahiers d”études africaines, 32:128 (1992), 597-627; Id.,
‘West Africa and the Pondicherry Textile Industry’, Indian Economic & Social History Review 31:2 (1994), 11745. On the trade to West Africa see: Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Studyof International Trade and Economic Development (Cambridge, 2002). For a comprehensive analysis ofproduction on the Coromandel for international markets see Kazuo Kobayashi, Indian Cotton Textiles in West
Africa: African Agency, Consumer Demand and the Making of the Global Economy, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke,2019), esp. pp. 127-163.
21

Joseph J. Brennig, ‘Textile Producers and Production in Late Seventeenth-Century Coromandel’, Indian

Economic & Social History Review 23/4 (1986), 334-35.
6

estimated that at least 150 varieties of cloth were produced on the Coromandel Coast in theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries.22

Madras had been the key English factory on the eastern coast of India since its establishment
in the 1640s.23 It specialised in the production of mid-quality cloth, a notch up from the cheaper
printed cloth procured in Gujarat, but not as fine as some of the products bought in Bengal,
most especially the veil-like muslin produced in Dhaka and surrounding areas.24 The rest of
the Coromandel coast had an equally varied production: while northern Coromandel provided
the best white cloth (unpainted), southern Coromandel specialised in printed cloth and mostespecially waxed textiles and cheap guinees.25 It is important for us to note that the EEIC
operated from Madras in northern Coromandel while the VOC operated from Pulicat (northern
Coromandel) and Nagapattinan (southern Coromandel) and the FEIC from Pondicherry(southern Coromandel).26

Both the Coromandel and the other Indian markets were as sophisticated as they werecompetitive. The European companies did not just compete with each other, but also with local
merchants operating in the Indian Ocean. A 1723 report from the Madras Factory illustrates
the challenges faced in procurement, and explained that the merchants who acted as middlemenwith the weavers:
told us that it was impossible for them to pretend to furnish 4,000 Bales of Cloth whichshould all exactly answer musters, and that the utmost they can do is to keep their
weavers as near as possible to them, But that the very large demand lately made has
occasion'd the running the Cloth off the Loom so fast 'tis not practicable to keep themjustly to the goodness of the muster. That they can always provide the quantity andmuch more, but that when they do so they cannot pretend to engage for the Goodness,
Since it is certain that the People working in a hurry must be more careless and negligent

22

Stephen, Oceanscapes, p. 167.

23

David Veevers, The Origins of the British Empire in Asia, 1600–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2020), pp. 57-78.
24

K. N. Chaudhuri, ‘Foreign Trade: 1. European Trade with India’, in Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib (eds),

The Cambridge Economic History of India; Vol. I. c. 1200 – c. 1750 (Cambridge, 1982), p. 402.
25

Kristof Glamann, Dutch-Asiatic Trade, 1620-1740 (The Hague, 1958), pp. 132, 135; Knaap, Gerrit, Shallow

Waters, Rising Tide: Shipping and Trade in Java Around 1775 (Leiden, 1996), p. 93.
26

Prakash, The New Cambridge History of India. Vol. II.5, pp. 298–9; Gottmann, Global Trade, pp. 25-7.
7

than when they have more time; so that when this place provided 1000 Bales per annum
it was very easy to keep them up to the Musters, but that now the demand is encreas'dto four times that quantity it is not reasonable to expect it should be equal in goodness.27
This was not the first, nor the last time, when the servants of the EEIC complained about thechallenges of procuring larger and larger quantities of textiles. Demand in Europe was buoyant
and the EEIC textile trade doubled in quantity between the 1690s and the 1750s, increasingfrom 2.3 million to 5.6 million pieces per decade. In expanding procurement, it was not justthe quality of what was delivered that was at stake but also the price at which cotton textiles
could be bought.28 Fifty years earlier the Madras warehouse claimed to have suffered not just‘by short contents and thinness &c. imperfections of their cloth sent home in Anno 1672’ but
also because of ‘ye dearness of ye same, requiring allowance for it twenty per 100’. 29 It was
not uncommon for the company to have to pay more than what they had tendered for.

Complaints about the dearness of cloth in India were common for all European companies. Yet
procurement price increases especially after 1690 cannot be attributed solely to high demandin Europe. The volume of cloth bought by the European companies pale in comparison withestimates of the overall production of cloth in the Indian subcontinent.30 European traders
might have dominated the local production of specific weaving villages but overall remained‘small players’ in the large Indian Ocean trade.31 More problematic was the fact that the Dutch,
the English and later the French competed for the same cloth production. The aversion of one
company against the other was palpable; reports of the ways in which other companies were

27

Records of Fort St. George. Diary and Consultation Book of 1723 (Madras, 1930), pp. 91-2. (29 August 1723).

28

Giorgio Riello, ‘Factories before the Factory: The English East India Company’s Textile Procurement in India

and British Industrialisation, 1650-1750’, in Kristine Bruland, Anne Gerritsen, Pat Hudson and Giorgio Riello(eds), Re-inventing the Economic History of Industrialisation (Montreal, 2020), p. 267.
29

Records of Fort St. George. Diary and Consultation Book, 1672-1678 (Madras, 1910), p. 27 (29 September1674).
30

Sushil Chaudhuri, ‘European Trading Companies and Bengal Textile Industry in the First Half of the EighteenthCentury: The Pitfalls of Applying Quantitative Methods’, Modern Asian Studies, 27 (1993), 321-40; and Om
Prakash’s ‘Response’, Modern Asian Studies, 27 (1993), 341-46; Roy, An Economic History of Early Modern
India, 77.
31

For estimates of the European share of the Indian cotton production, see: Prasannan Parthasarathi, ‘Cotton

Textiles in the Indian Subcontinent, 1200-1800’, in Riello and Parthasarathi (eds), The Spinning World, p. 39.
8

able to secure sufficient and cheap supplies of cloth were not uncommon.32 Perhaps moretroublesome for the European companies was the fact that they competed not just in India but
also on European markets. Notwithstanding the increasingly rigid regulations on the trade andconsumption of Indian cloth in Europe, price convergence indicates a high level of integrationof the European textile market for both domestic and imported cloth.33 Beyond competition,
historians have pointed to the low elasticity of production in India: while demand by theEuropean companies increased, the overall structure of production and its productive capacity
remained unaltered. As a result, prices of all types of Indian fabrics increased steadily over theeighteenth century.34

By the mid-1750s the VOC complained that the prices of guinee cloth, salampuri and othercloth had increased more than fifty percent in a period of fifty years. The EEIC seemed to beeven more effected by increases in purchasing prices: the 1690s had been admittedly a good
decade when prices had been low and mark ups (the sale price in London divided by thepurchase price in India) high. By the 1750s the price of cloth had more than doubled and themark-ups were down by 50 per cent.35 While procurement prices in India increased, the priceof cotton cloth in Europe decreased. This was a general trend for all textiles: in Britain over thecourse of the eighteenth century the price of serge and fine linen declined by up to 40 percent
while Indian cottons decreased 20 percent in price in the first half of the eighteenth century.36
In such a situation, the EEIC profit margins decreased substantially. As we will see in the next
section, the decreasing terms of trade of Indian cloth on the British market, made attempts atimport substitution more viable.
Troubles in India: The Companies’ Procurement Problems

32

Femme S. Gaastra, ‘War, Competition and Collaboration: Relations between the English and Dutch East India

Company in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in H.V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby(eds), The Worlds of the East India Company (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002), p. 55.
33

Pim De Zwart, ‘Globalization in the Early Modern Era: New Evidence from the Dutch-Asiatic Trade, c.1600-

1800’, JEH 76:2 (2016), 535.
34

Parthasarathi, ‘Cotton Textiles in the Indian Subcontinent’, pp. 17-41.

35

Riello, Cotton, ch. 4; Riello, ‘Factories before the Factory’, p. 267.

36

Own price database. See also Carole Shammas, ‘The Decline of Textile Prices in England and British America

Prior to Industrialization’, EHR, 47/3 (1994), 483-507.
9

A window of opportunity for the development of a European (and in particular British) cotton
textile industry opened because of a connection between the political economy measuresembraced at home and the conditions of supply of Indian cotton textiles experienced by theEast India Companies. Notwithstanding the bans, the European East India companies did notseem able to cope with expanding demand in Europe. As Jan de Vries pointed out, European
demand (especially for textiles) rose at a faster rate than the one percent per year growth ofEurasian trade.37 Normally this should have led to an increase in prices for Indian cloth; yet as
many textile historians have pointed out, Indian cotton cloth competed with a series of otherlocal textiles, not just copies of chintzes and calicoes but also white, patterned and printed
linens, as well as lighter woollens.

The situation of the companies was no better in India. One is struck by the perduring problems
faced in procurement. Why was it so difficult to secure satisfactory supplies of good cloth on
the Coromandel as well as other manufacturing areas of India? As mentioned, competition
between companies was rife. Throughout the seventeenth century the EEIC seemed to haveexperienced an endemic lack of funds for the purchase of cloth. Agents in Madras and othersatellite factories complained that they had to stretch their credit with merchants in order toavoid having ‘Private Persons buying of the same sorts of goods here untill they shall havebeen able to Compleat their said Investments’.38 Moreover competition with the VOC wasproblematic: ‘at this Time that the Dutch Merchants having such great Sumes of moneys givenout unto them, and have sent all about the Countrey to buy and the Scarcity of Cotton
continuing by reason of last yeares Harvest failed’.39

Credit was at the heart of the production system of India. It is worthwhile explaining that theEuropean companies had little access to production carried out in weaving villages sometimes
located dozens of miles inland. They relied instead on a series of intermediaries, the mostimportant among which were wealthy merchants residing in the main ports with capital large
enough to coordinate bulk production of cloth. These merchants relied on brokers (sometimes

37

Jan De Vries, ‘Understanding Eurasian Trade in the Era of the Trading Companies’, in Maxine Berg et alt.

(eds), Good from the East, p. 27.
38‘Consultation in Fort St. George’, 18 April 1672, in Records of Fort St. George: Diary and Consultations. Vol.

1. 1672-1678 (Madras, 1910), p. 4.
39

Ibid.
10

referred to as delols), who agreed the type of cloth to be produced, the quantity, price and dateof delivery. An intermediary might commission an order by relying on a series of otherintermediaries (sometimes known as picars) within a weaving village itself: this could be a
weaver who acted for the merchant (or broker) and received a small commission. 40

The relationship between weavers, intermediaries and merchants was contractual and based on
cash advances. Advances were given by merchants to middlemen, who travelled to the villages
and contracted weavers normally via the village chief (Figure 1). Om Prakash argues that cash
advances were necessary to support the weaving household during the months (up to six) when
the cloth was being produced. We must remember that advances acted as interest-free loans inan economy like the Indian one in which interest rates of 7-8 percent in rural areas and 12-15
percent in urban areas were not uncommon. Advances also reduced the risk of approachingpotential buyers directly, especially by those producers in rural areas with limited access tomarkets, and circumvented the need for weavers to predict market conditions.41 The contractual
arrangements were flexible though this meant that merchants had little leeway to enforce them.
Whilst weavers could simply extricate themselves by returning an advance, the same was not

40

This intermediary system differed across areas of the country. For Dacca, see: British Library, IOR, G/40/26:‘Account of the manner of providing cloth at Dacca in the year 1676’, ff. 85-86. See also Rasjan Humar Gupta,‘The Growth and Decay of the Cotton Piece-Goods Industry of Berthum’, Bengal Past and Present, 97:1, no. 182(1977), 70-1; Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Merchants, Companies and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast, 16501740 (Delhi, 1986), p. 268; Id., ‘Weavers, Merchants and Company: the handloom Industry in Southeastern India
1750-1790’, Indian Economic & Social History Review, 17:3 (1980), p. 265; Carla M. Sinopoli, The Political
Economy of Craft Production: Crafting Empire in South India, c.1350-1650 (Cambridge, 2003), p. 186; P. Sudhir
and P. Swarnalatha, ‘Textile Traders and territorial imperatives: Masulipatnam, 1750-1850’, Indian Economic &Social History Review, 29:2 (1992), pp. 148 and 151; Ian C. Wendt, ‘The Social Fabric: Textile Industry andCommunity in Early Modern South India’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2005),
145.
41

Om Prakash. ‘Textile Manufacturing and Trade Without and With Coercion: The Indian Experience in the

EighteenthCentury,’

GEHN

Paper

(2005),

7:https://www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-

History/Assets/Documents/Research/GEHN/GEHNConferences/conf5/PrakashGEHN5.pdf [last accessed 20
August 2020]; Vijaya Ramaswamy, ‘South Indian Textiles: A Case for Proto-Industrialization?,’ in Deepak
Kumar (ed.), Science and Empire: Essays in Indian Context (1700-1947) (Delhi:, 1991), pp. 51-2; K. N.
Chaudhuri, ‘The Structure of Indian Textile Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Tirthankar
Roy (ed.), Cloth and commerce. Textiles in Colonia India (New Delhi, 1996), p. 52.
11the case for merchants who had to forfeit their advance if the contract was cancelled. 42 This
imbalance meant that it was in the interest of merchants to accept whatever was produced by
weavers and convince the Company to accept them in turn. In contrast, weavers could sell
their products to someone else and return the advance.43 This was a risk borne (entirely by themerchant) that could only be avoided by what we would today call social control over the
weavers.44

Figure 1. ‘A Weaver’, gouache made in Tanjore, c. 1770. © Victoria & Albert Museum AL.9128:14.
One of thirty-six paintings of castes and occupations of South India showing a weaver. The East India
Companies’ servants had very little access to weavers and their villages until the second half of theeighteenth century.
42

Prasannan Parthasarathi, ‘Merchants and the Rise of Colonialism’, in Burton Stein and Sanjay Subrahmanyam(eds), Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 96-7.
43

For the late eighteenth century Subramanian cites the case of a nine percent penalty for undelivered cloth to the

EEIC. Lakshmi Subramanian, ‘Power and the Weave: Weavers, Merchants and rules in Eighteenth-Century
Surat’, in Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Lakshmi Subramanian (eds), Politics and Trade in the Indian Ocean World:
Essays in Honour of Ashin Das Gupta (Delhi, 1998), p. 56.
44

In what Parthasarathi calls an ‘asymmetry of contracts’ merchants did not possess the right to break a contract

or demand the return of an advance. Prasannan Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers,
Merchants and Kings in South India 1720-1800 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 26-7. Mukund also observes that ‘The
relationship between the merchants and the weavers was not a simple, unidimensional exploitative relationship as
is often assumed. Kanakalatha Mukund, The Trading World of the Tamil Merchant: Evolution of Merchant
Capitalism in the Coromandel (Hyderabad, 1999), p. 116.
12

In this complex system of production, European companies had to contend both with theindependence of weavers and the power of large merchants. One of the risks was for the
weavers to go ‘on the run’ after they had used advances to feed their families. Yet, without
advances there was no possibility of finding suitable supplies of cloth.45 Middlemen andbrokers too could be free riders and were often portrayed by Company servants as ‘perfidious’and dangerous. Merchants could also become too powerful: leveraging their own money, they
could dominate entire markets. This was the case of Kasi Viranna (otherwise known as Cassa
Verona or Kasi Veeranna), the chief intermediary merchant for the EEIC in Madras in the1670s. He was one among a dozen merchants who supplied the Company; yet Viranna alone
provided more than a quarter of the 300,000 pieces of cotton cloth that the EEIC purchased on
the Coromandel Coast each year.46 The case of Viranna was one of potential monopsony thatwas considered problematic by the Company. The Dutch had already intervened in limiting thepower of specific merchants. From the 1660s onwards they imposed a stock company, formed
to organise groups of merchants, especially of the Komati caste. The joint stock was based ona number of shares with each partner committing to the business venture solely in connection
with the production of cloth for a specific consignment. The merchant-shareholders were notallowed to sign contracts with other merchants not holding the same joint stock.47 After thedeath of Viranna in 1680 the EEIC attempted a similar move but with more limited success.

The European companies faced other problems of a more practical nature as well. The English– as had other companies – had established a clear system for evaluating the quality of the cloth45This was not just the case of the Coromandel Coast. For Dhaka, see Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New

History of Global Capitalism (London, 2014), esp. pp. 33-4; and Maxine Berg, ‘“The Merest Shadows of a
Commodity”: Indian Muslins for European Markets 1750–1800’, in Berg et alt. (eds.), Goods from the East, p.
128.
46

Yogesh Sharma, ‘A Life of Many Parts: Kasi Viranna: A Seventeenth Century South Indian MerchantMagnate’, Medieval History Journal, 1:2 (1998), esp. 265, 273-76. On Viranna see also Mukund, Trading Worldof the Tamil Merchant, pp. 109-10; Stephen, Oceanscapes, ch. 4; Radhika Seshan, ‘From Chief Merchant to Joint
Stock Merchant: A Comparative Study of Kasi Virana and Pedda Venkatadri, Chief Merchants of Madras’,
Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 70 (2009-10), 347-53.
47

Stephen, Oceanscapes, pp. 130-32.
13

delivered. Patterns were provided to merchants who in turn sent them to weaving villages.48
Yet what was supplied was often substandard. As explained, it was in the interest of merchants
to get hold of whatever they could. Once the cloth reached the company’s warehouse, it waschecked according to ‘qualities’ (first, second, third etc.). There were ways to cheat the system,
for instance by placing the best cloth at the top of a bale. Merchants relied on the fact that
because of the high volumes, not everything could be checked. This was admitted as a problem
by many warehousemen in charge of assessing the quality of merchandise before shipment. In
the 1670s, Edward Herrys, an EEIC warehouseman, reported that:
notwithstanding all the care & paines that he takes in the sorting & looking after thequalities of the Callicos, he finds it in a manner impossible to make a thoroughexamination of the latter in regard of the necessity of receiving & sorting it while
through the shortness of time, for want of a stock aforehand to buy it in more early &seasonable in the yeare, when business might be done at better leasure whereas thus agreat deal of it is fain to be brought in whited and beaten from the country for the better
dispatch, and that which comes brown is hurryed away to the Washers without time tolooke it over. 49
The pressure on quantities and the seasonal nature of shipments made it difficult to ensure thatcloth attained was of the prescribed quality, and that enough time for bleaching as well as
printing was left available. Even packing was often hurried, leaving the cloth exposed to airand sea water in the six-month journey to Europe. Some cloth arrived rotten and rat eaten. 50

In the early 1720s the Company servants at Madras recommended the Deputy Governor of Fort
St. David near Cuddalore, a hundred miles north, not to take in substandard cloth: ‘We mustremind you that you strictly keep your Merchants up to Lengths and Breadths & goodness ofCloth’.51 This was a perpetual problem: when raw cotton was scarce or expensive, weavers

48

For the VOC see: Femme S. Gaastra, ‘The Textile Trade of the VOC: The Dutch Response to the English

Challenge’, South Asia 19 - Special Issue (1996), 91.
49

Records of Fort St George. Diary and Consultation Book. Vol. 1. 1672-1678 (Madras, 1910), p. 75:‘Consultation at Fort St. George: From Mr Edward Herrys to the Honorable Sr. William Langhorn and Council’,
27 September 1675.
50

Riello, ‘Factories before the Factory’.

51

Records of Fort St George. Letters from Fort St. George. Vols. 18-19. 1722-1723 (Madras, 1931), p. 7: ‘To the

Worship. [Will.m] Jennings Esq., Deputy Governor of Fort St. David & C., Councill’. March 9th, 1721-2’.
14

would produce thinner cloth.52 Imperfections would be hidden by ‘conjee’, rice water, thus
enhancing the smoothness and consistency of the weave. One servant of the EEIC observedthe ‘filling up the cloth with Conjee, Oyl &ca. … is very liable to deceive the sorters, andoccasions its appearing much worse when washed than when taken in Brown’.53 I have argued
elsewhere that quality was both a problem and an opportunity. While the EEIC never managed
to get supplies that matched their standards, at the same time they continued to enforce thosequality standards with consistency, providing a benchmark on which manufacturers at home
had to contend .54

The mismatch between what was sought after in domestic European markets and what waspurchased in India was evident especially for printed and painted cloth.55 The success of Indian
cloth in Europe over the second half of the seventeenth century was due to its fashionability.
Initially adopted for furnishing, Indian cottons came to be used in clothing in the last quarterof the seventeenth century. With his usual sarcasm, the English writer Daniel Defoe
complained about ‘persons of quality dressed in Indian carpets’ as he explained that Indian
chintzes had ‘advanced from lying upon their floors to their [customers] backs, from thefootcloth to the petticoat’.56 It was a challenge to satisfy fashionable customers in Europe withcloth produced tens of thousands of miles away. It took the best part of two years from the timeorders were sent from England to the time when the final products arrived in London’s docks.
Samples were used but it was an imprecise game: ‘The muster is only to shew you the goodnessof the cloth, and the brightness of the Dye which last may be mended with you, and you must
direct the Weavers when they make them to vary the checks that they may not be too many of
one Pattern, and there must be no mixture of Red in any of them’, explained a letter from
52

Records of Fort St George. Diary and Consultation Book. Vol. 1. 1672-1678, p. 73.

53

Records of Fort St. George. Letters to Fort St. George. Vol. 45. 1765 (Madras, 1946), p. 180: ‘To the Hon.ble

Robert Palk Esq., President and Governor &ca. Council of Fort St. George, from Cuddalore, Oct. 28 th 1765’.
54

Riello, ‘Factories before the Factory’, pp. 262-75.

55

For the VOC see the ‘Eischen van Retour’ (Requests for return), orders of Indian chintzes for the period 1641-

1796, compiled by Jopie van Eijkern-Balkenstein, Peter Diebels and Ebeltje Hartkamp-Jonxis, ‘Orderoverzicht
van door de VOC uit India ‘geëiste’ sitsen’, in Ebeltje Hartkamp-Jonxis (ed.), Sits: oost-west relaties in textiel(Zwolle: Waanders 1987), 113-121Sits: Oost-West Relaties in Textiel (Zwolle: Uitgeverij Waanders, 1987), pp.
113-21. I thank the author for alerting me to these materials. For the EEIC see the database of orders sent out
compiled by the University of Warwick’s ‘Europe’s Asian Centuries: Trading Eurasia, 1600-1830’ ERC Project:https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/ghcc/eac/databases/english/
56

Weekly Review, 31 January 1708.
15

Madras to Fort St. David.57 This was the case for cottons as much as it was for silks: ‘Know
this for a constant and general rule that you change the fashions and flowers as much as you
can every year, for English ladies and they say the French and the Europeans will give twice
as much for a new thing not seen in Europe before though worse, than they will give for a bettersilk of the same fashion worn the former year’.58 Fashion – the timely provision of new patterns,
colours and varieties of cloth – was a complex affair that put European imitations of Indian
cotton –imperfect as they were – at an advantage, at least in their responsiveness to demand.59

How different was the EEIC from the VOC and FEIC in their procurement in India? The FEIC
operated from Pondicherry and was particularly active in the textiles trade for about fifty years
between the 1720s and the 1760s importing into France on average 175,000 pieces of cloth ayear.60 This was a relatively small amount compared with the 700,000 pieces a year importedby the EEIC and the 375,000 pieces a year imported by the VOC over the same five decades.61
The French were latecomers to the Indian trade and to textile procurement on the Coromandel
coast.62 However, they seemed to suffer the same problems that afflicted the EEIC concerning
the quality and timeliness of delivery as frequent complaints in the Correspondance du Conseil
supérieur de Pondichery reveal.63 This was also the case for the VOC, though the company
was in no sense second to the EEIC. Aggregate figures for the trade to Europe hide the large
sales that the VOC made in Asian textile markets, most especially in Southeast Asia as well as

57

Records of Fort St George. Letters from Fort St. George. Vol. 23. 1739 (Madras, 1931), p. 31: ‘To the Worsh.

James Hubbard Esq. Deputy Governor & C. Council of Fort St. David, July 10th 1739’
58

Records of Fort St. George. Despatches from England 1681-1686 (Madras, 1916), May 20th 1681.

59

Riello, Cotton, pp. 175-9; Chris Nierstrasz, Rivalry for Trade in Tea and Textiles: The English and Dutch East

India Companies (1700–1800) (London, 2015), 169-70.
60

Haudrère, Philippe, ‘La Compagnie française des Indes, 1719-1795’, L’Information Historique 51 (1989), 5;

Philippe Haudrère and Gérard Bouëdec, Les Compagnies des Indes (Rennes, 1999), pp. 80; Donald C. Wellington,
French East India Companies: A Historical Account and Record of Trade (Lanham, 2006), pp. 188-89. For acomprehensive analysis of French procurement see Gottmann, Global Trade, esp. pp. 18-49.
61

Author’s database. See also Riello, Cotton, pp. 94 and x-xi.

62

Arasaratnam, Merchants, p. 251.

63

For instance, in 1744 it was observed that: ‘l’année passée, malgré l’augmentation de 7 ½ Rs. par courge, qu’on

avait accordée aux marchands par les nécessités du temps où on se trouvait, ils n’en ont pas fourni à la visite laquantité pour laquelle ils s’étaient engages, et que moralement même parlant, il n’y a pas eu aucune pièce de laqualité requise’. Correspondance du Conseil supérieur de Pondichery et de la Compagnie, 1726-67. Vol. 4. 174449, ed. A. Martineau, 6 vols (1920-1934), pp. 43-4.
16

in Africa. The many company’s factories from the Red Sea to the China Sea made the VOC an
important player in particular in the seventeenth century (Figure 2). The English complainedfor instance ‘that the Dutch who have made great contracts all along this coast, are tamperingwith all our weavers to seduce ‘em from our service’ by offering advances of ten pagodas perloom rather than the normal five.64 Several reports highlighted that the Dutch seemed to be
more successful than the English in buying printed and painted cloth.

Figure 2. ‘D. Cormandelse Catoen Baalen’ (The Cotton Bales of Coromandel), c. 1710. Stone, 117.5 x
16.5 cm. Amsterdam Museum, inv. nr. KB 1868.
A European – most probably a VOC servant – is in conversation with a trader. The bales are of guinees
for the West Coast of Africa and cloth from Serampore (Kolkatta).

There was a major difference between the procurement of the Dutch (and to a certain extent
the French) and the EEIC: the Dutch might have been more successful in securing steady andcheap supplies but their main port in southern Coromandel meant that more than fifty percentof their cloth was made up of printed and painted (coloured) cloth. By contrast Madras innorthern Coromandel was at the core of a trade in white cloth. This was particularly the casebetween the 1690s and the 1720s.65 Bengal became a major producer of finer varieties of white
cotton – as well as muslins – but the primacy of Coromandel remained unabated. The large
quantities of white cloth that the EEIC imported into London were key to the development ofa local calico printing industry. The dominance of the EEIC in this market was such that even

64

Records of Fort St George. Diary and Consultation Book of 1701 (Madras: Government Press, 1922), p. 57:‘Generall Letter from Vizagapatam’, June 27th 1701.
65

Nierstrasz, Rivalry for Trade, esp. pp. 157, 171.
17

the famous Germany calico printer Oberkampf who operated from Jouy-en-Josas near Parisclaimed that the best white Indian calicoes could only be sourced in London.66

The Political Economy of Textiles

The three main European traders in India all seemed to face similar problems in their textile
procurement. The power of Indian merchants and the independence of weavers werecompounded by the competition between companies and with Asian merchants. The VOC was
marginally more successful than other companies in financing large-scale procurement mostespecially of printed and painted cloth. In Europe, the millions of pieces of cloth that thesethree companies imported constituted all but a small percentage of the total textile
consumption. Moreover there is evidence that growth in demand outstripped growth in textile
imports from Asia into Europe. Import substitution – the replacement of imported cloth withcopies made in Europe – was a possible solution. Yet, one insurmountable problem insubstituting imported with home-produced calicoes was the differential in production costs in
Europe and India: the cost of labour in the Subcontinent was possibly one sixth of that ofEurope.67 Fortunately, as the purchase price of cloth in India increased throughout theeighteenth century, the price gap between India and European textiles decreased.

Clearly a window of opportunity presented itself for the expansion of European domestic
production to satisfy local consumers as well as increasing levels of demand in African andAmerican markets.68 Henry Martyn’s ‘Considerations on the East India Trade’ (1701)
presented the argument that Indian goods such as textiles were not just finding markets among
consumers but could lead to increased productivity and ‘invention of Arts’ in English

66

Maxine Berg, ‘Quality, Cotton, and the Global Luxury Trade’, in Riello and Roy (eds), How India Clothed theWorld, pp. 407-8.
67

K.N. Chaudhuri, ‘Some Reflections on the World Trade of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Century: A Reply’, Journalof European Economic History 7:1 (1978), pp. 227-28. On the difficulty of measuring wages and standards ofliving in Europe and South Asia see: Prasannan Parthasarathi, ‘Rethinking Wages and Competitiveness in the
Eighteenth Century: Britain and South India’, Past & Present 158 (1998), 79-109; Id., The Transition to a Colonial
Economy, esp. pp. 21-39; Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta, ‘The Early Modern Great Divergence:
Wages, Prices and Economic Development in Europe and Asia, 1500–1800’, EHR 59:1 (2006), 1-31.
68

Giorgio Riello, ‘Cotton Textiles and the Industrial Revolution in a Global Context’, Past & Present(forthcoming 2022)18

manufactures.69 Yet for a long time historians saw the political economy of the English (andlater British) state as less attentive to economic development than the interests of establishedsectors, first among which wool and silk manufacturers. The quantitative expansion of textile
imports from India in the 1680s coincided with a campaign on the part of English textile
manufacturers to limit this new source of competition. A first special duty of 20 percent wasapplied to textiles imported from the East Indies in 1690. This preceded the better known 1701
Act that effectively prohibited the import of printed and painted Indian cottons. Yet, as Ralph
Davis noted more than half a century ago, the 1701 Act can be read as ‘the first important
modern example of a deliberate industrial protection’.70 Prohibitions were not uncommon - asthey had been in sumptuary laws – yet the very title of the act (‘An Act for the more effective
employing the Poor by incourageing the Manufactures of this Kingdom’) revealed the‘developmental’ intentions guiding legislators. The Act was part of a wider policy concerning
textile production that included the abolition of all export duties on woollen cloth in 1700 anda decade later the abolition of import duties on cochineal and other imported dyestuffs (1714
and 1722). In the 1730s to 1760s other duties were abolished on flax (1731), Irish woollens(1740), linen yarn (1756), and raw silk (1765).71

Most importantly for the development of a local cotton industry was the fact that the 1701
legislation allowed for the import of plain cottons.72 It is true that duties applied on plain Indian
cottons in 1701 were increased in 1704 and 1708. An excise was also applied on the productionof printed calicoes in 1712 and 1714.73 The 1721 Act forbade the weaving of calicoes that wereprinted, painted, stained or dyed either for clothing or for household furnishing.74 All of thesemight appear not conducive to local printing on imported white cotton cloth, an activity that69

For an analysis of Martyn’s interesting arguments foreshadowing Adam Smith’s, see Maxine Berg, ‘Political

Economy and the Principles of Manufacture, 1700-1800’, in Maxine Berg, Pat Hudson, Michael Sonenscher (eds),
Manufacture in Town and Country before the Factory (Cambridge, 1983), esp. pp. 35-7.
70

Ralph Davis, ‘The Rise of Protection in England, 1789-1786’, EHR 19:2 (1966), 309.

71

Davis, ‘The Rise of Protection in England’, 309, 313-314.

72

William J. Ashworth, ‘The Intersection of Industry and the State in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Lissa

Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear (eds), The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late
Renaissance to Early Industrialisation (Amsterdam, 2007), p. 353.
73

Ashworth, Customs and Excise, pp. 38-9.

74

7 Geo. I, c 7. Raymond L. Sickinger, ‘Regulation or Ruination: Parliament’s consistent Pattern of mercantilist

regulation of the English Textile Trade, 1660-1800’, Parliamentary History, 19:2 (2000), 229.
19

had found a home in the area around London. Yet it encouraged printing on linen as well as on
mixed linen and cotton cloth. The 1736 Manchester Act legalised what was already an
established practice of weaving mixed linen and cotton cloth, to be sold either bleached or,most commonly, printed.75 As the name suggests, this new piece of legislation recognised theimportance of a new industry fast expanding in the north of England. It was estimated that by1750, more than 50,000 pieces a year of printed cloth were produced in England.76

Over the next decades and up until the revocation of the ban on Indian cloth in 1774, moreconcessions were made. For instance, in 1765 it was made legal for the EEIC to import Indian
calicoes from abroad if the direct Indian supply was deemed insufficient to satisfy (mostespecially) African markets.77 The logic that slowly emerged was one of complementarity: as
Indian cloth complemented existing textiles and markets, so the production of ‘cottons’ (mostoften mix linen and cotton) and printed textiles (on white Indian cloth) complemented imported
calicoes and chintzes. As Philippe Minard and William Ashworth have observed, this happened
within a specific political economy context. Far from interpretations that see a liberal regime
in England in opposition to a Colberterian one in France, the differing role of the state ishighlighted in both nations. Ashworth underlines the importance of the excise in determining
precise rules on quality and product specification; Minard the action of the state in establishingregulatory standards.78

Yet one has to account for the differing trajectories of cotton manufacturing in England, France
and the Dutch Republic. National as well as international conditions might explain this. Whenin 1686 France enacted a ban on Indian cloth, it might have been more an attempt to limit
importation from other European countries than to curb direct trade from India. By this datethe FEIC was still a small player in Asia. It could not afford bulk purchase in South Asia as the
English company did, nor could it sell Indian cottons on Indian Ocean markets as the VOC had

75

9 Geo. II, c. 4.

76

Edmund Potter, Calico Printing as an Art Manufacture. A Lecture (London, 1852), 8. Note however that thiswas less than 10% of the number of pieces of cotton textiles imported per year by the EEIC in the 1740s and1740s. Riello, Cotton, p. 94.
77

Sickinger, ‘Regulation or Ruination’, 230.

78

William Ashworth, ‘Quality and the Roots of Manufacturing “Expertise” in Eighteenth Century Britain’, Osiris,

25 (2010), 231-54; Philippe Minard, ‘Le bureau d’essai de Birmingham, ou la fabrique de la réputation au XVIIIe
siècle’, Annales HSS, 65:5 (2011), 1117-46.
20

successfully done for two generations.79 The bans had different legal force in England andFrance: whilst in England only a small number of people were prosecuted for contravening theAct, in France the original 1686 ban was regularly reissued leading to several prosecutions
especially in the 1720s and 1730s when larger quantities of Indian cloth started to be importedby the FEIC.80 These strict regulations did not provide much space for the legal production of
locally-printed cloth or cotton mixes.81 For instance, white cotton cloth imported by the FEIC
was allowed into France only with the condition that such textiles were marked and had plombs
affixed. The damage must have been substantial as reports said that Dutch and other traders
were falsifying the marks and plombs making their cloth pass as legally imported by theCompany.82

The argument presented here is that the political economy embraced by the English state wasflexible enough to protect existing markets and at the same time allow for the development of
a new cotton industry. This emerged as much from riding ‘the wave of fashion’ opened up by
Indian cloth as from supplementing scarce and substandard imported textiles, More than fifty
percent of what the EEIC imported from India was bleached, undyed and white cloth suitablefor printing in England and this turned out to be a further incentive for the development of a
local calico printing industry.83 England had followed in the footsteps of the Dutch Republic
where a calico printing industry had developed in the last quarter of the seventeenth century
together with the production of copies of Indian woven textiles.84 Yet, differently from either
France or England, the Netherlands never enacted a restrictive legislation on imported cotton
textiles. Attempts were made but they proved unsuccessful: in 1676 the city of Haarlem made79

Indrani Ray, ‘The French Company and the Merchants of Bengal (1680-1730)’, in Lakshmi Subramanian (ed.),The French East India Company and the Trade of the Indian Ocean: A Collection of Essays by Indrani Ray (NewDelhi, 1999), p. 78.
80

Édit ... qui prononce des peines contre ceux qui introduiront dans le Royaume des toiles peintes ou teintes,écorces d'arbres ou étoffes de la Chine, des Indes et du Levant... Registré à la Cour des Aydes [le 26 octobre1726] (Paris, 1726). See also Giorgio Riello, ‘Governing Innovation: The Political Economy of Textiles in the
Eighteenth Century’, in Evelyn Welch (ed.), Fashioning the Early Modern: Creativity and Innovation in Europe,
1500-1800 (Oxford, 2017), esp. pp. 57-58; Gottmann, Global Trade, ch. 3.
81

On the rethinking the led to its repeal in France see Gottmann, Global Trade, pp. 150-6.

82

Haudrère, La Compagnie française des Indes, vol. 1: 302-3.

83

Riello, Cotton, pp. 96-7.

84

Giorgio Riello, ‘Asian Knowledge and the Development of Calico Printing in Europe in the Seventeenth andEighteenth Centuries’, Journal of Global History, 5:1 (2010), 1-29.
21

a request to the States of Holland to issue a resolution against the consumption of all kinds ofcotton and chintzes ‘both white and printed, coloured and painted’; such a resolution was
postponed and never brought back.85 The VOC seemed instead to have placated national textile
interests by promising to export woollen cloth as in the case of two separate contracts signedwith the city of Leiden in 1742 and 1776 respectively.86

Notwithstanding the free circulation of Indian cloth, in the fifty years between the 1670s andthe 1720s the Netherlands developed a thriving cotton industry. Daniel de La Feuille in a travel
guide for Amsterdam published in 1701 mentions the flourishing trade of calico printing aroundthe city where by 1730 nearly 90 printworks were in operation.87 Yet by this tume Swiss printed
cottons were more resistant, cheaper and more beautiful than Dutch ones.88 Dutch producers
seemed to be at a disadvantage compared with their competitors in London and Paris who could
respond more quickly to new fashion trends.89 The cost of labour was also higher in the
Netherlands than in other European countries.90 French printers specialised in high-quality
chintzes, carried out research on dyes and adjusted prints to current taste. In contrast to France,in Amsterdam no names of designers are known. Dutch printers did pay attention to changes
in fashion, but the French designs were beyond their abilities. At the same time when in Francedyes improved, Dutch printers started to use lesser quality to reduce costs.91 By the mid-

85

Willem Johannes Smit, De katoendrukkerij in Nederland tot 1813 (Amsterdam, 1928), p. 184.

86

Valentijn Schenk, ‘“Een naare en bedroefde eeuw”: De verschepingen van Leidse textiel naar Azië door

tussenkomst van de VOC in de periode 1770-1790 en de rol van het contract van 1776’, Textielhistorische
Bijdragen, 41 (2001), 49-64; Femme S. Gaastra, ‘Leiden en de VOC’, in Dick E. H. de Boer (ed.), Leidse facetten:
tien studies over Leidse geschiedenis (Zwolle, 1982), pp. 53-64.
87

Vibeke Kingma, ‘De katoendrukkerijen in Amsterdam en Nieuwer-Amstel’, Textielhistorische Bijdragen 38(1998), 10-11.
88

Smit, De katoendrukkerij, pp. 155-6.

89

Kingma, ‘De katoendrukkerijen in Amsterdam en Nieuwer-Amstel’, 25.

90

In 1766 Swiss printers earned 3-3.5 guilders a week; in 1760 the Augsburg printer Schule paid his workers 3

guilders a week. Amsterdam workers earned instead 9-10 guilders a week. Smit, De katoendrukkerij, p. 196.
91

Kingma, ‘De katoendrukkerijen in Amsterdam en Nieuwer-Amstel’, 25. For France see: Gottmann, Global

Trade, ch. 5.
22eighteenth century, the Dutch industry had declined substantially and produced mostly cheaper
products of a lesser quality.92

Conclusion

This chapter has brought together two stories that are often seen as separate. The political
economy of textiles in Britain as well as in France and the Dutch Republic needs to be readnext to a history of textile procurement from India. It is assumed that the East India companies
played against domestic manufacturing interests. Their high volumes of textiles imported legally or illegally – into Europe were perceived as a threat more than as an opportunity. Thebans that were enacted confirm this interpretation. I showed instead the limitations of the textile
supplies of the East India companies: problems in procurement were endemic as was theimpossibility of being supplied with abundant quantities of high-quality cloth that responded
to the specifications and tastes of European consumers. Perhaps rather than accounting for the
success of Indian cotton textiles in spurring economic dynamism and innovation in Europe,
one might consider their limitations as equally important. Yet opportunities for thedevelopment of a new cotton industry in Europe could only be realised through a political
economy that provided the right level of protection to a nascent industry whilst satisfying
established manufacturing interests. England – more than France or the Dutch Republic –capitalised on the importation of large quantities of white Indian cloth suitable for local printing
as well as the opportunity to complement Indian cotton textiles with local mixes of linen andcotton. The complex political economy of cotton and linen within the British Isles has a global
dimension that connects Indian producers and European consumers and compares different
national trajectories within Europe.

92

Jan Willem Veluwenkamp, ‘De buitenlandse textielhandel van de Republiek in de achttiende eeuw’,Textielhistorische Bijdragen, 34 (1994), pp. 81-3. On the issue of quality and the development of an English cotton
industry see: Berg, ‘Quality, Cotton, and the Global Luxury Trade’; Riello, ‘Factories before the Factory’.
23