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5 - The Indian apprenticeship: Europeans trading in Indian cottons

from Part II - Learning and connecting: making cottons global, circa 1500–1750

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2013

Giorgio Riello
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
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Summary

Piles of cotton cloth are for sale in this nineteenth-century European painting of everyday life in India. Unlike similar paintings of commercial life on the subcontinent, this image shows the process of opening, measuring and assessing the quality of the wares for sale. A measuring stick is used to check that the length of the cloth is correct. Many pieces are still folded, which suggests that this task might take a while. This painting takes us to the heart of an important problem in the history of trade and exchange: what was the knowledge behind the products being sold? Clearly the purchaser in this picture is taking precautions against being swindled. We also presume that he is informed about the goods that he is buying and that he has already in mind who he might be selling them to in order to make healthy profits.

An early modern European trader (one of the many servants of the East India companies purchasing cottons in India) would have looked less composed and comfortable in carrying out such a task. There are endless reports in the correspondence of the European companies on the frauds that they encountered in India. Cloth frequently fell short in fineness, length and breath. As the French traveller and writer Jean-Baptiste Tavernier explained, a bale of cloth contained up to two hundred pieces ‘among which five or six and up to ten pieces…may be inserted of less fine quality; thinner, shorter, or narrower than the sample of the bale’. Clearly European traders had to trust samples, but they were often given coarser and thinner goods. Measuring lengths was also problematic as it implied opening each bale supplied. But the problems faced by European traders did not stop there. Unlike many of their Asian competitors, who had been trading in Indian cotton cloth for centuries, the Europeans, at least initially, had little understanding of varieties and markets. Getting to know the business was essential to the success of an entire enterprise and was no simple task. This chapter considers the process by which Europeans came to comprehend cotton textiles. This process of learning about cottons started in India and, through trade, developed into attempts to make cottons a viable commodity for sale in Europe, Africa and the Americas.

Type
Chapter
Information
Cotton
The Fabric that Made the Modern World
, pp. 87 - 109
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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