Learning and connecting: making cottons global, circa 1500–1750

When Europeans first disembarked from their ships in India at the very end of the fifteenth century, they were amazed by the profusion of cotton textiles. Just over three centuries later European ships disembarked cargoes of cotton cloth produced in Europe on the same shores of India. What had happened between 1500 and 1800 to radically change the geography of world production and trade? The second part of this book explains this change as a slow but important transition in the position that Europe occupied in global trade and manufacturing. The concentration on a single commodity serves to explain a transformation that was much wider than cotton manufacturing and trade. The central section of the book argues that the early modern period witnessed the emplacement of the conditions for cotton textiles in particular and manufacturing in general to bring the West towards a modern industrial society.

The introduction to this book points out that the ‘divergence’ of the West has been explained in different ways. From the microperspective of the cotton industry it can be represented as a protracted and cyclical process dependent upon a variety of factors, some endogenous to Europe, but in most cases dependent on the connections that Europe created with other continents. The aim of this section is not to explore a world of ‘endless possibilities’, and it therefore sidelines what other parts of the world did (or might have done) to create their own modern industries or develop versions of a cotton textile sector to rival India. Europe was a rather improbable candidate to become the new powerhouse of cotton textile production and trade, because the continent had never enjoyed much success in developing a sophisticated cotton textile industry before 1500. Indeed, the striking feature of the textile world at that time was that Europe performed well in wool, linen and even to some degree in silk manufacturing, but was rather backward in spinning, weaving and finishing cotton cloth.