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16. The BEIC was first known as the English East India Company when it<br />
received its charter in 1600. Its stated intention was to sell English woolen<br />
cloth in Asia and to obtain spices for the home market, but it was unable<br />
to establish markets in China and Japan where the weather might have<br />
helped sell English broadcloth. Its merchants soon learned that Indian<br />
cotton and silk textiles were the long-established commodities of Asian<br />
trade in the “Spice Islands” [contemporary Maluku in eastern Indonesia]<br />
(all paraphrased from Guy 1998, 14). The English East India Company<br />
agents developed their seventeenth-century trade in Indian textiles<br />
within several distinct markets, and the company was known as the<br />
British East India Company after 1707.<br />
17. The Company supplied Indian chintz to London both as fabric lengths<br />
and as stitched clothes (Lemire 1991, 10-13, 15, 180; K N. Chaudhuri 1978,<br />
277). The seventeenth-century craze for Indian handprinted cottons was<br />
associated with both a quantitative increase in the use of fabric for home<br />
decoration, such as “hangings and curtains” (Clabburn 1995, 6), as well as<br />
with new clothing styles. Meanwhile, the BEIC continued to ship<br />
handloomed cotton cloth from India for a profitable re-export trade with<br />
the British colonies in North America and elsewhere. The classic reference<br />
is Irwin and Schwartz 1966.<br />
18. For the arguments that fashion is a western/capitalist phenomenon, see<br />
Fred Davis 1992, 16 note 8, 17, 105; Lipovetsky 1994, 242; Shrimpton 1996.<br />
For the critique of this “colonizer’s model of the world,” see Blaut 1992.<br />
The popular conception of the “unchanging East” had many nineteenthcentury<br />
ramifications. As late as the 1860s, some British manufacturers<br />
were eager to market cloth in India because they apparently believed that<br />
“change in material and style did not exist as such, favourite patterns had<br />
been constant for centuries, [and] fashion did not have to be contended<br />
with” (Lyons 1996, 182).<br />
19. The collection and display of colonial Indian manufactures in Victorianera<br />
exhibitions and museums was an important way in which British<br />
imperialism claimed its authority over information about India<br />
(Breckenridge 1989). The men associated with London’s South<br />
Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert), such as Henry Cole<br />
and George Birdwood, obtained Indian textiles for the collection directly<br />
from the 1851 Exhibition (Barringer and Flynn, eds. 1998).<br />
20. Indian handicrafts were considered to be living antiques in the same<br />
sense that native American handicrafts were in the U.S.; both sets of<br />
“traditions” were supposedly facing extinction through the pressure of<br />
Euro-American commodification (Cohodas 1997).<br />
Used by permission for Bridging World History, 28<br />
The Annenberg Foundation copyright © 2004