Giorgio Riello

East & West: Textiles and Fashion in Early Modern Europe

What is the origin and essence of fashion? This question has engaged scholars of various disciplines over the past decades, most of whom approach this subject with a Western or European focus. This paper argues instead that Asia was also pivotal in the articulation of the fashion system in Europe. The long interaction between these regions of the world initiated profound changes that included the iteration of the early modern fashion system. Silk and later printed cotton textiles are uniquely important in world history as agents of new consumer tastes, and the embodiment of fashion in Europe. Particular attention is given to the process of the Europeanization of Asian textiles, and the consideration of the intellectual, commercial and aesthetic relationship between Europe and Asia, as the European printed industry developed. Fashion was not just created through the adoption and use of Asian goods, but it was also shaped by a culture in which print was central; and it was the printing of information—visual, as well as literate—along with printing as a productive process, which produced a type of fashionability that could be “read”.

Asian knowledge and the development of calico printing in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

From the seventeenth century, the brilliance and permanence of colour and the exotic nature of imported Asian textiles attracted European consumers. The limited knowledge of colouring agents and the general absence of textile printing and dyeing in Europe were, however, major impediments to the development of a cotton textile-printing and -dyeing industry in Europe. This article aims to chart the rise of a European calico-printing industry in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by analysing the knowledge transfer of textile-printing techniques from Asia to Europe.

How India clothed the world : the world of South Asian textiles, 1500-1850

List of Illustrations List of Maps List of Figures List of Tables Preface Introduction: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500-1850, Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy I. REGIONS OF EXCHANGE: TEXTILES IN THE INDIAN OCEAN AND BEYOND 1. Southeast Asian Consumption of Indian and British Cotton Cloth, 1600-1850, Anthony Reid 2. Cloths of a New Fashion: Indian Ocean Networks of Exchange and Cloth Zones of Contact in Africa and India in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Pedro Machado 3. English versus Indian Cotton Textiles: The Impact of Imports on Cotton Textile Production in West Africa, Joseph Inikori 4. British Exports of Raw Cotton from India to China during the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, H. V. Bowen 5. The Resurgence of Intra-Asian Trade, 1800-1850Kaoru Sugihara II. REGIONS OF PRODUCTION: TEXTILES IN SOUTH ASIA 6. The Textile Industry and the Economy of South India, 1500-1800, David Washbrook 7. Four Centuries of Decline? Understanding the Changing Structure of the South Indian Textile Industry, Ian Wendt 8. From Market-determined to Coercion-based: Textile Manufacturing in Eighteenth-Century Bengal, Om Prakash 9. The Political Economy of Textiles in Western India: Weavers, Merchants and the Transition to a Colonial Economy, Lakshmi Subrahmanian 10. Competition and Control in the Market for Textiles: The Weavers and the English East India Company in the Eighteenth Century, Bishnupriya Gupta III. REGIONS OF CHANGE: INDIAN TEXTILES AND EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENT 11. The Indian Apprenticeship: The Trade of Indian Textiles and the Making of European Cottons, Giorgio Riello 12. The French Connection: Indian Cottons and their Early Modern Technology, George Bryan Souza 13. Fashioning Global Trade: Indian Textiles, Gender Meanings and European Consumers, 1500-1800, Beverly Lemire 14. Quality, Cotton and the Global Luxury Trade, Maxine Berg 15. Historical Issues of Deindustrialisation in Nineteenth-Century South India, Prasannan Parthasarathi Glossary Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

La chaussure à la mode: Product innovation and marketing strategies in Parisian and London boot and shoemaking in the early nineteenth century

Abstract After 1815 a large range of French goods could enter Britain free of duty. Many London trades had to face new French products that had fashionable status and were often considerably cheaper than the equivalent British products. This article analyses the relationship between the Parisian and the London shoemaking trades during the first half of the nineteenth century. Its aim is to understand the economic transformations that posited London in direct competition with Paris. Starting with a quantitative analysis of the competition between the two cities, the article focuses on the differences of products, materials and the selling and marketing techniques of the Parisian and the London boot and shoe trades. The article aims to show how differences in the way products were marketed played an important role in the success story of French shoemaking.

The Indian Ocean in the Long Eighteenth Century

This article considers the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth century, a period often seen as a moment of transition for the Ocean as an economic space. It argues that notwithstanding the increasing European presence, the eighteenth-century Indian Ocean world remained quintessentially Asian. The trade of cotton and the flow of American silver expanded an already developed system of trade and exchange. This article concludes by reflecting on the chronological and spatial boundaries of the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth century and considers the field of Indian Ocean studies in relation to global and Atlantic histories.

The object of fashion: methodological approaches to the history of fashion

This essay considers the role of artefacts in the historical study of dress and fashion and suggests the existence of three different approaches. The field of history of dress and costume has a long tradition going back to the nineteenth century. It adopts the methodologies of art history and considers artefacts as central to the analysis of different periods and themes. In the last few decades the emergence of fashion studies has been interpreted as a distancing from artefacts. It is here claimed that fashion studies brought theoretical rigour and embraced a deductive methodology of analysis in which artefacts still played an important function. The final part of this essay introduces the reader to what I call the material culture of fashion, a hybrid methodology borrowed from anthropology and archeology in which the object is central in the study of social, cultural and economic practices that are time specific. It shows in particular the challenges and paybacks of such an approach.

A Taste for Luxury in Early Modern Europe: display, acquisition and boundaries

2A. Winter, Mesmerized. Powers of mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago, 1998). use of the hospital remained ‘strong and deep-rooted’ (268). Hence, it is important to her argument to show that the city’s charitable dispensaries, as outpatient institutions and under the charge of energetic Indian sub-assistant surgeons, had a positive role to play in mediating between a still largely alien hospital system and a cautious Bengali public. Chatterjee’s book is an enterprising addition to the growing literature on medicine and public health in early colonial India: it is especially valuable in its detailed examination of specific hospitals and in its quest for Indian agency. However, the colonial source materials she relies upon necessarily present a one-sided perspective on how these institutions actually functioned. We learn a great deal about how and why they were set up, the rules and regulations by which they were governed, but remarkably little about the patient experience and how far life in the wards matched up to high-minded expectations. Although she gives some impression of the physical structure and layout of individual hospitals, there is little sense of how Calcutta’s population at large felt about these imposing, if somewhat menacing, edifices. In her introductory and concluding remarks, Chatterjee tries to present a larger interpretive picture, but in the content of the individual chapters she remains locked into the contemporary mindset, its official language and arcane medical terminologies. It would have been refreshing if she could have found a way, through newspapers, memoirs and fiction, to stand outside her constricting sources, or to have given some indication of how hospital medicine fared in relation to rival homoeopathy and resurgent Ayurveda. At times, Chatterjee fails to draw on recent scholarship, such as Alison Winter’s lucid account of mesmerism in Bengal.2 This is a useful book, informative and purposeful, but it lacks a more systematically critical and analytical approach to its source material.

Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia

This anthology explores the role that art and material goods played in diplomatic relations and political exchanges between Asia, Africa, and Europe in the early modern world. The authors challenge the idea that there was a European primacy in the practice of gift giving through a wide panoramic review of imperial encounters between Europeans (including the Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English) and Asian empires (including Ottoman, Persian, Mughal, Sri Lankan, Chinese, and Japanese cases). They examine how those exchanges influenced the global production and circulation of art and material culture, and explore the types of gifts exchanged, the chosen materials, and the manner of their presentation. Global Gifts establishes new parameters for the study of the material and aesthetic culture of Eurasian relations before 1800, exploring the meaning of artistic objects in global diplomacy and the existence of economic and aesthetic values mutually intelligible across cultural boundaries.

The Oxford India Anthology of Business History

many of the cases a key individual is involved, usually a dominant, charismatic personality able to convince, persuade, bully or manipulate those around them, their professional advisers and investors. There is abundant evidence that effective corporate governance can reduce the likelihood of creative accounting and fraud, and that failure in internal controls and by external auditors are common to most of the cases. None of this is perhaps very surprising and largely supports the view that accounting and audit failures are manifestations of deeper strategic failings rather than causes of collapse in their own right. There is also a peculiar reassurance in finding that in our era of globalisation and financialisation ‘creative accounting and fraud is endemic (across time and space)’ (p. 507). Jones concludes realistically that as creative accounting will always be with us, and indeed that we are probably aware of only a fraction of its ‘true’ extent, the struggle against it will be a continuing one. This is a well-constructed and well-executed book. It is written and presented with admirable clarity, with clear diagrams and tables supporting the text and a high degree of consistency across the multi-authored contributions. Numerous examples are provided, many of which are already familiar, such as Satyam, Parmalat, HIH and Polly Peck. But the broad geographical coverage ensures there are cases which will be new to the expert reader. The book’s style makes it very accessible to non-accountants who may want to understand more about accounting, particularly its ‘dark side’, but who would be disinclined to read a textbook. For the academic accountant it is a very useful resource, with comprehensive references provided on a chapter-by-chapter basis. For the business historian there is much of interest, particularly in the individual cases, which demonstrate the links between corporate failure, strategy, entrepreneurship and the role of financial markets, and also highlight the potential difficulties in relying on accounting numbers in judging corporate performance.