India and China constituted the main world industrial areas of the pre-modern times.2
India attained a pre-eminent position particularly in cotton textile production, a sector in which the subcontinent developed superior knowledge and exceptional productive
1 Francis Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire (London: W. Pickering, 1826), Vol. 1, p. 439.
2 Maxine Berg, ‘Useful Knowledge, ‘Industrial Enlightenment’, and the Place of India’, Journal of
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skills.3 This chapter asks whether superior knowledge of production processes
characterised also raw silk production. Should the phrase ‘textile factory of the world’ include India’s silk industry in the eighteenth century?
Indian cotton production was exported to other regions in Asia, Africa, as well as the Americas and Europe, fostering long-distance trade and conquering global markets. The distinctive aesthetic qualities, designs, and colours created strong international demand for Indian cottons. India’s pre-eminent position in the production of cotton textiles in the pre-modern period was underpinned by superior knowledge of dyeing and printing and the precision of its weavers and other textile artisans.4 However, the success of the cotton industry was achieved mainly thanks to the high- quality of the Indian finishing processes.5 In the case of cotton textiles, India’s
‘comparative advantage’ rested upon knowledge which stemmed from long-term familiarity with production techniques and practices by Indian artisans.6
As this chapter shows, superior knowledge and/or sophisticated production technologies did not characterize the Bengal silk industry. Some contemporary travelogues create a misleading impression that Bengal was a region renowned for the production of silks suitable for European markets, often confusing the demand for
3 See Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy (eds.), How India Clothed the World (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009); Prasannan Parthasarathi, ‘Cotton Textiles in the Indian Subcontinent, 1200-1800’, in Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi (eds.), The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200-1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 17-41.
4 Giorgio Riello, ‘Asian Knowledge and the Development of Calico Printing in Europe in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Global History 5 (1), 2010, pp. 1 and 6; Parthasarathi,‘Cotton Textiles’, pp. 18-21.
5 Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 83.
6 Ibid., p. 362. In particular, it was the knowledge of the finishing processes that rendered Indian cotton textiles a highly sought after item on the global market. Riello, Cotton, p. 80.
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finished and raw silk.7 Moreover, the story of raw silk production needs to be
disentangled from that of silk weaving, even if these two stages of production are intimately related. Prior to the standardization of the nineteenth century, silk was not a homogeneous product and woven silks from different countries or using different methods of production could be easily distinguished.8 Giovanni Federico contends that the specific production methods resulted in specific physical characteristics, which made a “certain type of silk comparatively more suited for producing a specific type of silkware and/or for being processed with some type of equipment”.9 The types of silk
products demanded by European and Indian consumers differed, therefore different qualities of raw silk were needed. Eighteenth-century Indian consumers valued silk fabrics for the reputation of the place of weaving or for their colours. In contrast, Europeans demanded high-quality silk fabrics with fashionable designs.10 Europeans
7 Bengal was the only centre of commercial production of raw silk in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century India. The main silk production area was the region of Kasimbazar. When the European trading companies arrived in India, the trade in Kasimbazar silk was already well developed and its silk was traded within the Mughal Empire and across Asia. The Dutch East India Company was the first among the trading companies to import raw silk to Europe. However, to improve the quality of Bengal raw silk, over 80% of the imported silk had to be reeled under the Company’s control in its reeling workshop. Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India 1556-1707 (New Delhi: Asia Publishing House, 1963), p. 57; Om Prakash, The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, 1630-1720 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 55-7 and 219; Roberto Davini, ‘Una Conquista Incerta. La Compagnia Inglese delle Indie e la Seta del Bengala,1769-1833’ (Unpublished PhD thesis: European University Institute, 2004), p. 15.
8 Giovanni, Federico, An Economic History of Silk Industry, 1830-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 53.
9 Ibid.
10 C.A. Bayly, ‘The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society 1700-1930’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 286; Roberto Davini, ‘A Global Supremacy: The Worldwide Hegemony of the Piedmontese Reeling Technologies, 1720s-1830s’, in Anna Guagnini and Luca Molà (eds.), History of Technology, Vol. 32 (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), p. 99; Debin Ma, ‘The Great Silk Exchange: How the World was Connected and Developed’, in Debin Ma (ed.), Textiles in the Pacific,
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also valued lightness and a uniformity of texture, qualities which could only be achieved if high-quality raw material inputs were used. This in turn required advanced reeling technology and high-quality cocoons.
Figure 1.1. Map of the Principal Silk Producing Region in Bengal
Source: Adapted from Roberto Davini, ‘Una Conquista Incerta. La Compagnia Inglese delle Indie e la Seta del Bengala,1769-1833’(Unpublished PhD thesis: European University Institute, 2004), p. 221.
Positive views of the Indian silk industry relate to the superior quality of the finished silk fabrics, not raw silk. Brenda M. King, for instance, claims that “the silk textiles of India were and still are, some of the most widely admired and skilfully
1500-1900. The Pacific World: Lands, Peoples and History of the Pacific, 1500-1900 (Aldershot: Variorum, 2005), pp. 24 and 26.
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produced in the world”.11 This view of Indian silks can be traced back to pre-modern
sources. Travel accounts by Europeans show a certain degree of admiration for Indian silken products. The seventeenth-century French traveller François Bernier, for example, observed that in Bengal there were “such a quantity of cotton and silks that the Kingdom may be called the common storehouse for the two kinds of merchandise, not of Hindustan or the Empire of the Great Mughal only, but of all the neighbouring kingdoms, and even of Europe”.12 This and other positive views are, however, in stark
contrast to the situation the EEIC encountered when exporting raw silk. Bengal raw silk was repeatedly described as inadequate quality material by the British silk manufacturers and weavers. Such raw silk was criticized for its coarseness and for its inequality that allowed it to be used only in the production of haberdashery.13
Mulberry silk culture was only introduced to India in the fifteenth century. Three hundred years later Indian production methods lagged behind other world areas, particularly China, Italy and France, the leaders in silk manufacturing.14 There was no
11 Brenda M. King mostly focuses on the weaving skills of the Indian artisans and on the finishing processes that enabled the production of high-quality silk fabrics. She does not address the issue of the raw materials used for the production of such silk products. The use of imported raw silk of finer quality might reconcile the evidence on the production of low-quality silk thread and high-quality silks being weaved in India. Brenda M. King, Silk and Empire: Studies in Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 55-56.
12 Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, p. 439. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier also shows admiration for Indian silks. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India (London: Macmillan & Co, 1889), Vol. 2, pp. 2-4. 13 All the contemporary materials called the silk “unequal in skeins”, meaning that the skeins contained silk threads of different colour and made of different number of filaments. Goldsmiths´ Library [G.L.], 1796 fol. 16654, Considerations on the Attempt of the East-India Company to Become Manufacturers in Great Britain (London: n.p., 1796), p. 21; Goldsmiths´ Library [G.L.], 1795 fol. 16280, Reports of the Committee of Warehouses of the East-India Company relative to Extending the Trade on Bengal Raw-Silk
(London: n.p., 1795), pp. 13; K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660-1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 346.
14 Sanjay Shinha, The Development of Indian Silk Industry: A Wealth of Opportunities (London: Intermediate Technology Publications, 1990), pp. 4-5. For the origins of sericulture in India see: Lotika
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apparent pressure from the domestic weaving sector to upgrade the available technologies. The rest of this chapter therefore addresses the question of why Bengal raw silk was of a quality lower than the Chinese and Italian silk and why the EEIC considered it feasible to increase the quality of raw silk by altering production methods.