Tradition · cotton textile export trade
Calico and the Indian cotton trade
Also known as Calico, Indian cotton textiles in world trade, Calicut cloth, Chaliyan, cāliyan cloth
Plain-woven cotton named after Calicut, where cāliyan weavers made it by the eleventh century, and the trade it stands for: Indian cottons, calico, painted chintz and Bengal muslin, that clothed markets from Cairo to London. East India Company imports grew so popular that English wool and silk interests won the Calico Acts of 1700 and 1721 against them. The ban on finished cloth fostered the Lancashire mills through which Britain overtook India as the leading cotton manufacturer in the nineteenth century.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Material
- Cotton
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
The polymath Hemachandra described calico prints with a lotus design in the twelfth century. The calico question was one of the great issues of English politics from the 1680s to the 1730s: a mob stormed the Company's offices, and people wearing imported cloth were assaulted in the street.
Dhaka muslin and Coromandel chintz have their own entries; this one covers the trade as a whole. The second Calico Act received royal assent in 1721 but is styled the Woollen, etc., Manufactures Act 1720; the prohibition was lifted in 1774, though the statutes were formally repealed only in 1867.
Connections (6)
- Named afterKozhikode / Calicut
Calico takes its name from Calicut, the Malabar port now called Kozhikode, where the cloth originated in the eleventh century and was known as chaliyan, after the cāliyan weavers who made it. The raw plain-woven cotton was dyed and printed in bright colours, and calico prints became popular in Europe; the word has been in British use since 1505. Like denim from Nîmes, the name records a place of trade carried into English rather than every place of manufacture.
- Trade routeSurat
Calico was woven with Gujarati cotton from Surat for both warp and weft, and by the fifteenth century calico from Gujarat was appearing in Cairo; trade with Europe followed from the seventeenth century. Surat therefore stands at the raw-material end of the cloth that carried a Malabar name, and of the export trade whose success in England later provoked the Calico Acts of 1700 and 1721 against Indian printed and dyed cottons.
- Craft tradition ofCoromandel chintz, Machilipatnam
Chintz is printed, painted, stained or glazed calico, its name from the Hindi chint, meaning spotted or variegated. By 1680 more than a million pieces a year were being imported into England, with similar quantities going to France and the Dutch Republic, first for curtains and bed hangings and then for dress. France banned chintz imports in 1686 and Britain followed in 1720; the Calico Acts were in large part laws against Indian printed cotton of this kind.
- Craft tradition ofDhaka muslin
Muslin, the finest of the Indian cottons, sits at the other end of the same trade: in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Mughal Bengal was the world's foremost muslin exporter, with Dhaka the capital of the trade. The Calico Acts were aimed largely at Bengal, which then dominated world cotton markets, and England laid a 15 per cent duty on muslins in 1700. In the later eighteenth century muslin weaving in Bengal ceased under competition from cheap English cloth.
- Historical linkLondon
The calico question was one of the major issues of English national politics between the 1680s and the 1730s. The East India Company's cheap printed cottons overtook its spice trade by value in the late seventeenth century; a mob stormed the Company's offices and people wearing imported cloth were assaulted. Parliament's acts of 1700 and 1721 banned first the import and then the sale of most cottons, while Lancashire grey cloth was sent to London for finishing.
- Historical linkJamdani
Jamdani's decline belongs to the wider story of the Indian cotton trade. From the middle of the nineteenth century the industry withered as cheaper yarn arrived from Europe and Bengal's jamdani and muslin could not compete with textiles manufactured in Britain, while the fall of Mughal power removed its greatest patrons. Villages once famous for it, such as Madhurapur and Jangalbari in Kishoreganj, faded into oblivion, reversing the centuries in which Bengal's fine cottons had clothed distant markets.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Calico", "Calico Acts", "Chintz" and "Muslin". Woodruff Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800.
Open Calico and the Indian cotton trade in the repository →