Question

How was cloth for an international market produced in Europe during 17th & 18th centuries

Answer 1

Dear Student,

At the beginning of the 17^th and 18^th century, the regional and international trading in textiles has already been established and ruled by Ming China and Mughal India, through their silk and cotton production on such a substantial scale that both served not only the elite consumers within the region as well as the growing world market to Southeast and Southwest Asia. While Europe served only the regional and national markets as it's woolen and linen industries were not well developed, except Flanders’ and Italy’s fine woolens that were exported across the continent. Europe’s prime interest lied in Oriental luxuries, mainly silk, spices, ceramics and their occurrence in Asia. Still, Europeans entered the cotton trade, keeping in mind the keen interest of Southeast Asian buyers towards cotton, that was made along the Coromandel Coast in India.
Although in Africa, Gujarat’s cotton cloth was already very valuable while trading along the East African coast, but Europeans extended the trade to the West African slave trade by purchasing cotton for that. By the mid 17^th century, Europeans had developed a second new market of Indian cotton in Europe. The Atlantic economy grew as trade in Indian cotton developed in tandem with European participation and Atlantic trade also became more and more important for European textile industries as the economic change started increasing in the 18^th century because the quantity of consumption of European manufactures was increasing in both the tropics and temperate zones’ societies, and textiles was a prominent part of that. The size of the domestic market or production cannot be calculated by such statistics, but it reveals the rise that the Atlantic economy gave to the growing and intense demand for textiles that producers and traders look forward to meet.

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