Let me conclude with what might appear a rather ordinary piece of cloth (Figure 13.1). It is a bandana, a square handkerchief commonly worn in India. Indeed, this cloth was produced in South Asia in the early nineteenth century but was consumed not in Asia but in North America. We are well acquainted with bandanas as they are to be seen around the neck of cowboys in endless 1950s and 1960s movies. They might be one of the few items that we are accurate about in films of nineteenth-century adventurers living in the Wild West. What the movies do not reveal, however, is that the bandana was made of a pretty Indian cloth (sometimes made of silk but most commonly of cotton), and that such cloth was part of the hyper-masculine sartorial choices of American cowboys.

An Indian bandana appears to us to be out of place in the American Far West also because the construction of the figure of the cowboy relies on the importance of another item made of cotton: jeans. It is Californian jeans (Levi's and later other labels) that have been repeatedly presented as foundational to US national identity. Yet, when the recently independent American Republic started trading in the Indian Ocean, bandanas were the most important item of importation into the US. Bandanas became a hit, with literally millions of them being sold in North America in the first couple of decades of the nineteenth century. It was such a good line of business that bandana imitations for US customers started being produced in the United States, and also in Britain and China.