The celebrated toile ‘Les Travaux de la manufacture’ by the French calico printer Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf shows a series of vignettes of his printworks in Jouy-en-Josas in the year 1783 (Figure 8.1). Craftsmanship and industrial organisation are woven together in a design that is at the same time a narrative of industrial achievement and the demonstration of the unparalleled quality of European printed textiles. This artefact needs deciphering, however. This is a printed cotton cloth that an Indian artisan would have recognised, but found at the same time very puzzling. He might have guessed that the cloth itself was Indian, but he would have been surprised by the printing motifs, which are very different from the floral and animal designs commonly used in India. An Indian artisan would have also been quite surprised to find that this cloth was neither painted nor resist-dyed (by waxing the cloth), but was printed with madder red, a technique not used in India. The scene, clearly borrowed from an etching, was also alien to Indian craftsmanship as it did not make use of a wooden-block technique but used copper plates not dissimilar from those deployed for printing on paper. Although the cloth was woven in India, this was surely neither an Indian cloth nor a counterfeit or imitation. This was something new: a European printed cotton.