2 results
3 - A Fierce Competition! Silesian Linens and Indian Cottons on the West African Coast in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries
-
- By Anka Steffen
- Edited by Jutta Wimmler, Klaus Weber
-
- Book:
- Globalized Peripheries
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 18 January 2023
- Print publication:
- 19 June 2020, pp 37-56
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
European-made linens and woollens figured prominently among the foreign textiles exchanged at the very beginning of the African trade, as Colleen E. Kriger points out. Indian cottons joined the product range shipped on European vessels to the coast of Africa, when the English and their European rivals became aware that they could become an inexpensive substitution for linens during the first years of the seventeenth century. As Bernhard Struck has convincingly shown in the previous chapter, it is no longer possible to exclude Eastern Europe from global histories. By implication, his conclusion also means that global history cannot be told by ignoring Eastern European actors or the supply of essential manufactures from this region for global trade. One particularly noteworthy commodity from East-Central Europe within the Atlantic trade system was Silesian linen textiles.
In recent years, scholars have come to agree on the central importance of African consumer preferences for the consistently high level of textile exports by European or Asian merchants to the western or eastern shores of Africa. Strikingly, however, only Indian cottons have received a high degree of scholarly attention, whereas woollens and linens brought to Africa have been almost completely overlooked. This situation is puzzling, considering that preferences of Africans for textiles not only dictated the type of cotton cloths that were traded, but also determined what kind of fabrics in general were transported to the West African coast and in what quantities.
It is time to pull woollens and linens out of the shadow cast upon them by the longstanding spotlight directed on cottons. Thus, the major part of this chapter brings into the limelight the competition between these three types of textiles on the West African coast during the decades just before and after the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. First, I explore the role played by the Royal African Company of England (RAC) as one major ‘delivery service’ for Silesian linens, based on extensive research in the company’s invoice books. The chapter then provides a short introduction to the nature of the textiles. Since Silesian linens still lack an adequate definition, I survey their portrayal in contemporary travel accounts. Lastly, a quantitative comparison of all textiles shipped by the RAC (based on its invoice books) is introduced, and the narrative of the dominance of Indian cottons is called into question.
4 - Spinning and Weaving for the Slave Trade: Proto-Industry in Eighteenth-Century Silesia
- Edited by Felix Brahm, Eve Rosenhaft
-
- Book:
- Slavery Hinterland
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 17 June 2021
- Print publication:
- 16 June 2016, pp 87-108
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Textiles were the most important merchandise in the barter trade for Africans destined for slavery, serving both as a consumer good and as a currency. Throughout the four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, fabrics of all sorts made up about 50 per cent of the value shipped to Africa. Leslie Clarkson states that cotton figures most prominently in the literature relevant to the history of textiles, as a commodity which Europeans have always desired and which has been prominent in early intercontinental trade (including in the barter trade for enslaved Africans), in the slave-based economy of the American South, and in the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. At the same time, she concludes that linen has been almost entirely overlooked by scholars – although the fabric was ubiquitous in Europe, for clothing, bedding, tablecloths, packaging, canvas, and more. Even a more recent essay collection on the European linen industry treats mainly the British, Irish and North American aspects, and hazards some glances into Sweden, Belgium and nineteenth-century Germany, when linen was already in irreversible decline; the omnipresent linen trade of seventeenth and eighteenth century northern France and Central Europe is completely ignored. Its importance has been taken into account by a number of German scholars, but their studies on some particular textile regions, published in German, have not had the impact they deserved.
It is true that homespun linen lacks the glamour of silk, the ornaments and the brilliant colours of calicoes and the dignity of woollen cloth, but in spite of all its inconspicuousness it was one of the products that closely linked the peoples around the Atlantic basin with those in Atlantic hinterlands, and it did so over centuries. A history of linen can very well illustrate how distant regions established trade relations and thus constituted a wider, previously non-existent, socio-economic fabric. This chapter will first introduce the overall importance of export-oriented linen production for certain regions of the Holy Roman Empire. It will then scrutinise the conditions which helped to make the landlocked province of Silesia one of the major suppliers of textiles on Atlantic markets, and the living conditions of the textile workers in the region. The formerly Austrian, then Prussian province of Silesia is of particular interest because there the institution of serfdom survived well into the nineteenth century, in contrast with Germany's more western textile regions, such as Westphalia, the Rhineland or Swabia.