Raman, Alka (2022) Indian cotton textiles and British industrialization: Evidence of comparative learning in the British cotton industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Economic History Review, 75 (2). pp. 447-474. ISSN 0013-0117
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
This article contributes to a topic central to interpretations of British industrialization and the role of Indian cotton textiles in shaping notions of cloth quality and, eventually, innovations. Textual evidence indicates that manufacturers in the early British cotton industry compared the quality of their products to that of Indian cottons. These texts suggest the hypothesis that there was a shift towards finer cotton textiles in Britain, via attempts to make the cotton warp yarn match Indian quality. Using a novel dataset of surviving British and Indian textiles of the period, the article puts this hypothesis to the test, and concludes that between 1746 and 1820 there was an increase in the quality of British cottons, leading to a convergence with the quality of handmade Indian cottons.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Additional Information: | Funding Information: The research for this article is part of the author's doctoral thesis, generously funded by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). The author thanks Tirthankar Roy, Joan Roses, Mary Morgan, Patrick Wallis, Anne Ruderman, John Styles, Maxine Berg, and participants of the Economic History Society's Residential Training Workshop (2018) and Annual Conference (2019) for their inputs on earlier drafts of the article. The author is also grateful to participants of the Graduate Seminars at LSE and Oxford for their feedback on earlier versions of this article. The author thanks the editors of the and three anonymous reviewers for their questions, comments, clarifications, and suggestions, all of which improved the final article. EcHR Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Economic History Society |
| Divisions: | Economic History |
| Date Deposited: | 03 May 2024 14:03 |
| Last Modified: | 12 Dec 2024 02:49 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/122903 |
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