How India clothed the world : the world of South Asian textiles, 1500-1850 / edited by Giorgio Riello, Tirthankar Roy, with the collaboration of Om Prakash and Kaoru Sugihara.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material / Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy -- Introduction: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500-1850 / Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy -- Southeast Asian Consumption of Indian and British Cotton Cloth, 1600-1850 / Anthony Reid -- Cloths of a New Fashion: Indian Ocean Networks of Exchange and Cloth Zones of Contact in Africa and India in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries / Pedro Machado -- English versus Indian Cotton Textiles: The Impact of Imports on Cotton Textile Production in West Africa / Joseph E. Inikori -- British Exports of Raw Cotton from India to China during the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries / H. V. Bowen -- The Resurgence of Intra-Asian Trade, 1800-1850 / Kaoru Sugihara -- The Textile Industry and the Economy of South India, 1500-1800 / David Washbrook -- Four Centuries of Decline? Understanding the Changing Structure of the South Indian Textile Industry / Ian C. Wendt -- From Market-Determined to Coercion-Based: Textile Manufacturing in Eighteenth-Century Bengal / Om Prakash -- The Political Economy of Textiles in Western India: Weavers, Merchants and the Transition to a Colonial Economy / Lakshmi Subramanian -- Competition and Control in the Market for Textiles: Indian Weavers and the English East India Company in the Eighteenth Century / Bishnupriya Gupta -- The Indian Apprenticeship: The Trade of Indian Textiles and the Making of European Cottons / Giorgio Riello -- The French Connection: Indian Cottons and Their Early Modern Technology / George Bryan Souza -- Fashioning Global Trade: Indian Textiles, Gender Meanings and European Consumers, 1500-1800 / Beverly Lemire -- Quality, Cotton and the Global Luxury Trade / Maxine Berg -- Historical Issues of Deindustrialization in Nineteenth-Century South India / Prasannan Parthasarathi -- Glossary / Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy -- Bibliography / Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy -- Notes on Contributors / Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy -- Index / Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy.

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Cloth has always been the most global of all traded commodities. It is an illuminating example of the circulation of goods, skills, knowledge and capital across wide geographic spaces. South Asia has been central to the making of these global exchanges over time. This volume presents innovative research that explores the dynamic ways in which diverse textile production and trade regions generated the 'first globalization'. A series of experts connect this global commodity with the dramatic political and economic transformations that characterised the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Collectively, the essays transform our understanding of the contribution of South Asian cloth to the making of the modern world economy.