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Passionate projectors : savants and silk on the Coromandel coast 1780–98
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Berg, Maxine (2013) Passionate projectors : savants and silk on the Coromandel coast 1780–98. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 14 (3). doi:10.1353/cch.2013.0041 ISSN 1532-5768.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cch.2013.0041
Abstract
Silk was an industry of longstanding provenance in precolonial India, highly specialized by region and the specific markets it provided. It was well known from the Punjab, Dacca and Bengal, Surat and Ahmedabad, Benares, and Hyderabad; in South India silk and cotton mixes were produced in Mylapore, Tanjore, Trichinopoly and Madurai. Wild silks (moonga) were known in India “from time immemorial” and produced for the Arab market.1 Yet a recent survey of the early European and Eurasian industry mentions the Indian silk industry only once, as “known in India before our era.”2 From the early medieval origins of South Indian production, the industry flourished during the Vijayanagar Empire of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries in the Karnataka, Andhra and Tamil regions. Silk production in new cotton and silk mixes (mushroo and himroo) also expanded in the Deccan and the Mughal courts in the fashionable dress of the nobility.3
Silk production in South India for export to Europe became an East India Company project in the later eighteenth century, at a time when it was seeking cheaper alternatives for European, Persian and Chinese silks on the London luxury market. A series of South Indian silk projects also found its context in Enlightenment projects of “useful knowledge” and industrial improvement. This article investigates James Anderson’s silk projects on the Coromandel coast. Though the projects ultimately failed, they show dedicated attempts to adapt and transfer technologies and substantial investment by the East India Company. Detailed analysis of the setting-up phases, early progress, then failure of a number of these projects shows a common lack of engagement with local environmental constraints and local commercial incentives among farmers and zamindars.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||
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Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor | ||||
Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > History | ||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Luxury goods industry -- India, Silk industry -- India | ||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History | ||||
Publisher: | The Johns Hopkins University Press | ||||
ISSN: | 1532-5768 | ||||
Official Date: | 2013 | ||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 14 | ||||
Number: | 3 | ||||
DOI: | 10.1353/cch.2013.0041 | ||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||
Funder: | European Research Council (ERC), Seventh Framework Programme (European Commission) (FP7) | ||||
Grant number: | 249362 (ERC) |
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