Threads of Empire: Modes, Materials, and the Making of Textiles
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This blog discusses a workshop on global textile history held at the University of Glasgow on 8-9 September 2025 and partly funded by the Economic History Society.
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The British Academy-funded Commodities of Empire project has held annual workshops since 2007. Past iterations have advanced the field of commodity history, with a predominant focus on the flow of raw materials from the global South to the global North. This workshop, held at the University of Glasgow, turned its attention to textiles, exploring the interplay between primary materials and finished goods between 1450 and 1850. The significance of textiles as global and colonial commodities in the early modern period is well established, with cotton and silk offering particularly cogent lenses through which to examine the long-distance movement of goods, fashion, and technology. Yet if textiles were to serve as the workshop’s theme, the organizers asked, what new questions could be posed?
The immediate answer was to focus more closely on imperial peripheries — the global South. In studies of textiles and empire, scholarship has often emphasized the metropole as the driver of trade, exchange, and innovation. This workshop sought instead to foreground the perspectives of colonized populations. What might the materials, manufacture, movement, and use of textiles within, across, and between colonial systems reveal about the wider roles of textiles in global cultures of production and consumption between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries? And, in turn, how might these insights reshape our understanding of both colonized and colonizing societies?
Following an open call, twelve papers were selected, seven of them by early-career scholars. Reflecting the inherently interdisciplinary nature of textile history, the contributions ranged from economic, social, and cultural analyses to object-based investigations of materials and processes of exchange. The case studies covered six regions of the world—sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Atlantic world, and North America—while consistently emphasizing the interaction between local and global dynamics. Several papers also examined lesser-studied fibres, such as raffia, piña, and wool.
All papers addressed the impact of broader political and economic structures on local textile manufacturing. Some emphasized the vitality of local production and consumption in colonial settings. Laura Beltran-Rubio showed how textile production in the Andean region of New Granada thrived in the eighteenth century despite an influx of foreign goods. Pragya Sharma illustrated how nineteenth-century innovations in Indian hand-knitted cloth drew upon imported technologies and styles. Sarah Van Beurden traced how techniques introduced by Catholic missionaries in Kongo around 1900 blended with indigenous materials and weaving knowledge to create a distinctive form of lacemaking. Emma Pearce explored continuities between African preferences for checked patterns and the consumption of Madras and tartan cloths in the Caribbean. Taking a continental view, William Clarence-Smith challenged the assumption that African handicraft production necessarily declined with global economic integration and successive waves of Asian and European textile imports.
Other papers examined attempts by colonial authorities to control, often unsuccessfully, local textile production and consumption. Paula González Fons demonstrated that silk production in seventeenth-century New Spain was short-lived, unable to coexist with the booming colonial demand for cochineal. Tiago Gil analysed how cotton spinners and weavers in Paraíba, Brazil, responded to imperial prohibitions on textile manufacturing between 1780 and 1820. Annahcelestya Sanchez discussed tensions between Aztec cultural traditions and imperial appropriations of rebozo cloth in colonial Mexico. Ruth Egger revealed how racialized European interpretations of ancient Kongo cloth distorted understandings of its original uses. Juan Carlos González Balderas showed that imperial restrictions failed to suppress the illicit trade of Chinese silks and other Asian textiles in eighteenth-century Peru. Stephanie Coo argued that nineteenth-century dress codes in the Philippines clashed with climatic realities and the need for comfort. Finally, Williams Orukpe demonstrated how British colonial occupation transformed cotton production in Esanland, Nigeria: European imports undermined Benin cloth manufacture, while cotton cultivation and weaving ceased to be women’s exclusive domain.
Held over two days, this iteration of the Commodities of Empire workshop series underscored the universality of human engagement with textiles—whether animal or plant fibre, and whether through making, trading, or consuming. Textiles thus emerge as a powerful lens through which to illuminate imperial strategies, economic processes, and, perhaps most importantly, the lived experiences of those under colonial rule.
To contact the authors:
Meha Priyadarshini
University of Edinburgh
Sally Tuckett
University of Glasgow
Jelmer Vos
University of Glasgow
