Oceanscapes: Tamil Textiles in the Early Modern World

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This book explores how Tamil textiles became a globally traded commodity, and circulated across the seas and oceans during the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, eventually being consumed by a wide variety of societies in Asia, Europe, Africa, and America. The author traces how the global diffusion of woven, Painted, printed, and dyed cotton textiles occurred not only because of the skills of Tamil weavers and dyers, but also because of the political and the economic compulsions in the various regions it travelled. The offcers of the East India Companies and the missionaries investigated the techniques of the printing and dyeing of Tamil textiles and found them to be considerably more sophisticated than those used in Europe. This resulted in an exchange of technical and technological knowledge of textile production between the Tamil coast and Europe.

This volume examines the long-term economic history of the Tamil region through the lens of textiles and provides not only extensive and quantitative analysis of the types of textiles traded, but also examines the movement of precious metals, the process of monetization, and the struggle between the Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, Armenian, Tamil, and Telugu traders.

Adopting Braudel’s approach, this study breaks new ground by looking at changes and continuities in the Tamil textile economy, society, and technology as an integral phenomenon, thus rescuing history from becoming region or nation-centric and elevating its status to the global.

S. Jeyaseela Stephen is Directeur, Institut Pour etudes Indo-Europeennes, and was Professor of Maritime History from 2001 to 2013 at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, West Bengal. Professor Stephen is the author of the Coromandel Coast and its Hinterland: Economy,

Society and Political System 1500-1600 (1997); Portuguese in the Tamil Coast: Historical Explorations in Commerce and Culture, 1507-1749 (1998); The Diary of Rangappa Thiruvengadam Pillai, 1761-1768, Translated from Original Tamil (2000); Caste, Catholic Christianity and the Language of Conversion: Social Change and Cultural Translation in Tamil Country 1511- 1779 (2007); Portuguese, the Armenians and the World of Art and Architecture in the Tamil Coast, 16th-18th Centuries (2008); Expanding Portuguese Empire and the Tamil Economy, 16th-18th Centuries (2009) and The Sky of Indian History: Themes and Thought of Rabindranath Tagore (2010).