Eric
Jones, La Trobe University ha reseñado para EH.Net el libro de Giorgio Riello, Cotton:
The Fabric that Made the Modern World. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2013. xxviii + 407 pp. $35 (hardcover),
ISBN: 978-1-107-00022-3, Leemos en sus apreciaciones “Reviewing this book is a tall order because
it is strikingly broad in coverage and even bolder in the sweep of its claims,
geographical, chronological and methodological. The volume is also full
of contemporary illustrations of textiles, which, when few physical items have
survived, is a practical alternative. I have never seen so many pictures
in a scholarly text on commodity history, used here to support Giorgio Riello’s
insistence that economic historians are too narrow in the evidence and approach
they use – more of which anon. It is true that cotton has been the
subject of innumerable industrial histories that do not begin to match this
author’s reach back to A.D. 1000 or his delving into the detail of textile
history in Asia, though his claims for primacy may still be thought a mite
overdrawn. Riello, who is Professor of Global History at the University
of Warwick, wishes to answer two main questions: why cotton came to outclass
other fibers used for clothing and why northwest Europe, more particularly
northwest England, became the improbable location from which manufactured
cotton cloth flooded the world market. He does better, in my view, in
tackling the former question than the latter. Much is to be learned,
nevertheless, from both halves, for this is a rich and elaborate work.
Explorar Cambridge books online acá
Picking
out any single section is difficult because so many topics, themes, clever
distinctions and academic debates are introduced in a largely successful
crusade to demonstrate that cotton is a good lens for viewing global history
(though by dealing primarily with India and England, the book is really
international history, give or take the late arrival of the nation
state). I will mention only two outstanding treatments of the “why
cotton” issue. The first is the extended demonstration that developments
in the printing and design of fabrics should take their place alongside
innovations in spinning and weaving. The second is some ingenious
calculating of ghost acreages to show how unreasonably expensive in land or
labor it would have been for England to have produced at home enough of any
fiber to satisfy its burgeoning industrial sector. The point is
emphasized that the novelty of European cotton production was to delink
manufacturing geographically from the source of its raw material.
There is
no need to quarrel with the breadth of the geography or chronology other than
to say that the choice does rather depend on what one is trying to
explain. Economic historians may, however, bridle at the remark that they
are just as interested in measuring outcomes as in explaining them and
attribute “all the merit (or blame)” parsimoniously, to one or at most a
handful of variables. This, says Riello, is “a rather narrow way of
accruing alternative explanations.” Insofar as we are guilty as charged,
this misconceives the economic method. Economic historians of my
acquaintance are concerned with magnitudes (how many, how much, how often,
etc., as Clapham said) but they have an end in view that does not necessarily
blind them to the complexity of the world: they simply wish to identify as much
order in it as possible. Admittedly some overdo the approach, bruising
the tender tissues of history in the iron grip of neoclassical theory.
Price theory will take you 60 percent of the way, quipped Lance Davis, but he
meant only 60 percent. As soon as sociological and other variables are
introduced, the reproducible and the definite deliquesce into less tractable
realism. Maximizing these things simultaneously proves too hard for any
of us. Introducing great breadth, as Riello does, creates engaging
narratives but is a different exercise. Perhaps ironically, Cottonturns
out to be far more analytical than his methodological statements might lead one
to expect.
Beyond
this, Riello joins the coterie of academics determined to cut the role in world
history of Europe, and especially of England, down in size. That the West
borrowed ideas about design from India, whence it imported cotton textiles
before producing them at home, is familiar enough. Nevertheless, some
credit might be given to the European shipping that did uniquely take trade
into another hemisphere. Riello asserts that England was extreme rather
than exceptional, which depends on what these terms mean and as it stands is
surely misleading. He says that whereas the old classic on cotton by
Wadsworth and Mann aimed to show how Lancashire changed the world, he wants to
show how the world changed Lancashire. He wishes explicitly to side-line
technological history, saying for instance that even if factories did emerge in
England suddenly they were only epiphenomena. They were symptoms of
something bigger. But factories, and a fortiori textile machinery, indeed the entire
Lancastrian industrial revolution, were what broke the mold of world
history. Ideas and materials had filtered from the East but that is not
the point, even without any allowance for independent discoveries. The
point is the response. However early in time developments in making
cotton had occurred in Asia, and whatever transmission to Europe there was, the
technological response in England was utterly novel and utterly formative of
the modern world. The cant term would be “game-changer.”
Riello’s
central purpose is to demonstrate how a specific good changed the way people
lived, their tastes and physical conditions, and to do this in a way that
dissociates him from the supposed limitations of economic history. The
formation of tastes is admittedly something that economic historians do not
pretend to understand but I do not see that this book endogenizes it in a
rigorous way. Exposing the passionate heart of Riello’s approach and its
apparent defects is of course the first task when reviewing. It may,
however, distract attention from the scope of his achievements. Given the
depth of scholarship and unusual range, a catalogue of contents ought not to be
an appendix – but a full account of all the subsidiary episodes and puzzles
discussed would be beyond the permissible length of this review. On its
own terms Cotton’s history is immensely informed and
informative.
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