Passionate Projectors: Savants and silk on the Coromandel coast 1780–98

Abstract

Passionate Projectors: Savants and silk on the Coromandel coast 1780–98 Maxine Berg Silk in India 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. Europeans were well aware of Indian silks by the first half of the sixteenth century. Portuguese chroniclers described the silk robes and caps of the Vijayanagar kings and of the court of the Zamorin in Calicut. Bengal had a reputation by then for its lightweight silks, “taffeties” or “taffeta,” much used by the English by the seventeenth century.4 European imports from the seventeenth century, especially from Bengal, included large amounts of silk textiles. European trading companies soon sought to exploit the potential of an export trade to Europe in Indian silks. From this time the crafts and production moved away from the indigenous production and trading centres to the “black towns” around the European trading centres and factories in coastal India. There was also an increased demand for silk in the princely states.5 The English sent Streynsham Master to India in 1675 to learn about silk production there, and its potential as a trade product. He spent five years there, and promoted the promise of Bengal silks.6 He wrote in 1676: “All the Country, or great parts thereof about Cassambazar, is planted or sett with Mullberry trees, the leaves of which are gathered young to feed the worms with and make the silke fine, and therefore, the trees are planted every yeare.”7 From the later seventeenth century the Dutch and the English imported large amounts of raw silk from Bengal. It accounted for 88 per cent of the Asian raw silk sold on the Amsterdam market from 1693 to 1820. Bengal also supplied most of the raw silk and silk goods from Asia to the London market; Chinese silk piece goods made up no more than 2 per cent of imports at the turn of the eighteenth century.8 English silk weavers so feared the competition of Indian and Near Eastern silks by the late seventeenth century that an Act of 1699 outlawed their sale in England, though the re-export trade was still allowed.9 Indian silk was by the eighteenth century a priority of the English East India Company, then seeking cheaper alternatives for a large London luxury market in Italian and later French silks, and to a lesser extent in expensive Persian and Chinese silks. The English Weavers Company achieved a total ban on imported French silks in 1766; the law remained until 1824.10 Silk fascinated European savants and projectors. Its exotic provenance from ancient times...