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Contents- Textiles In Trade- 1990

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

CONTENTS

Preface

A Brief History of the Textile Society of America. Milton Sonday

Speakers

Keynote Address: Silk in European and American Trade before 1783: A Commodity of Commerce or Frivolous Luxury? Natalie Rothstein

British Exports to the USA, 1776-1914: Organization and Strategy.

The British Linen Trade with the United States in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Negley Harte

Transatlantic Trade in Woollen Cloth 1850-1914: The Role of Shoddy. David T. Jenkins

Cottons and Printed Textiles. Stanley Chapman

The American Market for Indian Textiles, 1785-1820: In the Twilight of Traditional Cloth Manufacture. Susan S. Bean

The Manufacture and Trade of Luxury …

Trade And The Post War Textile Industry In The United States, Lynn Felsher

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

A large portion of textiles designed for the United States are no longer being made in this country. Instead they are manufactured in Europe, the Pacific Rim, including Japan, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, the Philippines, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean.

The initial design source of these textiles may still be the United States, but even this in light of my current research is ambiguous. I intend to show several textiles which though made for the U.S. market were not manufactured in this country. Their provenance is based upon interviews conducted with the textiles' designers, the country of origin labels …

Allegories Unveiled: European Sources For A Safavid Velvet, Mary Anderson Mcwilliams

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Woven in Iran during the seventeenth century, the magnificent velvet that is the subject of this paper (figure 1) testifies to the splendor of the reign of the Safavid Shahs (1501-1722). A curious blending of Persian and European elements, it features four women holding various objects against the backdrop of a flowering landscape.

The figures stand along the weft axis. The fragment in figure 1, from the collection of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York, features a full technical repeat unit, measuring over seven feet in warp direction, and 28 inches, or the full loom width, in weft direction. For …

Moccasins Into Slippers: Traditions And Transformations In Nineteenth-Century Woodlands Indian Textiles, Ruth B. Phillips

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Towards the middle of the nineteenth-century a swift and dramatic transformation occurred in textiles and other kinds of art made by Woodlands Indians in northeastern North America, This transformation was accomplished in part by a wholesale replacement of indigenous materials with Euro-American manufactures— cloth for hide, glass beads for porcupine quills and silk ribbon for paint. It also encompassed the introduction of entirely new object types and the substitution of a new vocabulary of floral imagery for older iconographic traditions.

It is not, of course, coincidental that this change in iconography and materials occurred simultaneously with the rapid growth of …

Studio And Soiree: The Use And Misuse Of Chinese Textiles In A European Setting, Verity Wilson

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

George Smith's painting, ‘The Rightful Heir’, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1874, serves as a melodramatic introduction to this paper. Sombre-suited gentlemen are depicted sitting around a table studying the disputed will. Two frightened ladies in crinolines and a small boy in a velvet suit confront the wicked usurper who is wearing a Chinese dragon robe. This angry Victorian was not unique in his choice of dressing gown.

The dragon robe, familiar from museum collections all over Europe and North America, was used in China in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an hierarchical garment. It was worn …

Modern Traditions: The Impact Of The Trade In Traditional Textiles On The Sakaka Of Northern Potosi, Bolivia, Elayne L. Zorn

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

An elegantly dressed woman, wearing the handwoven clothing characteristic of her ethnic group, stands in front of a vendor displaying the latest machine-woven shawls from Bolivia's capital city, La Paz. The women, her daughter, and friends have just walked five hours from their rural home to attend an annual festival in the region's only town. The merchant, a young man of indigenous origin, wearing jeans, a jacket, sneakers, and a baseball cap, urges her to try on his merchandise. Glancing at her women friends for support, she opens the large safety pin holding closed her handwoven shawl and deftly slips …

A "Little Book Of Samples": Evidence Of Textiles Traded To The American Indians, Rita J. Adrosko

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The original inhabitants of the United States were hunters and farmers, who used the produce of the hunt and of their gardens for food, clothing and shelter, for ritual purposes and pleasure. While some textiles were produced by Indians before the arrival of Europeans, the colorful yardgoods, blankets, kerchiefs, ribbons, and tapes introduced by the Europeans quickly became popular items of trade.

As early as 1685 wool fabrics such as matchcoat (a cloak material), stroudwaters, blankets, and stocking were listed among goods traded by William Perm's agents for lands west of the Delaware River. Two years earlier in a similar …

Ancient West Mexican Clothing And Its Ecuadorian Origins: New Evidence Of Maritime Contacts, Patricia Rieff Anawalt

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Evidence of ancient cultural contacts between coastal Ecuador and the mountains of West Mexico exists in clothing similarities between the two areas, namely tunic-like shirts and short breeches for males and a. tropical mode of dress for females. This non-Mesoamerican attire is illustrated in the early sixteenth century codex Relacion de Michoacan and also appears on mortuary figurines from the deep shaft tombs of Ixtlan del Rio, Nayarit (400 B.C.- A.D. 400). Coeval prototypes of this West Mexican clothing occur archaeologically along that section of the Ecuadorian coast which was the homeland of long-distance merchant navigators. Their trade goods, described …

A Documentation Of African Trade Cloths In The Philadelphia Port Of History Museum, Lisa Aronson

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The Port of History Museum in Philadelphia houses a collection of textiles characteristic of the types the French were trading with Africa between 1880 and 1900 in the early stages of European colonial rule within that continent.¹ The collection emerged in the era of "cotton imperialism1 when Europeans began competing with African cloth industries by importing their own cloths to Africa. (Johnson) The economic historian Hopkins reports that by the turn of the century textiles constituted "about a third of the value of total imports into French West Africa and about a quarter of total imports in British West …

Reconstructing The Ancient Aegean/Egyptian Textile Trade, Elizabeth Barber

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

For years archaeologists have commented on the occurrence of typically Aegean patterns on the ceilings of a fair number of Egyptian tombs, while musing that they could not see how such patterns were reaching Egypt. Certainly Minoan and Mycenaean potsherds had been found in fair numbers in Egypt; but the designs on the Egyptian ceilings were not the ones used by Aegean potters. To me, however, the particular patterns and layouts seemed strongly reminiscent of weaving —a craft I was quite familiar with, unlike most archaeologists, because my mother was a weaver. If the source of these ceiling patterns were …

Indian Trade Cloth In Egypt: The Newberry Collection, Ruth Barnes

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The Department of Eastern Art in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, holds what is undoubtedly one of the largest single collections of block-printed textiles produced in India, but exported to Egypt as part of the medieval Islamic Indian Ocean trade. These textiles, all now mere fragments, are of particular interest for two reasons. Firstly, fabrics of this type give us the earliest surviving examples of Indian weaving, although single fibre fragments have been found at the Indus Valley site of Mohenjo-Daro, dating to the second millenium B.C. , and we have numerous Vedic references to dress and textiles, as well as …

Carpets For Commerce: Rug-Weaving In The Caucasus, Carol Bier

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

At the turn of the 20th century, Caucasian carpets were in great demand among burgeoning European and American middle-class markets. With a history of carpet production going back at least three hundred years, rug-weaving in the Caucasus soared at the turn of the 20th century, first with economic incentives and the encouragement of czarist regimes, later as part of the Soviet economic system. Today, in an age of perestroika and glasnost. rug-weaving in the Caucasus for commerce and export lends itself readily to individual initiatives and private enterprise. Commercial production of carpets continues to be recognized as a means …

British Exports To The U.S.A., 1776-1914: Organisation And Strategy (3) Cottons And Printed Textiues, Stanley Chapman

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

One of the most familiar concepts to historians interested in Anglo-American topics is that of the Atlantic Economy. Political independence did not bring economic independence to the newly-found United States, and until after the middle of the nineteenth century trans-Atlantic trade continued much as it was in the colonial period, based on the exchange of primary produce for manufactured goods. Basic statistics confirm that Britain and the United States were each the major trading partner of the other in the first half of the nineteenth century. In this period, between a third and a half of all U.S. imports were …

The Role Of The Middleman In The Trade Of Real Madras Handkerchief (Madras Plaids), Sandra Lee Evenson

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The Kalahari people live and work in the Niger delta of southern Nigeria. There are some twenty-two Kalahari island settlements dispersed among the Santa Barbera, Santa Bartholomew, Sombreiro, and New Calabar Rivers (Jones: 1963, Daly: 1983) with Buguma, Abonnema, and Bakana their most recognized commercial and cultural centers; though, many Kalahari are employed in the more homogeneous city of Port Harcourt. (Daly: 1983)

Their location on the Niger delta favoured an economy based on fishing and trade. Originally, the Kalahari traded up-river for vegetables and grain in exchange for salt and fish. They also traded across the delta, most notably …

Local Textile Trading Systems In Indonesia: An Example From Flores Island, Roy W. Hamilton

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Several of the papers presented at this symposium deal with the trade of textiles over long distances, from one continent to another. Such trade systems undeniably had tremendous impact on the societies involved, but in many parts of the world individuals and communities are bound together in much smaller circles of trade that are equally formative. In this paper I will discuss a tiny network of textile trade that involves the carrying of cloth to neighboring villages over mountain paths and along surf-swept beaches. Trading systems on this scale are as much the rule as the exception and our understanding …

The British Linen Trade With The United States In The Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries, N.B. Harte

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

In the eighteenth century, a great deal of linen was produced in the American colonies. Virtually every farming family spun and wove linen cloth for its own consumption. The production of linen was the most widespread industrial activity in America during the colonial period. Yet at the same time, large amounts of linen were imported from across the Atlantic into the American colonies. Linen was the most important commodity entering into the American trade. This apparently paradoxical situation reflects the importance in pre-industrial society of the production and consumption of the extensive range of types of fabrics grouped together as …

Textiles And Trade In Tokugawa Japan, William B. Hauser

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Any discussion of the textile trade in Tokugawa Japan (1600-1867) requires that the socio-economic and political context first be outlined. Japan was a state divided into many separated political jurisdictions, with around one-quarter of the country controlled directly by the Tokugawa Shogunate and the other three-quarters under the local control of around 265 local barons or daimyo. While each of these local power-holders was subordinated to the shogun and required to spend half his time in attendance on the shogun at the Tokugawa capital of Edo (modern Tokyo), within his own domain he was an autonomous ruler. Each daimyo owed …

Transatlantic Trade In Woollen Cloth 1850-1914: The Role Of Shoddy, David T. Jenkins

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

THE WORSTED CLOTH TRADE

The factors affecting European trade and competition in worsted cloth in foreign markets, notably the United States, in the second half of the nineteenth century are well recorded. From the 1840s the two main worsted cloth producing countries of Europe, Britain and France, pursued quite different strategies in production and trade. Developments in dyeing technology from the late 1830s allowed substantial improvements in the production of mixed worsted cloth; cloth of cotton warp and worsted weft. The British industry rapidly converted its production to the cheaper mixed worsteds for a much wider market to the extent …

Revolving Bananas: The Influences Of Indian Trade Textiles On Javanese Batik Design, Robyn Maxwell

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The influence of the Indian double ikat silk patola on Southeast Asian textile structure and design has long been acknowledged, however, the impact of Indian painted and printed mordant-dyed cotton textiles, traded into the region over centuries, has been largely undocumented. Recent finds now indicate the great variety of cotton textile types imported into Indonesia.

This talk explored the role of these Indian cotton trade textiles in the development of Javanese batik, and the effect of the change of medium on design transformations. Designs from a range of batik-producing regions were examined, including the well known pisang balik (inverted banana) …

The Manufacture And Trade Of Luxury Textiles In The Age Of Mercantilism, Elisabeth Mikosch

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

When Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's minister for finance and economic affairs, said: "Fashion is to France what gold mines are to the Spaniards," (quoted by Minchinton 1977,112) he recognized how significant the manufactory of fashionable luxury textiles was for the economy of France. During the seventeenth and eighteenth century many absolutist rulers of Europe who pursued mercantilist policies fostered the production and trade of expensive textiles.

Tremendous resources went into the making of woven silks, lace, tapestries, fine embroideries and table linens. The best designers and craftsmen were employed who used the most valued materials, such as silk, precious metals …

Toba Batak Textile Inventions, Sandra A. Niessen

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

INTRODUCTION

This article focuses on fruits of looms worked by Toba Batak weavers in the Silindung Valley, North Sumatra, Indonesia. Silindung Valley weavings are characteristically bright and fashionable. They are described by the Batak themselves and by visitors from outside as the "least traditional" of Batak woven goods. They are also surging in popularity throughout all of Toba and increasingly making inroads into the market replacing the old-style textiles which are larger, of coarser yarn, and deeper/sober in colour. It is the modern style of Batak textile which today commands the highest prices locally. "Connoisseurs" of Indonesian textiles, however, usually …

Silk In European And American Trade Before 1783: A Commodity Of Commerce Or A Frivolous Luxury?, Natalie Rothstein

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

This outline is taken from ray as yet unpublished book on The English Silk Industry 1700-1825, and especially from the chapters on raw silk and the distribution of the woven material. In addition, I have widened the scope for this talk to discuss the subject more generally. In terms of general economic history the quantities of silk produced and sold are minuscule but there are a lot of instructive points to be made which are of general importance - as well as some very pretty objects. The latter are "documents" in the French sense as well as works of art …

The Harket For Domestic And Imported Textiles In Sixteenth Century Istanbul, Yvonne J. Seng

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

INTRODUCTION

When one thinks of Ottoman textile trade, the city of Bursa immediately comes to mind. As the Ottoman capital at the end of the fourteenth century/ it was known for its flourishing silk industry which exported fine brocades and velvets to Europe and the East. As it expanded, it fostered a secondary market in which Persian merchants exchanged a large part of the raw silk they carried to supply local weavers for European woolens as well as the Bursa silk fabrics. By the end of the fifteenth century, its fabrics were being exported to northern Europe: both the Russian …

Speaker Bios- 1990

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

SPEAKERS

A-Z (2 pages)

Rita J. Adrosko is Supervising Curator in the Division of Textiles, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, -D.C.

Patrida. RieffAnawalt is Director of the Center for the Study of Regional Dress at the Fowler Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles, California.

Lisa L. Aronson is Assistant Professor at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York.

Suzanne Baizerman teaches in the Department of Design, Housing and Apparel and is Registrar for the department's costume, textile, and decorative arts collection in the Goldstein Gallery at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Elizabeth Barber is …

Textile Design In The Marketplace, John E. Vollmer

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

INTRODUCTION:
As textile historians we are trained to observe physical evidence — materials, structures, methods of applying surface decoration and patterns. In brief, we deal with design. Despite our design focus, we frequently seek to explain differences within the context- of art historical research. Our conclusions, like those of the art historian, often focus on attribution and connoisseurship, rather than contributing to an understanding of textiles as cultural or economic indicators.

Although the academic study of design dates from the mid-19th century, only in recent years has this study moved from considerations of styling. Within the last three decades the …

Textiles In The Tourist Trade: Woollen Textile Production In Momostenango, Guatemala, Anne M. Lambert

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

INTRODUCTION

Textile production in Guatemala has been the focus of a considerable amount of twentieth century literature in the English language. Guatemalan textiles have been avidly collected by museums, universities and private collectors in North America and Europe. Our belief as researchers and collectors is that we are recording and preserving the valuable textile traditions of the indigenous people of Guatemala.

What we often don't realize is that collectively, over time, we are saying as much about our own perspective as outsiders as we are about the Guatemalan people and their textiles. Our choices of what to document and what …

Textiles In Trade In West Africa, Brigitte Menzel

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Textiles in Africa since some time have become a topic of research, much of which is focused on aspects of art. The at least equally important economic aspects (production, consumption, and trade) are still rather neglected.

When doing field research in West Africa it is impossible to overlook the fact that most of the textiles in use could not have been produced locally. This applies not only to the colorful printed cottons but as well to handmade textiles.

In Asante (Ghana) I found woolen fabrics, which obviously were hand-woven but must have come from somewhere else as sheep and goats …

The Impact Of The Mediterranean Silk Trade On Western Europe Before 1200 A.D., Anna Maria Muthesius

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Introduction

Silk, trade and politics were common spokes in an intricate wheel, propelling Mediterranean influence towards the West. At a time when Western Europe lacked the ability to manufacture silk cloth, Eastern silken stuffs were eagerly sought for secular and ecclesiastical purposes. Byzantium in particular, in return for silks, demanded Western military and naval aid, and her silk trade concessions bore the hallmark of powerful political bargaining counters. The survival of more than one thousand silks in church treasuries of Western Europe, provides unspoken insights into the complex impact of Mediterranean silk trade on the West before 1200 A.D. The …

Of Cabbages And Kings, Ellen S. Smart

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

This paper attempts to relate a small number of Mughal furnishing fabrics to their 17th C prices and to the purchasing power of Mughal money. There is no intent to give a comprehensive overview, but rather to see a few 17th C textiles, which today are rare and fabulously expensive, in terms of their original comparative cost. Information about the fabrics comes from the goods themselves and from contemporary Mughal paintings. Although inscriptions on the textiles contain some information about prices, several tables of textiles and prices are found in the Ain-i Akbari, a compendium on the mode of …

Trade In Hispanic Weavings Of Northern New Mexico And The Social Construction Of Tradition!, Suzanne Baizerman

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

No discussion of late 20th century trade in textiles - particularly trade in what has been called "regional" or "ethnic" textiles - would be complete without a discussion of the terms "traditional" and "authentic" for these terms inform even a lay person's evaluation of textiles on the market today.

As textile professionals, we encounter terms like "textile tradition," "traditional textiles" or even "authentic traditional textiles" in our everyday experience: a textile brought back by a collector from travel to a Third World nation or a textile on display in a museum. These textiles are subjected to discussions of their authenticity, …