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Honnold Library Record: The Cloth Trade
From the Honnold Library Record, Volume 3, Number 2. Summer 1960:
The Cloth Trade
During the past weeks important additions have been made to the Honnold Library collection of books on textiles and the textile trade and industry. Perhaps the most elegant accession is Calico Painting and Printing in the East Indies in the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries by George P. Baker. This folio volume deals with the history and techniques used in making Indian calicos and chintzes. So greatly desired were these handmade products that the United Kingdom had to pass the so-called Calico Act (1720) to protect its woollen industry from the formidable competition of this popular Indian substitute. Baker’s study is supplemented by a portfolio of magnificent colored photographs of Indian prints. After looking at these pictures it is easy to understand why the enforcement of the Calico Act was very difficult. Otto von Falke’s Kunstgeschichte der Seidenweberei is a valuable and beautifully printed volume on silks and silk production. Tissues des XVIe et XVIIe siècles, by René Chavance, contains beautiful photographs of French and Italian brocades and damasks. These and a large number of other books on textiles have arrived in the Library. More are on their way to Claremont from foreign book dealers.
These additions to our collection promise to be of both aesthetic and historical interest. They make one vividly aware of the great cultural debt of Europe to the Orient. They make one aware of how much the world lost when the distinguished craftsmanship of an earlier period was replaced by the machine products of the nineteenth century. Ruskin may have been wrong when he indicted machine-made products as “cheap and nasty;” but he was right in his admiration of the hand-made textiles of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.
These books will be of interest to the political and economic historian. The obscure cloth peddlers who walked from town to town in the late medieval and early modern period did much to foster the growth of European markets and market towns. In these towns merchants and guildsmen became men of power. These urban centers became places of refuge for run-away serfs. The textile trade and manufacture in Europe gave rise to the new and powerful merchant class, and created centers of population favorable to the growth of political and economic freedom.
As textile production increased in Europe in the nineteenth century, the industry in India declined. Long before World War I, it had ceased to be of international importance. But since that date the trend has been reversed. Today Lancashire is unimportant and India is again one of the great textile manufacturing countries. The textile trade has almost completed a full cycle. Unfortunately, the decline and revival of textile production in the Far East was not accomplished without producing feelings of anti-European resentment. The textile industry’s role in the larger aspects of history is not yet ended.
The expanded collection of books so useful to scholars has been made possible by a gift of a generous friend of Honnold. It promises to become a valuable part of an already good collection of materials on history and on the arts.
Some of the materials mentioned here are physically located in Special Collections. For more information on those materials, contact Special Collections.
What is the Honnold Library Record?
The Honnold Library Record, published from 1958 until 1975, was the publication of the Honnold Library Society, the friends of the library group, founded in 1954. All the issues of the Honnold Library Record are available online in the CCDL in the Honnold Library Record Collection.
— michael | May 3, 2007 07:53 AM | The more you know
