A Global History of Textile Workers, 1650-2000

Call for Papers

We are still missing overviews for Canada, France, Indonesia, Italy and Poland. Please send a short proposal for a national overview (500 words max.) by email: or by fax: +31 6654181

This call for papers offers a detailed description of our intended programme. Please read this carefully, and also take note of the framework document, according to which all national overviews will be written.

Textiles shield our bodies and bring comfort to our homes. Textile products thus cater to a basic human need, they are among the most important goods fabricated and traded by mankind and have thus played a central role in history. It is no wonder that historians have paid a lot of attention to spinning and weaving, the basic processes in producing textiles. Not only have numerous regional and national studies on developments in the textile producing and trading sectors been published, but textiles have also been in the centre of several crucial historical debates. Theories on (proto-)industrialization, technological and business history, and the gendered division of labour, for instance, have often taken the textile industry as an important point of reference.
This project aims to take stock of the work done on textile workers all over the world, to compare their history internationally and over a long stretch of time. In doing this, we want to focus on wool and cotton production. Many natural and artificial fibres have been spun into yarn and woven to cloth over the past centuries, but wool and cotton have been the most important fibres, considering global production over the entire period from 1650 until recent times.

This period has been chosen to be able to show processes of industrialization and de-industrialization in all parts of the world. In the pre-industrial phase, market production of textiles mostly took place on farms by part of the rural population and in urban workshops by artisans. In some regions, weavers and entrepreneurs sought for cheaper ways of organising market production, by employing other weavers and spinners in the countryside for wages to produce for them. The specific nature of this 'proto-industrialization' was debated especially in relation to textile production.

In search of cheaper cloth production, technical improvements were made to enlarge spinning and weaving production from the 1760s onwards. Cotton and wool were among the first raw materials to be processed industrially after the introduction of new machinery. The 'industrial revolution' created immensely wealthy textile employers and condemned the actual producers to work in more efficient factories. The living conditions of textile workers and their efforts to organize to improve their situation have largely characterised the debates in social and economic history on the consequences of industrialisation.

Specific stages of textile production, whether in domestic, artisan or factory industry, were almost invariably divided between men and women. In some cases spinning was performed exclusively by women, in other cases by men. Certain kinds of products were only made by one, others by the other sex. Sometimes specific machines were only operated by one sex. Usually female workers (and children of both sexes) earned far less than men, even in performing exactly the same tasks. These and other aspects of the gendered nature of textile production can only be sufficiently explained by a thorough historical analysis, which compares these mechanisms in different parts of the world, throughout time.

Textiles early became a global product. Wool and cotton were cultivated in one place, transported to centres where yarn and cloth were produced, and the (partly) finished products were again moved to places all over the world, where they were sold for further refinement or usage. Both within and between countries different technologies, even un-mechanised and mechanised production, often co-existed for remarkably long periods for a variety of reasons. Trade relations and political hegemony greatly influenced the decisions about what processes could be performed most profitably in which place. Metropolitan authorities often prevented their colonies from protecting their local textile industries. With the process of de-colonisation, however, the lower wage rates in the ex-colonies served very well to compete with the former colonial powers. Consequently, the textile industries in the economic core regions of the world dramatically declined after 1950. Notwithstanding this reversal of roles, long commodity chains in textile goods, linking all parts of the world, remained typical.

The relevance of a global history of textile production over a long period of time seems clear. To realise such a broad comparison, the project follows a research model of an earlier comparative project on the history of dock workers. The results of this method have been published in Sam Davies e.a. (eds.), Dock workers. International Explorations in Comparative Labour History (2 vols., Ashgate, Aldershot: 2000).

Based upon their share in world wool and cotton spinning and weaving in the 1930s and the 1990s, we have decided to at least include the following countries in the project:

Africa:    Egypt
America's: US, Canada, Brazil, Argentine, Mexico
Asia:      China, India/Pakistan/Bangla Desh, 
           Japan, Indonesia, Turkey, Russia/USSR
Australia: Australia
Europe:    UK, Germany, France, Italy, 
           Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Spain, Poland,
           Switzerland, Netherlands