A Global History of Textile Workers, 1650-2000

National Overviews

These are preliminary versions of papers prepared for the conference 'A Global History of Textile Workers, 1600-2000' held at the IISH in November 2004.
Quotation or citation is allowed only after written permission of the authors.For more information please contact the project team ().

Argentina

Mirta Zaida Lobato, A Global History of Textile Production, 1650-2000 (Argentina) (104 Kb, word document)

Austria/Czechoslovakia

Andrea Komlosy, International Textile History 1650-2000: The Habsburg Monarchy and its Successor States Austria and Czechoslovakia (140 Kb, word document)
Textiles were of major importance in the industrial parts of the Habsburg Monarchy, especially in Lower and Upper Austria, in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, in Vorarlberg and the Vorlande. The main textile fibres were linen and wool. Cotton only gained in significance when the Habsburg Monarchy reached a trade agreement with the Ottoman Empire following the Peace Treaty of Passarowitz/Pozarevac in 1718. Silk weaving was an important industrial trade in Vienna. Propelled by the incorporation of Lombardy, a district of silk production, this branch came to dominate urban proto-industry in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Vienna. After the collapse of the Monarchy, the existing networks and the established division of labour were severely disturbed by the new national borders and the attempts of the successor states to sever the ties with the former political core, i.e. Vienna. The article is guided by a periodization which combines territorial modifications, legal conditions and economic cycles with changes in technology, raw materials and the organization of production. One particular focus is on the specialization of and the division of labour between the different regions involved in the process. Another focus is on the different types of labour and employment. Conceiving historical change in terms of inequality, unevenness and the contemporaneous overlapping of methods usually attributed to different eras, my explorations reveal the simultaneity of different types of labour at a given moment in time rather than a chronological sequence of modes of production.

Brazil

Roberta Marx Delson, The Origin of Brazil's Textile Industry: An Overview (178 Kb, word document)
This article considers the origin of Brazil's important modern textile industry. Rejecting previous theories of textile manufacture, the position presented here is revisionist in nature, suggesting a direct, if uneven, line of development for the industry from the eighteenth century onward. The 1700's witnessed metropolitan support for an expanding proto-industrialized cotton cloth industry in Brazil in conjunction with an expansion of textile production in Portugal, a significant departure from mercantilist colonial paradigms. Where cloth production had previously been limited to home or plantation settings, heavily capitalized factories now appeared, especially in the North and the Far West of Brazil. These mills produced surplus cloth for trade, employing a wage labor force that was mostly indigenous. Cloth was produced in both urban and rural settings, becoming a proxy for currency; salaries were calculated in rolls of fabric, while cloth became a medium of commercial exchange in many parts of the colony. Notwithstanding eventual metropolitan directives to halt this colonial production, cotton cloth of all categories continued to be manufactured in Brazil. The nineteenth century saw the expansion of Brazilian cotton mills which prospered even in the face of competition from inexpensive British textile imports. The diverse nature of the Brazilian textile workforce, which included slave and free laborers, and male as well as female weavers, is also considered.

China

Robert Cliver, 350 Years of Chinese Textiles (2nd version, 167 Kb, word document)

Denmark

Lars K. Christensen, The textile industry and the forming of modern industrial relations in Denmark, (final draft, 163 Kb, word document)

Egypt

Joel Beinin, Egyptian Textile Workers: From Craft Artisans Facing European Competition to Proletarians Contending with the State (116 Kb, word document)

Germany

Dietrich Ebeling, Marcel Boldorf, Stefan Gorißen, Michael Mende, Anke Sczesny, Michaela Schmölz-Häberlein, Die deutsche Woll- und Baumwollindustrie vom 16. bis 20. Jahrhundert (German version, 252 Kb, word document)
The German Wool and Cotton industry 16th - 20th Century (English version, 43 Kb, word document)
Of the national overview of German textile workers' history two versions are available. The German version is what our German colleagues have sent in. It is mostly in German. As we realise that many partners in the project will be unable to read German, but we do not have funds to have the full text translated into English at this phase of the project, we have supplied an English translation of the parts dealing with the general picture for all of Germany of the German text, but not of the text on regions of Germany.

Great Britain

Alan Fowler, British Textile Workers in the Lancashire Cotton and Yorkshire Wool Industries (95 Kb, word document)

India

Tirthankar Roy, India (96 Kb, word document)

Japan

Janet Hunter and Helen Macnaughtan, Textile Workers in Japan, 1650-2000 (154 Kb, word document)

Spain

Angel Smith, Carles Enrech, Carme Molinero and Pere Ysàs, Spanish Textile Workers, 1650-2000 (2nd version, 179 Kb, word document)

Turkey

Donald Quataert, Textile Workers in the Ottoman Empire, 1650-1922 (98 Kb, word document)
Lisa A. Seidman, Textile Workers in Turkey, 1922-2003 (46 Kb, pdf document)

Uruguay

María Magdalena Camou and Silvana Maubrigades, The evolution of Uruguayan textile industry (113 Kb, word document)

USA

Mary H. Blewett, Textile Workers in the American Northeast and South: Shifting Landscapes of Class, Culture, Gender, Race, and Protest (118 Kb, word document)
This overview of the American textile workers 1650-2000 explores changing technology, industrial organization, markets, and state regulation; gender relations and antagonisms; the shifting sexual division of labor; the issues of race and the racialization of immigrant groups; and the clash of cultural values and class ideology among native-born and immigrant workers, including religion, ethnic differences, levels of skills, and familiarity with industrial/urban life. American textile production shifted from its proto-industrial beginnings in New England in the early nineteenth century to water and steam-powered factories. In the later nineteenth century, large competitors in the Northeast, especially in silk and woolen production, challenged the region's pre-eminent position. Emerging from the Civil War, the mill villages and large factories of the South dominated US cotton and rayon production in the twentieth century. Expanding world trade and the globalization of capital investment encouraged competitive textile centers in Asia and Latin-America, which rapidly undermined southern production by 2000.