ABSTRACT
The first shipment of Lancashire calico made from Liverpool to India in 1814 proved to be a defining event in world history, because it set in motion the process of industrialization in Asia. In that process the cotton textile industry played a preeminent role. What remained essentially a nomadic industry first migrated from east to west during the eighteenth century and then returned, in a new factory incarnation, to its ancestral home. The modern era in its history began in the 1780s when Lancashire assumed supremacy in the manufacture and export of cotton yarn and cloth. The era of the cotton industry as a standard bearer of the British export economy (1788-1949) largely coincides with the era of British primacy in world trade (1787-1939). Three later turning-points in the global history of the trade may be distinguished, occurring respectively in the years 1871, 1913 and 1955. Down to 1871 the share of cotton goods in world trade increased steadily as the largest flow of textile exports ever known in the history of the world gathered momentum. One item in that trade, cotton yarn, proved to be even more important than calico itself. World exports of yarn expanded throughout the century to reach a peak in 1899, in harmony with the continuing increase in the number of hand looms. That traffic supplied the primary stimulus from 1854 to the establishment of spinning mills in the ports of Asia, a process which was designed to replace the import of yarn by a local product. From 1872 to 1984 the share of textiles in world trade underwent a progressive decline as the cotton industry developed in markets formerly supplied by alien imports and as domestic production increased faster than the proportion entering into world trade. In 1913 the reign of King Cotton reached its very zenith, as the volume of world trade in both cotton textiles and textile machinery reached an all-time peak,1 together with the average world per capita consumption of cotton (Table 2.1).
