Global trade and textile workers

Because of their high value and low weight, textiles have long been a major commodity in local, regional and, from the sixteenth century, global trade. Indeed, fragments of Indian cotton cloth have been found in Roman archaeological sites in the eastern Mediterranean. This trade, of course, would have taken place some two thousand years ago. The same axis of exchange, from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, was active in medieval times, which has been documented recently by Ruth Barnes' detailed analyses of cotton cloth fragments from the Cairo bazaar, now deposited in Oxford's Ashmolean Museum. ¹ It should come as no surprise, then, that global flows of textiles shaped the lives of textile workers in the period from 1650 to the present.