Movement and Mobility

This chapter demolishes the accepted wisdom that India was the source of Egyptian cotton and instead demonstrates the importance of local production and regional trade. Kelley shows, through a comparison between Byzantium, Egypt, and Nubia, the degree to which our conceptualisation of ‘Byzantine’ is transactional. She shows furthermore that our understanding of the commercial networks of cotton production and distribution is entirely mistaken; the popular narrative of the Indian origin for Byzantine and Mediterranean cotton is shown to be exceptionally improbable.