Oceanscapes: Tamil Textiles in the Early Modern World

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This book explores how, in the early modern world, Tamil textiles became a globally traded commodity, and in being circulated across the seas and oceans came to be consumed by a wide variety of societies in Asia, Europe, Africa and America. The author elucidates how global diffusion of woven, painted, printed, and dyed cotton textiles occurred mainly because of the skills of Tamil weavers and dyers, and depended in large measure on consumer choices, fashion, aesthetics, social hierarchies besides the political and the economic situation in the areas of trade. The officers of the East India Companies and missionaries investigated into the techniques of printing and dyeing and found them to be considerably more sophisticated than in Europe.

The resultant exchange of technical and technological knowledge of textile production from the Tamil coast to Europe shaped clothing trends and taste as well as prompted innovations. The long-term economic history of the Tamil region as examined through the lens of textiles has been traced in this volume with an extensive and quantitative analysis of the types of textiles traded. The author addresses topics concerning the movement of precious metals, the process of monetization, aspects of business organization, techniques, and the struggle between the Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, Armenians, Tamil, and Telugu traders.

Being Braudelian in approach, this study breaks new ground by looking at changes and continuities in the Tamil textile economy, society and technology as an integral phenomenon, a process directing itself to a totality, thus rescuing history from becoming region or nation-centric and instead, elevating its status to the global.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR S. Jeyaseela Stephen

S. Jeyseela Stephen is professor of maritime History and Coordinator of the special Assistance programme of the UGC at Visva-Bharti. He joined the academy of historians in 1994 at Ecole francaise extreme-orient and went to pune to became Senior Advisor to Tata Central Archives in 2000. He became Head of the Department of History in 2001 at Visva-Bharti University, Santiniketan. He was the editor of revue Historique: Societe de 1st Histoire de Pondichery (1995-97). He had taught at the University of Nebraska, USA in 2004. He is a Member of the Executive Committee in the Indian Historical records Commission nominated by the Government of India. (220-07). Among his many publications are: The Coromandel Coast and its Hinterland: Economy, Society and political System, 1500-1600 (1997), Portuguese in the Rtamil Coast: Historical Explorations in Commerce and Culture, 1507-1749 (1998), Rangappa Thiruvengadam Pillai Naatkurippu, Vol. I (1760-1768) Vol. II, 1762-66, (2000), The Diary of Rangappa Thiruvengadam Pillai, 1760-68: Trnslated from Original Tamil with Notes (2001), Portuguese-Tamil Grammar: Modernisation and Democratisation of Tamil (2001) and Letters of the Portuguese Jesuits from Tamil countryside, 1666-68, (2001). He has also co-edited (with K.S. Mathew) Indo-French Relations, (1999). ) and edited Trade and Globalisation: Europeans, Americans and Indians in the Bay of Bengal, 1511-1819 (2003). He won the best book prize for his book Muthu Vijaya Thiruvengadam Pillai Naatkurippu, 1794-1796, in 1999 (in Tamil which deals with Diary Writing in Tamil during the Eighteenth Century).