Re: Recent Macrohistories/unsubscribe

I find Whitaker's a very interesting paper. A few marginal historical
notes:

1.)

:>the legal regimes that had facilitated wool
>consumption and expansion in the first place were being demoted and
>challenged later by expanding cotton interests, which included the 'cotton
>dumping' policies by so called 'royal companies' particularly the East
>India Company.

The `East India Company' was NOT a Royal Company as its real name: `The
Company of London merchants trading to the East Indies' indicate - other
companies like the obscure Courteen Association or the Summer Island Company
were, but the East India Company was like, for example, the Levant Company a
chartered Company - meaning that it had a Charter granted by Parliament -
not by the crown.

2.)

Actually, one of the most revealing bits of information I found
>(that belies all these demand-side frameworks of 'consumer choice' you hear
>in neoliberalist economic thought) was that it was even ILLEGAL to be
>buried in anything else than wool for many years (1500s-1600s) in England.


One of the main problems in dealing with pre-modern societies is that you
tend to approach them in a modern frame: you see - one of the
characteristics of `absolutist states' is that they have so to say too many
laws - tens of thousands of them, many of them contradictory - AND INTENDED
TO BE SO. That there exists a certain law doesn't have to mean it's really
implemented.

3.)

> In the British case, it had 'unsubstitutable  wool,' meaning the British
>grades of wool were known to be of fine quality--making MANUFACTURERS in
>the Low Countries as well as elsewhere dependent upon them for wool. In
>other words, existing manufacturers were unable to play divide and conquer
>with their (plurality of) suppliers, as typically occurs worldwide in many
>materials and minerals. In the English case, it was a monopoly and the
>power relations were different.

This relates to the Middle Ages - to an extent wool-manufacturing in the 16
th century - NOT to the 17 th - 18 th century when the Dutch Republic was
supplied with wool from Denmark, the Baltic, the Ottoman Empire and even
Persia as well. In the eighteenth century actually Dutch merchants had a
wool-factory in Ankara.

4.)

  India was
>dropped like a stone in the late 1700s as a textiles powerhouse--only to be
>integrated in the British Empire later as something different, the
>peripheral extraction state, run on British capital. (Resat Kasaba has an
>edited 'world systems' book, advisory editor Wallerstein, which has a
>chapter about this. Plus, read any Indian economic history about this as
well.)
>
He - and any general economic history' may argue so but it's not true - bulk
export of textiles from Manchester to India only start around 1790 - exports
of textiles from India to England by the EIC continue in force in the
1757-1800 period, most of this direct investment by the East India Company.
Basically land-revenue invested in textiles - the
investments (that's mainly textiles - opium only takes off after 1780) in
Bengal by the EIC increase from 4.3 million in 1760 to 12.5 million in 1780
(see Om Prakash, ."Trade and Politics in Eighteenth Century Bengal" in L.
Blusse
(ed.) On the Eighteenth Century as a Category in Asian History (London,
1998).

And in any case - India was in the nineteenth century NOT run on British
capital - thus, for example, the Bombay - let alone the Ahmedabad
textile-industry was by and large (Ahmedabad completely) financed by Indian
capital.

5.)

> Relating this to the British case, textiles worldwide particularly have a
>great deal of 'cross over qualities', it being historically (worldwide
>until 200 years ago) part of the storehouse of common knowledge in an
>family economy to make their own textiles, own their own looms, etc. The
>knowledge base is (was) there and it was domestic.

Yes and no - technology was undoubtedly cheaper before the industrial
revolution, however - since knowledge was household based it was also easier
to keep it within the household. Consider the case of Persian carpets -
these can still not be imitated anywhere else since they are works of `art'
resting on a very ancient tradition. And what's true of Persian carpets
holds true for much of pre-industrial manufacturing - thus, nobody could
imitate Ahmedabad parcala since nobody but the Jain-weavers there knew how
it was precisely manufactured - same e.g. for Chinese porcelain or Russian
coats.

6.)

To facilitate this demotion of gilded labor as well
>as expanding the tax base for the monarchy, the king even had 'immigration
>drives' to lure the Dutch over into England. >

Dutch immigration concerns mostly highly skilled and very well-paid labor
which should in no way be compared to the `proto-industrial' labor force
since
that's basically cheap, unskilled or semi-skilled labor (women in
particular). Dutch workers were paid higher salaries than English to lure
them over, had to - since Dutch salaries in general were higher than English
salaries.


P.S.: This is my last message on this list. Since I'm leaving for Portugal
very soon for a long time; won't have e-mail there; and don't want to clog
my mail-box on this computer with general messages - could I, please,
unsubscribe from this list ?   The WSN-site does n't tell you how to do
that.