CLOTHS OF A NEW FASHION: INDIAN OCEAN NETWORKS OF EXCHANGE AND CLOTH ZONES OF CONTACT IN AFRICA AND INDIA IN THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES1 Pedro Machado Introduction Over the past two decades there has been a perceptible growth in ­interest in the history of the Indian Ocean as an arena of integrated economic, political and cultural interaction. Despite some differences, historians appear to be in general agreement that the ‘essential’ unity of the Indian Ocean was determined and maintained by the ebb and flow of inter- secting social and cultural circuits of maritime exchange. They see the Indian Ocean as constituted by distinct regions that, while they may have contained particular networks and circuits of exchange that catered for particular markets, overlapped and intersected in complex webs of economic and cultural relationships to create an integrated ‘inter-regional arena’ (Map 2.1).2 At the centre of these circuits of exchange, which connected South Asia to spheres beyond the subcontinent, were textiles. For centuries, the Indian subcontinent had produced and supplied textiles of vary- ing quality and size to markets that stretched beyond the Indian Ocean, from north-western Europe and West Africa, to the eastern 1 This chapter has benefited from discussions at the GEHN Conference on “Meanings of Trade: Textiles in the Early Modern World”, Pune, December 2005, especially the comments of W. G. Clarence-Smith, Prasannan Parthasarathi, and Lakshmi Subramanian. I thank also Om Prakash and Krista Maglen for their close reading of a longer and more unwieldy version. Any remaining errors are mine alone. 2 Frank Broeze (ed.), Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16th–20th Centuries (Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1989), pp. 3, 21, quoted in Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 13; Sugata Bose, “Space and Time on the Indian Ocean Rim”, in Leila Tarazi Fawaz and C. A. Bayly (eds.), Modernity & Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) p. 368; Id., A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 2006). © PEDRO MACHADO, 2009 | DOI 10.1163/9789047429975_004 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0Pedro license. Machado - 9789047429975 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 09:10:53AM via free access 54 pedro machado Map 2.1. The western part of the Indian Ocean in the early modern period. Pedro Machado - 9789047429975 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 09:10:53AM via free access cloths of a new fashion 55 Mediterranean, Southeast Asia and the Americas. This global flow of textiles was sustained by high productivity and low prices, and in turn fuelled by consumerism.3 Within the region of the western Indian Ocean, a stream of textiles linked South Asia to East, East-Central and South-East Africa, bringing African consumers into relation with South Asian producers in intimate and complex ‘connected histories’. This intra-regional engagement, linking Indian weavers with African consumers, was mediated in critical ways by networks of Indian mer- cantile groups, chief among them the Gujarati Vāniyā, whose presence in the Indian Ocean was of longstanding duration. In this chapter I explore the particularities that structured the chains of relation connecting Gujarat in northwestern India to East-Central and South-East Africa between the second half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. Gujarat has been identified as “a land of the Indian Ocean as well as of India”4 which occupied until the nineteenth century a central place in western Indian Ocean commercial systems.5 By contrast, the place of Africa has tended to be marginalised in general accounts of the history of the Indian Ocean. Regarded as being of limited importance to the structure and dynamics of oceanic exchange, East, East-Central and other coastal Africans often warrant only passing mention. This chapter suggests that one way to redress this partial view of western Indian Ocean history and bring Africans into the narrative is to explore the interrelation between East- Central and South-East Africa, and Gujarat and western India as regions with connected Indian Ocean histories.6 I thus emphasise the importance of uncovering links of trans-local connection for develop- ing a better understanding of the dynamics that shaped relationships in this oceanic space. This chapter considers the place of Gujarati Vāniyā networks operat- ing from the territories of Diu in Kathiawar (western Gujarat), and to 3 Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Global Trade and Textile Workers, 1650–2000” (Unpublished paper presented at “Globalization and Trade Conference”, International Institute of Social History, November 2004). 4 David Ludden, “Presidential Address: Maps in the Mind and the Mobility of Asia”, Journal of Asian Studies, 62, 4 (2003), p. 1068. 5 Sanjay Subrahmanyam has recently referred to Gujarat as the “linchpin” of west- ern Indian Ocean trade. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Of Imârat and Tijârat”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37, 4 (1995), pp. 750–80. 6 I have drawn inspiration here from Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Explorations in Connected History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). Pedro Machado - 9789047429975 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 09:10:53AM via free access 56 pedro machado a lesser extent Daman located south of Surat, in the chains that con- nected African consumers and Indian producers.7 It was the embed- dedness of Gujarati merchants in local, regional and international networks in both India and Africa – underpinned by the circulation of financial, social and cultural capital – that was key to their success.8 Gujarati merchants (both Hindu and Muslim) had been prominent in the Indian Ocean for centuries, and though their relative importance changed over time, they played one of the most important integrative roles in the economy and culture of the ocean as mediators of cross- cultural and cross-regional contact.9 The period from the 1750s to the 1840s is seen as a moment of ‘reconfiguration’ for the Indian Ocean networks and the role of India within them due to the encroachment of Empire. I argue, however, that rather than collapsing under the weight of colonial might, South Asian social and economic networks negotiated the process of imperial reach and were successful in maintaining their engagement across and between competing imperial spaces in the ocean. Far from being mar- ginalised, these already existing networks of circulation remained instrumental in connecting local and regional systems in South Asia and, more broadly, structure global systems of material, cultural and social exchange.10 Gujarati merchants enjoyed a comparative advantage over European merchants and states, as well as ‘Swahili’ and ‘Arab’ merchants because of the tightly-controlled hold they exercised over the importation into East- Central and South-East Africa of cotton textiles produced in ­western India. These textiles were in great demand as exchange commodities 7 Vāniyā are Hindu and Jain merchant communities. For a fuller discussion of the term see Pedro Machado, “Gujarati Indian Merchant Networks in Mozambique, 1777– c.1830” (Unpublished PhD Thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2005), ch. 2. 8 I borrow this formulation from Amira K. Bennison’s discussion of Islamic broth- erhoods in “Muslim Universalism and Western Globalization”, in A.G. Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History (London: Pimlico, 2002), pp. 74–97. 9 An overview of the place of South Asian and Gujarati merchant networks is pro- vided in Machado, “Gujarati”, ch. 2; Bose, “Space”, p. 374 and Id., Hundred Horizons; Philip D. Curtin, Cross-cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). By the eighteenth century this role was increasingly confined to the western Indian Ocean for reasons I discuss in “Guj ar at i .” 10 The notion of circulation, useful for understanding how a merchant network operated, is borrowed from Markovits, Global World. Pedro Machado - 9789047429975 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 09:10:53AM via free access cloths of a new fashion 57 in the African trade of the interior and were regarded as the “currency that is accepted in ports”.11 Gujarati textiles had a critical function in African material exchange and relations because of their use as pri- mary measures of value for which ivory, slaves and other ­commodities were exchanged across the Indian Ocean in areas that effectively con- stituted cloth currency zones of contact.12 This function was the result of the particular social, cultural, political and symbolic meanings which cloth attained through complex processes of domestication. In their journey from a weaver’s loom in India to the hands of a local ruler, trader or patron-client in Africa, a piece of cloth underwent a transfor- mation as it became inscribed with meanings that reflected local artic- ulations of taste. I address the question of African consumerism and the broader processes it affected across the Indian Ocean. A central argument is that demand was shaped by the local particularities of African con- sumer tastes and, as such, dictated the varieties of textiles that entered the East-Central and South-East African markets.13 Thus, far from being marginalised in this commercial nexus, African consumers were able to negotiate the terms of trade and their engagement in relations of exchange of which they formed an integral part. African demand had an influence beyond the continent as it stimu- lated production in a specific locale in Gujarat, Jambusar, where the bulk of the western Indian textiles for the African markets were manu- factured. In order to remain competitive, the Vāniyā needed to supply this market with textiles which were in demand or in fashion.