Cotton Textiles in Global History / Prasannan Parthasarathi and Giorgio Riello --
World Areas of Cotton Textile Manufacturing. Cotton Textiles in the Indian Subcontinent, 1200-1800 / Prasannan Parthasarathi --
The Resistant Fibre: Cotton Textiles in Imperial China / Harriet T. Zurndorfer --
The First European Cotton Industry: Italy and Germany, 1100-1800 / Maureen Fennell Mazzaoui --
Ottoman Cotton Textiles: The Story of a Success that did not Last, 1500-1800 / Suraiya Faroqhi --
'Guinea Cloth': Production and Consumption of Cotton Textiles in West Africa before and during the Atlantic Slave Trade / Colleen E. Kriger --
The Production of Cotton Textiles in Early Modern South-East Asia / William Gervase Clarence-Smith --
Global Trade and Consumption of Cotton Textiles. The Dutch and the Indian Ocean Textile Trade / Om Prakash --
Awash in a Sea of Cloth: Gujarat, Africa, and the Western Indian Ocean, 1300-1800 / Pedro Machado --
Japan Indianized: The Material Culture of Imported Textiles in Japan, 1550-1850 / Fujita Kayoko --
Revising the Historical Narrative: India, Europe, and the Cotton Trade, c. 1300-1800 / Beverly Lemire --
Cottons Consumption in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century North Atlantic /Robert S. DuPlessis --
Fashion, Race, and Cotton Textiles in Colonial Spanish America / Marta V. Vicente --
The Globalization of Cotton Textiles: Indian Cottons, Europe, and the Atlantic World, 1600-1850 / Giorgio Riello --
Cotton Revolutions and their Consequences in Europe and Asia. The Birth of a New European Industry: L'Indiennage in Seventeenth-Century Marseilles / Olivier Raveux --
What were Cottons for in the Industrial Revolution? / John Styles --
The Limits of Wool and the Potential of Cotton in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries / Pat Hudson --
The Geopolitics of a Global Industry: Eurasian Divergence and the Mechanisation of Cotton Textile Production in England / Patrick O'Brien --
Cotton and the Peasant Economy: A Foreign Fibre in Early Modern Japan / Masayuki Tanimoto --
Involution and Chinese Cotton Textile Production: Songjiang in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries / Bozhong Li --
Decline in Three Keys: Indian Cotton Manufacturing from the Late Eighteenth Century / Prasannan Parthasarathi and Ian Wendt.

Cotton textiles were the first good to achieve a truly global reach. For many centuries muslins and calicoes from the Indian subcontinent were demanded in the trading worlds of the Indian Ocean and the eastern Mediterranean. After 1500, new circuits of exchange were developed. Of these, the early-modern European craze for Indian calicoes and the huge nineteenth-century export trade in Lancashire goods, and subsequent deindustrialization of the Indian subcontinent, are merely thebest known. These episodes, although of great importance, far from exhaust the story of cotton. They are well known because of the enormous research energy that has been devoted to them, but other important elements of cotton's long history are deserving of similar attention. The purpose of this collection of essays is to examine the history of cotton textiles at a global level over the period 1200-1850. This volume provides new answers to two questions: what is it about cotton that made it the paradigmatic first global commodity? And second, why did cotton industries in different parts of the world follow different paths of development? Included in this second question is, of course, the problem of the so-called 'great divergence' that suggests that Europe and Asia followed a common path of economic development until the end of the eighteenth century. Cotton textiles have been central in explaining the nature, timing and effects of a 'divergence' in the nineteenth. A volume of this sort is timely for many reasons, not least of which is the growing interest in global history. Textiles remain one of the most important manufactured commodities in debates about economic, social and cultural change across the globe. By adopting a long historical view and a broad geographical viewpoint, this book wishes to avoid a Eurocentric perspective that has long dominated debates over the birth and rise of the cotton textiles industry in Europe. Empirically this book brings together, and adds to, the current state of knowledge on a number of questions related to the history of cotton textiles. The outlines of the cotton industry in medieval and early modern times, whether in southern Europe, central Africa, west Asia or the Indian subcontinent, are known only in the sketchiest of terms. The relationship between cotton textiles and those made from other fibres such as wool, linen, and silk is poorly understood. And there has been awoeful neglect of the cloth made from the great mixtures of cotton and linen, cotton and wool, and cotton and silk, which were mainstays of textile manufacturing from Europe to Bengal. And the long history of commerce and connections between the producers and consumers of cotton textiles in Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe remains under-researched. As a consequence, even the Indian trade in cotton textiles and the rise of the Lancashire cotton industry are not fully understood within their larger temporal and regional and global contexts. The volume draws upon papers that were presented at a conference on " held in Padua, Italy, in November 2005 and a workshop on " held at the Fondation des Treilles, France, in March 2006. Both meetings were sponsored and organised by the Global Economic History Network of the London School of Economics and were held in preparationfor Session 59 on " for the XIV International Economic History Association Congress held in Helsinki in late August 2006. Essays included in the volume are authored by 19 scholars from eight different nations, all of whom are specialists in the study of textiles. They are drawn from a range of sub-disciplines within history and bring together their areas and periods of specialization to provide a global history. Therefore, the volume covers a wide variety of approaches.