This first integrated study of the role of textiles in the development of the Persian nation (now Iran) reveals their unique importance to international trade and economics and to the cultural environment. The result of extensive scholastic research, the touring exhibition traces the evolution of the art through the major textile-producing eras, of the Safawid and Kajar dynasties, from the sixteenth to early twentieth century.
"When a rich man in seventeenth-century South Asia enjoyed a peaceful night's sleep, he imagined himself enveloped in a velvet sleep. In the poetic imagination of the time, the fine dew of early evening was like a thin cotton cloth from Bengal, and woolen shawls of downy pashmina sent by the Mughal emperors to their trusted noblemen approximated the soft hand of the ruler on the vassal's shoulder. Textiles in seventeenth-century South Asia represented more than cloth to their makers and users. They simulated sensory experience, from natural, environmental conditions to intimate, personal touch. The Art of Cloth in Mughal India is the first art historical account of South Asian textiles from the early modern era. Author Sylvia Houghteling resurrects a truth that seventeenth-century world citizens knew, but which has been forgotten in the modern era: South Asian cloth ranked among the highest forms of art in the global hierarchy of luxury goods, and had a major impact on culture and communication. While studies abound in economic history about the global trade in Indian textiles that flourished from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, they rarely engage with the material itself and are less concerned with the artistic-and much less the literary and social-significance of the taste for cloth. This book is richly illustrated with images of textiles, garments, and paintings that are held in little-known collections and have rarely, if ever, been published. Rather than rely solely on records of European trading companies, Houghteling draws upon poetry in local languages and integrates archival research from unpublished royal Indian inventories to tell a new history of this material culture, one with a far more balanced view of its manufacture and use, as well as its purchase and trade"--
"Through an analysis of specific weaving stories, the difference between a text and a textile becomes blurred. Such stories portray women weavers transforming their domestic activity of making textiles into one of making texts by inscribing their cloth with both personal and political messages."--BOOK JACKET.
The birth of a mass consumer society in western Europe has been the subject of much scholarly debate in recent years. In order to come to a further understanding of the issue, this book adopts an analytical approach, paying special attention to the socio-cultural and economic transfers which occur when different commodities are introduced to territories with diverse values and identities. In particular, it examines the role of merchants and their important influence on consumer decisions, describing how they created demand for new necessities in local, national and international markets of the western Mediterranean area. Through a systematic analysis of probate inventories from southern Spain, the study reveals shifts in the patterns of consumption of new goods in urban and rural families, underlining a growing interest in new, exotic and foreign goods. By connecting these local desires, aspirations and choices to a global movement in which human and material capital circulated trans-continentally, broader patterns of consumption are revealed. By observing a southern European society, such as Spain, where the industrialization process was slower than that in Anglo-Saxon territories, the book contributes to the on-going debates about 'industrious revolution' and 'trickle-down' theories and whether both occurred simultaneously or separately. The book also helps identify the socio-economic forces and agents that prompted the stimulus for new consumer aspirations, as well as the cultural consequences that the new modern consumerism brought about.
Following the tradition and style of the acclaimed Index Islamicus, the editors have created this new Bibliography of Art and Architecture in the Islamic World. The editors have surveyed and annotated a wide range of books and articles from collected volumes and journals published in all European languages (except Turkish) between 1906 and 2011. This comprehensive bibliography is an indispensable tool for everyone involved in the study of material culture in Muslim societies.
This volume examines the role of textiles within the expanding global economy in the Age of European Exploration. Major themes include: the opening of new markets and responses to competition in the cloth trade, evolving techniques and modes of production, and changes in the patterns of consumption of local and imported cloth in a comparative, cross-cultural context.
Today's world textile and garment trade is valued at a staggering $425 billion. We are told that under the pressure of increasing globalisation, it is India and China that are the new world manufacturing powerhouses. However, this is not a new phenomenon: until the industrial revolution, Asia manufactured great quantities of colourful printed cottons that were sold to places as far afield as Japan, West Africa and Europe. Cotton explores this earlier globalised economy and its transformation after 1750 as cotton led the way in the industrialisation of Europe. By the early nineteenth century, India, China and the Ottoman Empire switched from world producers to buyers of European cotton textiles, a position that they retained for over two hundred years. This is a fascinating and insightful story which ranges from Asian and European technologies and African slavery to cotton plantations in the Americas and consumer desires across the globe.
Affect, Emotion and Subjectivity in Early Modern Muslim Empires presents new approaches to Ottoman Safavid and Mughal art and culture. Taking artistic agency as a starting point, the authors consider the rise in status of architects, the self-fashioning of artists, the development of public spaces, as well as new literary genres that focus on the individual subject and his or her place in the world. They consider the issue of affect as performative and responsive to certain emotions and actions, thus allowing insights into the motivations behind the making and, in some cases, the destruction of works of art. The interconnected histories of Iran,Turkey and India thus highlight the urban and intellectual changes that defined the early modern period. Contributors are: Sussan Babaie, Chanchal Dadlani, Jamal Elias, Emine Fetvaci, Christiane Gruber, Sylvia Hougteling, Kishwar Rizvi, Sunil Sharma, and Marianna Shreve Simpson.
A boom in the production and export of cotton turned Iran into the richest region of the Islamic caliphate in the ninth and tenth centuries. Yet in the eleventh century, Iran's primacy ended as its agricultural economy entered a steep decline. Richard W. Bulliet advances several provocative explanations, for example that the boom in cotton production paralleled the spread of Islam and that Iran's agricultural decline stemmed from a significant cooling of the climate that lasted more than a century. Substantiating his argument with innovative quantitative research and scientific discoveries, Bulliet first establishes the relationship between Iran's cotton industry and Islam and then outlines the evidence for what he terms the "Big Chill." He then focuses on a lucrative but temperature-sensitive industry of cross-breeding one-humped and two-humped camels, concluding with an unusual concatenation of events that had a profound and long-lasting impact not just on the history of Iran but on the development of the world.
