Family and the Calico Trade in the Spanish Empire

Abstract

At the end of the eighteenth century, a calico craze swept the Atlantic world. Calico, originally from India, was a fine cotton cloth painted in attractive, colorful, and flowery motif designs. Its exotic name recalled the Indian town of Calicut, where the fabric originally came from. Elsewhere, the cloth’s name offered a more generic appeal to its Indian origins: indienne in French, indiana in Spanish and Catalan. The oriental flavor extended to the names of other types of calicoes, including the painted cotton chintz (derived from Hindi), the silk and cotton taffeta (of Persian origin), and the coarser cotton muslin (from the Iraqi town of Mosul).¹ But aside from their exotic names, calicoes’ main attraction lay in their brilliant colors and designs that did not fade wash after wash.² Calico was cheaper than silk and lighter than velvet, and Europeans fell in love with this Asian fabric the minute the Dutch, English, and French merchants first imported Indian calicoes as a luxury cloth in the early seventeenth century.³ In 1610, Indian workshops produced 10 million yards of cloth for the Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern markets, with only a few yards designated for sale in Europe; half a century later, between 35 and 40 million yards reached the European continent. In 1684, the English East India Company alone imported 45 million yards, more than 6 yards each for each man, woman, and child in Great Britain.⁴