For centuries before the mechanization of the English industry, which occurred between the times of Kay (1733) and Roberts (1824), the labour, skills, capital and organisation engaged in the preparation, spinning, weaving, finishing and export of cloth and yarn manufactured from cotton fibres was located to an overwhelming extent in South and East Asia (India, China and Japan).
Although merchants from the Italian city states imported cotton fibres and textiles from the east since the Middle Ages, and centres for cotton textile production existed in the Italian Peninsula, Iberia and Germany long before the Peace of Westphalia, it was not really until the second half of the 17th century that the sale and production of cotton cloth took hold in the economies of western Europe.
Thereafter, British, continental European and North American cotton textiles expanded to reach a position of dominance as the world's first fully mechanized urban factory industry. When, how and why Europeans acquired and maintained their clear comparative advantages in the manufacture and export of cotton textiles needs to be explored for it's potential to contribute significant insights to the currently dominant debate on divergence in labour productivities and real wages between east and west.
The research project aims to publish edited research papers, a book in economic history that will be global in scope and concerned with the forces of demand, supply, technology and political economy that shifted comparative advantages for a major industry from east to west and back again.
It's aim is to reconfigure the considerable volume of national sources (European and Asian) in order to construct a long run economic history of one significant "global industry" that will be analytically rigorous and based as far as possible on foundations of reliable data related to production, trade, prices, wages and productivity.
The Research Officer in charge of the project (Dr Giorgio Riello, LSE) reports directly to a supervisory committee of the department of economic history at the school which includes Patrick O'Brien, Kent Deng and Larry Epstein.
The project also enjoys participation and advice from several members of GEHN including: Robert Allen (Oxford), Maxine Berg (Warwick), Janet Hunter (LSE), Beverley Kemire (Alberta), Prasannan Pathasarathi (Boston), Om Prakash (Delhi), Ken Pomeranz (Irvine), Tirthanakar Roy (Pune), Osamu Saito (Tokyo), Kaoru Sugihara (Osaka), Jan Luiten van Zanden (Utrecht) and David Washbrook (Oxford), with interests and expertise in the history of the industry.