3 - A Fierce Competition! Silesian Linens and Indian Cottons on the West African Coast in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries

Summary

European-made linens and woollens figured prominently among the foreign textiles exchanged at the very beginning of the African trade, as Colleen E. Kriger points out. Indian cottons joined the product range shipped on European vessels to the coast of Africa, when the English and their European rivals became aware that they could become an inexpensive substitution for linens during the first years of the seventeenth century. As Bernhard Struck has convincingly shown in the previous chapter, it is no longer possible to exclude Eastern Europe from global histories. By implication, his conclusion also means that global history cannot be told by ignoring Eastern European actors or the supply of essential manufactures from this region for global trade. One particularly noteworthy commodity from East-Central Europe within the Atlantic trade system was Silesian linen textiles.

In recent years, scholars have come to agree on the central importance of African consumer preferences for the consistently high level of textile exports by European or Asian merchants to the western or eastern shores of Africa. Strikingly, however, only Indian cottons have received a high degree of scholarly attention, whereas woollens and linens brought to Africa have been almost completely overlooked. This situation is puzzling, considering that preferences of Africans for textiles not only dictated the type of cotton cloths that were traded, but also determined what kind of fabrics in general were transported to the West African coast and in what quantities.

It is time to pull woollens and linens out of the shadow cast upon them by the longstanding spotlight directed on cottons. Thus, the major part of this chapter brings into the limelight the competition between these three types of textiles on the West African coast during the decades just before and after the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. First, I explore the role played by the Royal African Company of England (RAC) as one major ‘delivery service’ for Silesian linens, based on extensive research in the company’s invoice books. The chapter then provides a short introduction to the nature of the textiles. Since Silesian linens still lack an adequate definition, I survey their portrayal in contemporary travel accounts. Lastly, a quantitative comparison of all textiles shipped by the RAC (based on its invoice books) is introduced, and the narrative of the dominance of Indian cottons is called into question.