The power of cloth : the textile trade of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) 1600-1780

Abstract

This study is concerned with the trade in textiles from India to Indonesia by the VOC (Dutch East India Company) from 1600 to 1780. A major objective was to establish the boundaries and dynamics of this trade and the impact it had on Indonesian textile production. I used the richness of the quantitative data in the account books of the Company to analyse trends, variations, and changing frequencies of more than two hundred types and varieties of textiles. In order to analyze the long term import and distribution trends it was necessary to classify and categorize the more than two hundred textiles into clusters. The clusters revealed the association and predominance of specific types within certain geographic locations. The peak of the overall import trend occurred during the second and third quarter of the 17th century after which a definite decrease in the volume of trade was revealed. The declining trend is explained in the thesis on three levels of generality. Firstly, the decline of the VOC as a trading institution. Secondly, the decline of the textile trade, Indian cloths being the second most important commodity the Company traded. And thirdly, the particular decline of clusters within the overall volume of the textile trade. The Indonesians produced large volumes of spices and other raw materials, and in exchange consumed hundreds of thousands of imported Indian textiles. The Indonesians could also produce their own cloth, but had coveted the foreign Indian cloths for their attractiveness and the affordable price. Monopolistic policies of the VOC on the production of spices, trade in Indian textiles and in other spheres of Indonesians' productive capacity elicited indigenous responses that incorporated the increased production of local cloths in imitation of the Indian cloths. The residual power of the Indonesian women to produce cloths and the political organi.iation to produce them in sufficient quantities and quality began to compete in the third quarter of the 17th century with the cloth the VOC imported from India. In that lies the foundation of import-substitution as the one key argument to explain the decline in the VOC cloth import trade, more specifically the chintz tapis (batik) produced, sold and exported from Java and the cloth production in southern Sulawesi and the lesser Sunda islands. Show more