Giorgio Riello

University of Warwick
Advisory Board member for The Enterprise of Culture

Giorgio Riello is Professor of Global History and Culture and Director of the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom. He is the author of A Foot in the Past (OUP 2006), Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (CUP 2013 – winner of the 2014 World History Association Bentley Book Prize), and Luxury: A Rich History (OUP, 2016, co-written with Peter McNeil). Giorgio has published extensively on the history of fashion, design and consumption in early modern Europe and Asia.  He is the co-editor of Shoes (2006; pb 2011); Global Design History (Routledge 2011), Writing Material Culture History (Bloomsbury 2014), The Global Lives of Things (Routledge 2015), and several other volumes. He is currently completing a book entitled Back in Fashion: A History of Fashion since the Middle Ages to be published by Yale University Press.

Abstract

Cotton: the making of a modern commodity

Cotton and cotton textiles have long had a prime position in histories of industrialisation and, more recently, in narratives of the divergence between the West and ‘the Rest’ in the eighteenth century. In this talk, Giorgio Riello brings together the analysis of the production and trade of raw material and that of finished cloth. He argues that cotton was the first ‘transcontinental’ manufactured product whose commodity chain brought together capital, labour, land, technologies and consumers in different continents. Central to the creation of what can be seen as a rather ‘modern’ way of conceptualising resources and commodity production and trade was Europe and its emerging industrial technologies. Yet, the story of cotton and cotton textiles in the eighteenth century needs also to be read against a more global background that also considers India and China (as the prime producers of cotton textiles before their decline in the nineteenth century) and that gives due consideration to environmental and resource issues.