Threads of Influence: How Indian Textiles Shaped Western Fashion

You will need to match headings to sections (A–F) and answer multiple choice questions.

Reading Passage

Threads of Influence: Indian Textiles and the Making of British Industrial Power

For much of the early modern period, India was the world’s foremost producer of cotton and silk textiles. According to Indira Modi, textile museum owner in Gujarat has observed, “Long before Europe learned to mechanise cloth, India had already perfected it by hand — not as craft alone, but as industry.” Indian weavers had long possessed highly advanced techniques in spinning, dyeing, and patterning, producing fabrics that were lighter, more colourfast, and more intricate than anything manufactured in Europe.

These textiles were traded across Asia, Africa, and Europe and were widely admired for both their aesthetic sophistication and durability.

By the late seventeenth century, Indian cottons such as chintz, calico, and muslin had become coveted in Britain for the fineness and intricate construction. The quality and celebration of these treasures from the colonies, posed a serious threat to the British textile industry, and perhaps even their pride. Domestic wool and silk producers created heavy and rougher fabrics, and they were becoming unable to compete on quality and price with the fine fabrics pulling in on ships from the far easter.

Rather than responding through innovation alone, British manufacturers and lawmakers pursued a strategy of imitation combined with protectionism. Indian patterns, dyeing methods, and weaving techniques were carefully studied and replicated, while legislation was introduced to restrict the import of Indian goods into Britain.

These restrictions culminated in a series of laws commonly referred to as the Calico Acts, which effectively banned most Indian cotton textiles from the British market in the early eighteenth century. Although these measures were justified as protecting domestic employment, their practical effect was to remove Indian competition while British producers refined their own methods. Crucially, the ban applied only to finished goods entering Britain; Indian knowledge itself continued to circulate, informing British experimentation and design.

The next phase of transformation occurred during the Industrial Revolution. British inventors developed machinery capable of reproducing cotton textiles on a scale previously unimaginable. Devices such as the spinning jenny and the power loom allowed manufacturers to mechanise processes that had once relied on skilled hand labour. While these technologies were novel, the fabrics they produced were often direct descendants of Indian originals, replicating established patterns and colour schemes. According to a professor of fashion history at a London university, Jane Dawe, “British industrial textiles did not emerge from a creative vacuum; they were mechanised answers to Indian questions Europe had already been asking for a century.”

Once mechanisation had reduced costs sufficiently, Britain reversed its earlier protectionist stance. Indian markets, now under colonial control, were opened to British manufactured textiles, while Indian producers faced barriers when attempting to export their own goods. British cloth flooded the subcontinent, undercutting local weavers who could not compete with machine-made alternatives. Regions that had previously thrived as centres of textile production experienced widespread economic decline, as artisanal industries collapsed.

The similarities to modern fashion, the flood of cheaper imitation goods from China and Asia onto the European market, stifling the European fashion power houses ability to innovative and compete, are not lost of profession door. “Fast fashion hasn’t just cheapened clothing — it has smothered Europe’s tradition of craftsmanship, replacing centuries of artistry with disposable trends.”

This process in India was not merely economic but cultural. Designs deeply embedded in Indian history were rebranded and absorbed into European identity. The buta motif, originating in Kashmir and associated with luxury shawls woven from fine goat hair, became internationally known as “Paisley,” named after a Scottish town that produced mechanised imitations. Over time, the Indian origins of such designs were obscured, even as they were celebrated globally within Western hippy fashion and the London look of the 1960s.

Another cruel aspect in the history of British textiles is slavery. While India produced its own cotton often on family farms, the British required the colonisation of the Americans and slavery to keep the prices down and compete with India.

The story of Indian textiles and British industrialisation should be seen as woven intricately together, but with the Indian thread the basis of the weave. British industrial success did not emerge in isolation but was built upon the appropriation, adaptation, slavery and eventual suppression of a pre-existing and highly sophisticated textile economy. As India Modi argues, “The legacy of industrialisation cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the uneven exchanges that underpinned it.”

Note: Your headings task is for Sections A–F (Questions 28–35).