Cloth has always been the most global of all traded commodities. It is an illuminating example of the circulation of goods, skills, knowledge and capital across wide geographic spaces. South Asia has been central to the making of these global exchanges over time. This volume presents innovative research that explores the dynamic ways in which diverse textile production and trade regions generated the 'first globalization'. A series of experts connect this global commodity with the dramatic political and economic transformations that characterised the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth and...

This is an innovative work that provides a broad introduction to the complex literature in the fields of fashion studies, and dress and fashion history. The book connects a diverse range of approaches and incorporates non-Western literature within better-known studies from Europe and North America.

Individual chapters focus our attention on objects, and the stories they can tell us about cultural interactions on a global scale, placed into contexts, such as trade, empire, mediation, and various forms of design practice. Topics included are: the global underpinnings of Renaissance material culture the trade of Indian cottons in the eighteenth-century the Japanese tea ceremony as a case of 'import substitution' German design in the context of empire handcrafted modernist furniture in Turkey the international circulation of contemporary architects. Features leading design historians, each...