ABSTRACT
Because of their high value and low weight, textiles have long been a major commodity in local, regional and, from the sixteenth century, global trade. Indeed, fragments of Indian cotton cloth ha�e been found in �oman archaeological sites in the eastern Mediterranean. This trade, of course, would have taken place some two thousand years ago. The same axis of exchange, from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea, was active in medieval times, which has been documented recently by �uth �arnes’ detailed analyses of cotton cloth fragments from the Cairo bazaar, now deposited in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum.1 It should come as no surprise, then, that global ��o�s of te�tiles shaped the li�es of te�tile �or�ers in the period from 1650 to the present.
