Blue lotuses and new mythologies: German Indophilia in the time of Goethe

The following lecture was originally given in German at this year’s Schnackenhof Philosophietage, an annual 3-day event organised by my friend Reinhard Knodt and devoted to intellectual and cultural encounters between Eastern and Western traditions, at the Schnackenhof, a salon and centre for philosophy and the arts in the Franconian town of Röthenbach an der Pegnitz. 

Choosing to speak in Germany on the topic of Indophilia in German literature (and its greatest period at that) might look like carrying coals to Newcastle – or “owls to Athens”, as the more poetic German idiom has it. I can offer two excuses. The first is that the German love of India was first stimulated by the translations produced by a handful of English scholars in the 18^th century: German authors of the classic and early Romantic periods were thus mostly reading translations of translations. Scholars such as William Jones were already reflecting on some of the intellectual implications of the texts they worked on, too, and in a way that pre-empted some of the concerns of German thinkers.

The second, more immediate prompt for choosing this subject is a series of publications in English over the last few years (in particular the extremely valuable work of the appropriately named Nicholas Germana, on which I will draw fairly heavily in what follows) that put the German interest in India in a new light. The interpretations they offer focus in particular on the question of German national identity. To forestall anxieties about what has become a vexed issue over the last hundred years, it is important to make some historical distinctions. Historians have known for some time that German identity in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries was first and foremost a cultural topic; that it only gradually built up into a demand for political unity; and that only still later, around the time of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, did it adopt the notoriously aggressive, intolerant, militaristic stance that was to cause such havoc in Europe during the 20^th century.

That has not stopped some scholars judging, as if by reflex, earlier German patriotic sentiments as forecasting later ones: the “benefit” of hindsight is notoriously difficult to refuse. But many aspects of the German self-image during the life of Goethe (1749-1832, frequently invoked as a convenient period in German literary and cultural history) were far from being as introverted or xenophobic as one might assume. Among them was the Indophilia of these decades, which led directly to the foundation of Indology as a separate subject in the German university system. An apparent paradox thereby arose: Germany rapidly became famous for the outstanding quality of its research on Indian languages and culture, even though it had no political connection to the subcontinent at all.

Why was India of interest to those thinkers reflecting on German identity? An answer begins to emerge if we look at the work of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), philosopher, poet, critic, and early anthropologist, to list only some of his occupations. Herder’s tremendous influence on European intellectual history is not disputed, but the nature of that influence certainly is. Some 20^th-century intellectuals, most notably Isaiah Berlin in England, blamed Herder directly for shrouding the universalism and rationalism of the Enlightenment in the fog of Romanticism. Along with J. G. Hamann, Herder was framed as a member of a “counter-Enlightenment”, undermining enlightened efforts by the likes of Kant or Voltaire on behalf of universal, secularized Reason. Most dangerously, had Herder not introduced the theoretical concept of the “folk” (Volk), the “people” as a discrete, communal entity? Did he not further defend the spirit of the German “folk” against French cosmopolitanism? Is that not the start of modern nationalism (and we know where that ends up)?

The judgement is easy to make, but deceptive. When Herder uses the expression “German” (deutsch), its meaning is broader than we understand it today – closer to “Teutonic” (germanisch). That explains why, in his collection of essays “On German spirit and art” (Von deutscher Art und Kunst, 1773), Herder could set up Shakespeare as a representative of the German spirit. With the Holy Roman Empire as shattered as it was after the Thirty Years’ War, present-day Germans ought to try to seek the “German spirit” outside the boundaries of their own language and territory, not just in the area between the Alps, the Rhine and the North Sea. To shape German identity in this sense required being open to the world: not simply submitting to the fashionable Francophile taste of the literature market, but seeking out deeper “elective affinities”.

Such openness really did apply to the world, however, and not just to Europe. Herder wanted to aid and enrich German culture through non-European identifications too. He had two reasons for this: one to do with literary history, the other with politics. I will discuss them, and their influence on Romanticism, separately.

In Herder and Hamann’s conception, the history of poetry began in the Orient, where it retained the kind of purity and authentic force that characterized the prophetic books of the Bible. But as mankind aged and modern European civilization developed, poetry became duller, more mechanical and prosaic. The literature of his own century was proof enough of that, so Herder thought. By “oriental" poetry Herder initially meant the literature of the Semitic peoples, above all the Hebrew literature of the Old Testament. During the 1770s and 80s, as works in ancient Persian and Sanskrit began to be made accessible, he grasped that there existed a still more distant and older “Orient”, whose culture until now had hardly been glimpsed.

According to his expectations, the literary expression of this Orient ought to be more sensuous, powerful, and yet also more innocent and pure even than the Old Testament or the Koran. Herder’s expectations here were shaped by his theory of language, influenced by Rousseau. Both thinkers saw the languages of the East (or the South) as having arisen as expressions of human feeling, above all feelings of love and wonder at God and Nature. Their entire character was different from a modern rational language like French. Modern German writers ought to assimilate some of that character, in order to become, as Herder put it in 1767, true “German-Oriental writers”. 

It was William Jones’s translation of the Sanskrit drama Sakuntala in 1789 that allowed Herder to put his theory to the test – and find it confirmed. The drama Abhijñānaśākuntalam  or “The Recognition of Sakuntala” was written by the greatest Sanskrit poet, Kalidasa, between the 1^st century B.C. and the 4^th century A. D. The freshness of the nature imagery, the innocence of the heroine Sakuntala, and the sensibility in the handling of the plot all impressed Herder immediately, to the point that he drew comparisons with Shakespeare and Ossian (the supposedly ancient Celtic poet whose works were only later revealed to have been the modern creation of the Scot James Macpherson). As Jones’s translation was re-translated into German by Georg Forster in 1791, the contemporary reception was so enthusiastic that the historian Raymond Schwab spoke of a “Sakuntala era” in Germany.

The first early German Romantic writer to feel the charm of Sanskrit poetry was Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg). There is a strong possibility that the famous “blue flower” in Novalis’ novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, a motif which was to become a symbol of German Romanticism in general, was inspired by the descriptions of lotus flowers in Kalidasa’s Sakuntala. The Oriental references in the novel’s first chapter are at any rate hard to miss. On the (unforgettable) first page of the book, Heinrich recalls the tales of a stranger who had told him of “treasures” and a “flower” in a distant land:

“It is not the treasures that have inspired such an inexpressible longing in me”, he said to himself; “I am unacquainted with greed: but I long to gaze on the blue flower. It occupies my mind incessantly, and I can do nothing else but ponder and dream of poetry. I have never felt thus before: it is as if I had been dreaming, or my slumbers had transported me into another world; for in the world that I otherwise inhabit who would have spared a thought for flowers? – and I had certainly never heard of such a strange passion for a flower. Where, in fact, did the stranger come from?”

He probably came from India. India was the land of “treasures” par excellence, and the land in which a “strange passion for a flower” such as the lotus was quite self-explanatory. Decisive in my opinion is the identification of the flower with the beauty of a “gentle face”, a female face. In Sakuntala, the heroine is consistently described using floral metaphors, and in the drama’s first scene she is compared with a “blue lotus petal” (blaues Lotosblatt, in Forster’s translation). (The notes to Forster's translation reveal the confusion of the Indian sacred lotus, nelumbo nucifera, with the blue water-lily, nymphaea caerulea, below.)

 

The female face that was in Novalis’s mind’s eye when he described the blue flower would surely have been that of his beloved, the young Sophie von Kühn; and Nicholas Germana points out that in the Hardenberg family correspondence, Novalis can be found using the nickname “Sakuntala” for Sophie. 

One could adduce further individual motifs that other writers of the time borrowed from Sanskrit literature. Goethe wrote a quatrain in praise of Sakuntala, planned a production of the play, and, according to Raymond Schwab, based his “Prelude on the Stage” to Faust on Kalidasa’s prologue. I have a further suggestion à propos of the character of Ottilie in Goethe’s Elective Affinities – a character reminiscent of Sakuntala in some ways. At two points in the novel, Ottilie makes a peculiar gesture, apparently bearing a strong similarity to the Indian namaskar – a quiet, gentle bow with joined palms in front of the chest. Though the namaskar normally denotes respectful greeting, mixed with a certain distance, in Ottilie’s case it is a gesture of refusal:

“She does this [refusing] with a gesture which is irresistible for one who has grasped its meaning. She presses the palms of her hands, which she raises above her head, together, and brings them to her breast while she leans gently forwards and fixes the supplicant with such a gaze that he gladly relinquishes all that he had demanded or wished for.” (Elective Affinities, Part I, chapter 5)

The meaning of (polite) refusal has a possible source in Sakuntala, however: the heroine is at one point asked to embrace her spiritual father or guru Kanva, and instead makes this gesture.

One could go on to discuss influences in art or music – Schubert wrote an incomplete opera Sakuntala in 1820, and Wagner was influenced by it in the first act of Parsifal – but more interesting is the motivation behind these borrowings. It was not only the charm of a newly discovered, paradisiacal land of literature and religion that prompted Novalis to use Indian images as symbols of romantic longing, but a central plank of Romanticism’s theoretical programme. This was laid down by Friedrich Schlegel in the concept of the “new mythology”. 

The concept itself was not new. Herder was the first to use this expression in his 1768 essay “Of the modern use of mythology”, in which he defended the utility of mythological images against the theological objections made by Christian Adolph Klotz. Klotz saw a potential threat to Christianity in the casual poetic use of “pagan”, i.e. Greek and Roman, mythological motifs. Herder replied that in a modern artistic context, the old gods certainly did not have anything to do with the truth of religion, but then again, pace Klotz, neither did they have to: “We find use for another side of them, their sensuous beauty. If I make use of mythological ideas and images, inasmuch as certain psychological or general truths are to be recognized sensuously through them, then mythological persons are equally permitted”. They could be used as generally recognizable images, and as prompts to one’s own fantasy: there would be “many difficulties in creating a wholly new mythology for us. – But working out how to construct an apparently new one with the ancients’ repertoire of images, that is easier... One applies the old images and tales to cases closer at hand; puts a new poetic meaning into them, changes them here and there to attain some new end.”

Around the same time William Jones had the same idea. Even before he discovered the new world of Sanskrit literature, he complained that “European literature has subsisted too long on the perpetual repetition of the same images, and incessant allusions to the same fables”. Translations of Oriental literature offered “a new set of images and similitudes”. In the 1780s Jones became so fond of the gods of ancient India that he devoted a set of original poems to them, including the “Hymn to Kama” (the god of love) or the “Hymn to Narayana” (Brahma) – poems that, at the time, were hardly less popular than his translations of authentic Sanskrit works. 

All this was part of the literary background for the Romantic “new mythology”. But there was another, theological-philosophical, precondition: pantheism. The path to German pantheism was opened up by Spinoza, Lessing, and Herder. It was necessary to entertain the – revolutionary – idea that Jesus Christ was not the only true mediator between God and man. The world or Nature was itself God. And according to Herder’s reformulation of Spinoza, Nature was not a merely mechanical chain of causes and effects, but an organic entity that had first to be felt and intuited. It would never be possible, as theologians and Cartesian philosophers alike had hoped, to prove through pure logic that the world existed. One could only feel it. And in order to reflect and mediate – to express – this feeling of true being, one could utilize an entire pantheon of poetic and mythological images, depending on which culture one belonged to. Vice versa, if one wanted to understand the experience of the world of people in other cultures, one should approach that experience through their religion, art, and mythology.

In this spirit Novalis wrote, in fragment 74 of his aphorism collection “Pollen” (Blüthenstaub), that:

Nothing is more indispensable to true religiosity than an intermediary that connects us with the deity. Man cannot possibly stand in an immediate relationship with the same. Man must be absolutely free in the choice of this intermediary. The slightest compulsion in this matter harms his religion... Fetishes, stars and planets, animals, heroes, idols, gods, a god-man. One quickly sees how relative such choices are, and is little by little led towards the notion that the essence of religion does not depend on the character of the mediator, but solely in one’s view of it, in one’s relation to it. It is idol-worship in the broadest sense when I actually take this mediator as God himself.

Friedrich Schlegel agreed in fragment 234 of his “Athenäumsfragmente”: “It is very one-sided and arrogant to say that there is only one mediator. For the perfect Christian, to whom in this respect Spinoza perhaps approximates best, everything would have to be a mediator”. In the last years of the 18^th century Schlegel became aware how important the Orient, and specifically India, were to a full understanding of the imaginative, mediating possibilities of the “new mythology”. In his “Discourse on Mythology” (Rede über die Mythologie, 1800) he talked of the “beautiful confusion of the imagination...for which I know no lovelier symbol than the colourful, teeming mass of the ancient gods”. By that he meant, of course, the Greek gods; but he immediately continued –

The other mythologies must also be reawakened according to the degree of their profundity, their beauty, and their culture, in order to accelerate the development of the new mythology. If only the treasures of the Orient were as accessible to us as those of antiquity! What new spring of poetry could flow to us from India, if a few German artists with their universality and depth of understanding, with their innate talent for translation, had the chance... We must look for the highest Romanticism in the Orient, and as soon as we can draw from that source, then perhaps the surface southern glow that currently charms us so much in Spanish poetry will [by comparison] seem banally occidental.

 At this point Schlegel could still only speculate about Oriental cultures, without yet having experienced any of their literary products at first-hand. In 1802 he travelled to Paris in order to study oriental languages – first Persian and then Sanskrit. By 1803 he was in the thick of his studies, and quite overwhelmed by what he was finding. To his friend Tieck he raved: “everything, everything without exception comes from India!” And yet by the time his studies culminated in his seminal 1808 book “On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians” his philosophical outlook had fundamentally changed. He was no longer a pantheist, but a Catholic; and India was no longer a freely elected source for a pantheistic and polytheistic “new mythology”, but the authentic historical source for the sole true monotheistic religion. Why did Schlegel, and with him the Romantic movement, turn away from their liberal pantheism?

The reasons for that lie in politics. I mentioned earlier that a second element in Herder’s conception of German identity was political. At the time Herder wrote, the motive for this was still liberal and humanitarian. As a German, Herder believed he had a good reason for sympathy with non-European peoples: they were the victims of modern European colonial powers. They were politically weak, but on the other hand, morally strong and virtuous, just as Herder imagined the Germans to be. In an extraordinary poem from 1797 discovered by Nicholas Germana, bearing the title “German National Glory” (Deutsche Nationalruhm), Herder praised the German people for not possessing a colonial empire like Britain or Spain, a fact that meant they could stand by the side of the oppressed American Indians, Africans and Indians. God would not bestow his blessing on a “people that feasts and revels while weighed down with the burden of such guilt, sin, and blood, the burden of gold and diamonds”; rather he would show his favour to “quiet Ethiopians and Germans” instead.

Such sentiments of patriotic resistance were naturally enhanced during the Napoleonic Wars, when, after the battles of Jena and Auerstädt, Germany was in actual fact conquered by a European empire. This was the period of the Heidelberg Romantics, Brentano, Achim von Arnim, and the brothers Grimm, diligently collecting folk songs and tales from the “people” whose culture had supposedly remained unaffected by corrupting French influences. Philosophers turned patriots too, such as J. G. Fichte: once a revolutionary, now the author of the “Speeches to the German Nation” (Reden an die deutsche Nation). The new, more patriotic spirit marked the turn away from early Romanticism to High Romanticism: one could no longer feel inspired by the radical-democratic spirit of the French Revolution, now that its consequences for Germany were so severe. Romantics like Schlegel sought more stable, conservative sources of support: the Catholic Church, the old German Imperial Knights, and the new ideology of folk culture. 

The Romantics also revised their image of India, however. Previously the exact historical connections between India and other cultures had not been of such great interest. Indian culture was very old, and probably older than the Egyptian – more than that one did not dare to assert. Above all the early Romantics wanted to use India as a source in their construction of a new mythology, essentially oriented towards the future. But after 1806, Friedrich Schlegel and the Heidelberg Romantics, especially  Joseph Görres and Friedrich Creuzer, became more interested in the past. They now tried to prove that there had been a “special relationship” between India and the Teutons or ancient Germans – an “Indo-German identification”, in Robert Cowan’s phrase. In particular, this relationship was used to demonstrate that Germanic culture derived from an older source than that of the French or other speakers of Romance languages. 

To this end Schlegel developed a new theory of the “migration of peoples” (Völkerwanderung) in the prehistorical era. Everything came from India still, as he had once said to Tieck, but in different ways, through separate phases of migration. The Germanic peoples came directly from the north of India (the red arrow on the diagram below); the peoples of the Mediterranean and southern Europe, like the Greeks and Romans, came via a longer and frequently interrupted route through Mesopotamia and Asia Minor (the blue arrow); and the Egyptians were colonized by a group of Brahmins, who transmitted to them the priestly culture of ancient India (the yellow dotted arrow). 

Friedrich Schlegel's theory of prehistoric migrations, 1808

 

 In 1810 Joseph Görres put forward a still more grandiose hypothesis. There had been four migrations of peoples, through which first America (green arrow below), then China and South-East Asia (red), then Northern Europe (blue), and finally Africa and Egypt (yellow) were colonized or populated. India was the birthplace of human culture as it covered the entire currently habitable surface of the globe!

 Joseph Görres' hypothesis, 1810

 

The claim for a direct Indo-German relationship was, it is important to note, at this juncture still unaffected by openly racist prejudices as they entered the debate on “Aryanism” in the later 19^th and 20^th centuries. The relationships that interested Schlegel and Görres were cultural and linguistic, not biological or genetic. Resistance to their theories was equally expressed in cultural terms. The famous “Creuzer debate” (famous to Indologists, anyway) between Friedrich Creuzer and Johann Heinrich Voss around 1820 was sparked off by Creuzer’s supposedly insulting interpretations of the origins of Greek culture and religion – above all, the idea that the wild, erotic figure of Dionysus was central to Greek religion, and that his cult had its origins in an early Indian “phallic cult” or “phallic teaching”, summed up in the phallic lingam of Hindu Shaivite ritual. 

By the time the reaction against Romanticism arrived, the connection between the Romantics’ picture of India and their veneration for the ancient legends and culture of the German peoples was well-established. If one wanted to attack Romanticism, one could do worse than begin by undermining the enthusiasm for India. And that was precisely what Hegel did. In his “Lectures on the Philosophy of World History” (1822), Hegel displayed an aversion to, indeed even a hatred of, all things Indian that still startles the modern reader. That the history of the world began in the East and travelled West was as clear to Hegel as it had been to the Romantics; but that this history manifested signs of decay from an original state of poetry and innocence was, in Hegel’s view, no longer credible. India, ancient or modern, was simply primitive, and nothing could be learned from it:

The life of the Indians is composed of...forms without spirit or emotional character...their entire condition must be grasped as one of dreamy reverie (Träumerei). Rationality, morality, subjectivity are annulled, disposed of... One wonders how a people so empty of spiritual substance and independence can become conscious of the highest life, of the truly substantial... The principle of Indian political life is arbitrary despotism and fortuitousness... Historiography the Indians do not understand in the slightest. They are wholly incapable of the kind of rational record-keeping [found in the writers of the Hebrew Old Testament]. Everything dissolves with them into exorbitant imagery. They are not capable of anything rational.

Hegel’s persistent characterization of Indian religion as “dreamy” is without doubt an indirect attack on the religion and literature of Romanticism, on authors such as Friedrich Schlegel. But two more aspects of Hegel’s interpretation deserve mention, representing as I believe they do a retreat from the radical and subtle character of Romantic thought. “Reason” (Vernunft) is, as is well known, the central category of philosophy for Hegel. It is realized step by step in the various phases of world history, above all in two spheres of human activity: in religion (or philosophy) and in politics. The most rational forms or end-states of world history are Christianity and the modern (Prussian) state. Culture – and this is the crucial difference between those two historicists Hegel and Herder – is a thoroughly secondary affair. This intolerant and abstract conception of Reason permits no choice between various “mediators”, as Novalis and Schlegel had done, because all sensual specificity and cultural difference is finally “resolved” (aufgehoben) in pure philosophical rationality. 

One might expect that such trust in the rational “end of history”, to borrow a more recent and equally short-lived Hegelian-derived catchphrase, would not survive such blows as D. F. Strauss’s Biblical criticism or the revolution of 1848. But the end or splintering of Hegelianism did not bring about any renewed reflection on the cultural pluralism of the Romantics that had gone before it. Ludwig Feuerbach’s “Young Hegelian” critique of religion unfortunately led all too rapidly into the crasser varieties of materialism that predominated in the second half of the 19^th century. When Marx came along to “stand Hegel on his head”, nothing about the prevailing image of world history was really altered. Modernity was now defined economically, rather than theologically and politically: but whereas the Indians according to Hegel had represented a primitive, irrational religion, they now represented according to Marx and Engels a primitive economic system instead, an “Asiatic mode of production”. There was still nothing to be learned from the Orient. The technological development of the West would soon leave the rest of the world behind, and the only remaining question was when this development would be taken out of the hands of the capitalists and placed in the trust of the socialist state.

It is clear enough that this modernity is still more or less ours. We too inhabit an ever-expanding “technological space”, to use the expression of Reinhard Knodt. But “technological space” does not rely solely on reason and material development. It relies equally on a mythology. We believe in technology: it is an apparently central, inalienable part of our narrative of mankind’s salvation. If it sometimes throws up problems – the atomic bomb, ecological devastation – then we think, and pray, that it will also solve them.

Technology is the universal “mediator” for our imaginations, even in art, in architecture, in music. We are hardly conscious, most of us, of how deeply our language and responses in the areas of culture, ethics and aesthetics are conditioned by science and technology. (I would point to Adam Curtis as one of the few voices in the mainstream media who really highlights this issue and its problematic twentieth-century history.) Without the materialist myth of technology we would probably never have seen the rise to prominence of the Bauhaus “international style” in architecture, of modern serial music, of psychoanalysis, sociology, mathematical economics, ecology, and many other phenomena of modern art and life. Raymond Schwab’s astonishing book The Oriental Renaissance draws the comparison with the Romantic generation quite explicitly: Orientalism “led to an enthusiasm for ideas that is only comparable with the enthusiasm of our contemporaries for the world of technology” (221).

But the enthusiasm is, in the end, of a different sort. The early Romantics knew that they were working on a common “mythology”, that the symbolic “mediators” of our values and ideas could, and should, be created and shaped by us. Symbols are human: they are given to us neither by God nor by the laws of physics. The Romantics were more sensitive to that fact than we are today. And so was one of the last great Romantics in a scientific age, born on Indian soil but perhaps not coincidentally more popular in Germany than almost anywhere else outside his native land: Rabindranath Tagore, who created from the gods and rituals of Hinduism his own symbolic universe of poetry, music, dance, art and festivals. If we want to make use of technology as aid and “intermediary” without slavishly worshipping it, we have much still to learn, I would suggest, from both Tagore and the Romantics.

Selected literature

Germana, Nicholas A. The Orient of Europe: The Mythical Image of India and Competing Images of German National Identity. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009.

Safranski, Rüdiger. Romantik: Eine deutsche Affäre. Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 2013.

Schwab, Raymond. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880. Translated by Gene Patterson-Black und Victor Reinking. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.

Cowan, Robert. The Indo-German Identification: Reconciling South Asian Origins and European Destinies, 1765-1885. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010.

Figueira, Dorothy M. Translating the Orient: The Reception of Sakuntala in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Albany: State University of New York, 1991.

McGetchin, Douglas T. Indology, Indomania, and Orientalism: Ancient India’s Rebirth in Modern Germany. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2009.

Calicoes and capitalism: or why the world was better off wearing Indian clothes

The subject of this post brings together two issues which bother me, to quite different degrees and in quite different ways, but which a reading of three recent books on global and South Asian history has convinced me are actually connected at quite a deep level. Issue no. 1 is - why is most Western clothing so dull? (Especially for men.) And issue no. 2 is - why is the current global economic dispensation so profoundly unjust? The books I draw on are David Arnold's history of South Asia, published in German as volume 11 of the Neue Fischer Weltgeschichte (Fischer Verlag, 2012) - David is professor emeritus at Warwick, and is a family friend since, as it so happens, he used to live in my parents' house; Prasannan Parthasarathi's Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence 1600-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Giorgio Riello's Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (CUP, 2013).

I will start with issue 1, before moving gradually on to the heavier debates surrounding issue 2. Anyone who has travelled in Asia has surely been struck by the aesthetic contrast between modern Western clothes, the plain cotton trousers and check or striped cotton shirt that are the typical everyday choice for menswear  among the urban middle class, and the variety and beauty of traditional Asian dress and fabric styles, from Indonesian ikat and Indian saris to Japanese kimonos. The latter tend to be reserved for women, the home, or for special occasions, while the "public sphere" is almost always defined by Western codes of dress.One wonders why Eastern cultures do not make more consistent use of their own types of clothing. Is it a matter of inherent price and production costs? Surely not: many Asian styles require less sewing and fabric treatment than Western shirts and trousers do. Is it convenience? That depends very much on how you define convenience (certainly in terms of adaptability to climate and function, south Indian lunghis are much superior to trousers). Is it a question of manufacturing origin? But so much of the world's clothing is now made in Asia! Why are we in the West not yet following Asian fashions? Perhaps by the time China has reached a position of unchallengeable dominance in the world economy, it will be able to dictate to us, linguistically, culturally and sartorially. And yet as far as clothes go, China is duller and more Westernized than most Asian countries. When I spent a day shopping for clothes on a trip to Kunming in south-west China a few years ago, it was extremely hard to find any men's clothes in interesting colours or patterns.

It is worth looking at this in historical perspective: have Western clothes always been dull? Is it - to adapt the sort of argument that Rousseau and his contemporaries made - another reflection on the utilitarian nature of the cold, Northern countries, serving the needs for warmth and durability imposed by a harsh climate rather than answering the invitation of the warm South to leisure and aesthetic display? If one goes back far enough, then maybe one could find support for such a line of reasoning (Ice-Age furs versus Amazonian tattoos, even). But the argument is somewhat irrelevant, for there have been periods of European history when clothing has been much more overtly appealing. Take for instance an item of clothing now irredeemably historical, but quite easy to recognize as typical for well-off men in paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries: the robe de chambre or house robe, sometimes (misleadingly) described as a "nightgown". Here are three examples, from paintings by Vermeer, Francis Hayman and the Spaniard Jose de Alcibar (the pattern on the Vermeer is only visible in close-up, probably as a result of over-cleaning):

Johannes Vermeer, The Astronomer (1668)

Francis Hayman, Maurice Greene and John Hoadly (1747)

José de Alcíbar, De Español y Negra, Mulato (ca. 1760-1770)

As this blog on costume history points out, robes such as this "appear all over Europe in the later part of the seventeenth century". Despite being predominantly a domestic item of clothing, Richard Steele in 1711 refers to "those who come in their nightgowns to saunter away their time" in coffee houses; and as the intellectual status of at least two of the subjects portrayed above suggests (Maurice Greene, in pink, was a professor of music), such gowns were used as symbols of learning and studiousness.

The plot thickens when we look at the more idiomatic words used to describe such words in Europe at the time: cambay in Dutch, and banyan in English. Both are Indian in origin: Cambay was a historical designation for Khambat, in Gujarat on the west coast of India; banyan or bania(n) is an Arabic and Portuguese word derived from the Gujarati for "trader" or a specific caste of merchants (bania).

This ought to come as no surprise. It is highly likely that all of the robes portrayed above actually came from India, as did an ever-increasing quantity of high-quality silk and cotton clothing from the 17th century (the VOC or Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602) up until the middle of the 18th century. And while silk had long been traded overland via the famous Silk Road, mass imports of cotton were something new to Europe - something that would in the end turn out, as Riello's subtitle implies, to be crucial to the Western economic regime of "modernity". In the meantime, in the hands of Indian manufacturers, cotton was a unique material: light, comfortable, relatively cheap, and most importantly, easy to dye and print, a combination of attributes that none of the fabrics known to the West, such as linen, hemp or wool, could match. The Indian textile industry had built up over centuries a tremendous expertise in dying fabrics, creating intense colours that were fast and did not fade. Riello reproduces fragments of the same vivid red and blue pattern found independently in Egypt and the Sulawesi islands in Indonesia, and produced in Gujarat in the 14th century, showing the antiquity, geographical extent and skill involved in the Indian Ocean textile trade. The V&A Museum's collection of Indian textiles (searchable online) is enormous, and contains pieces of astonishing beauty, among them these cotton ceremonial skirt-cloths (pha nung) for the Thai market:

Luxury printed cottons for Europe could also be impressively complex in design, on the scale of Turkish rugs. They were used for home furnishings, as bedcovers or wall-hangings, known as "palampores":

As that example demonstrates, with its palm trees surrounded by a more familiar-feeling flower-chain border, the designs of these fabrics were neither exclusively Indian nor European, but a melange or hybrid of motifs and styles, arrived at by a process of aesthetic negotiation between consumers, traders, and producers (Riello, p. 133). One contemporary term for Indian cottons was "calicoes", derived from Calicut, the old name for Kozhikode in the modern state of Kerala, and older histories of the textile trade used to refer to a "calico craze" on the European market (perhaps on the model of the "tulip mania" in the 1630s, also sparked by Dutch imports). This may be an accurate reflection of the popularity of Indian cotton, which was indeed massive; but it tends to make one think of this popularity as a passing fad, influenced perhaps by a curiosity for the exotic which would soon wear off. Recent historians such as Riello and Parthasarathi emphasize instead the slow process of material and aesthetic education involved in Asiatic commercial success: "consumers in Europe had to learn how to integrate cotton textiles into their dress and furnishings" (Riello, p. 6). Samuel Pepys provides an example. He recorded in his diary having "bought my wife a...painted East India callico for to line her new study", but only "after many trialls"; and only gradually did he progress from furnishings to purchasing a "banyan" for himself and a blue calico gown for his wife (Riello, p. 126).

Most importantly, there is evidence that the so-called "calico craze" brought beautifully-printed cottons into the lives not just of the rich and the middle classes in Europe, but also of the poor, right down to the lowest strata of society. The chief source for this is the 18th-century register for the Foundling Hospital in Coram Fields, Bloomsbury, which carefully preserved thousands of scraps of fabric used to identify the "foundlings" or abandoned babies taken in by the institution in case their mothers were ever in a position to come and reclaim them (few, sadly, were). Here are some:

As this Guardian review of a 2011 exhibition at the museum observes, the Foundling Hospital collection may well be one of the biggest archives of 18th-century fabrics in the world - certainly as far as the working class is concerned. Among them were girls so painfully poor that they had had to give up their child - but even they had access to the new world of taste, pattern and colour opened up by Indian cottons: "their dress may not have been a new one, but they had managed to acquire something that pleased the eye and soothed the touch. They had, perhaps, been able to express a preference for spots over stripes or wondered whether blue was more flattering than green. The tokens left behind at the hospital show a remarkable variety of design. Indeed, reports [John] Styles [the exhibition curator], it is rare for the same pattern to recur among the hundreds of different prints". What the author of the review, significantly, gets wrong is the suggestion that this world was opened up by home manufactures - by the Industrial Revolution. As Styles notes, the majority of these fabrics are from the 1740s and 1750s: Arkwright's spinning jenny, the first main technological innovation in the British textile industry, was constructed in 1764. These sorts of textiles were "hand made", either Indian or made in imitation of Indian designs by techniques not the least superior to those used in Asia. At this stage, the British textile industry was still learning from India - both in terms of taste and in terms of technology. It could not yet surpass it.

To answer the question of how English textiles did beat the Indian trade is really to answer both of my initial questions at once. The answer is however complex, surprising, and unfortunately, unlike the textiles above, also extremely ugly: aesthetically, politically, and morally. Its implications are also enormous in economic terms. For although the Dutch and English East India Companies provided key links in the trading network that opened up the European market to the East, and thus made sizeable profits themselves, this did not stop a process which strikingly resembles that by which China has recently grown to a position of economic strength: the gradual transfer of currency reserves from West to East. Today the currency is US dollars; in the 17th and 18th centuries, it was gold and silver bullion, mined in the New World. Parthasarathi quotes Andre Gunder Frank's assertion that, well into the 18th century, "the two major regions that were most 'central' to the world economy were India and China" (Parthasarathi, p. 22). Silver flowed into Asia in vast quantities in exchange for porcelain and silk from China and cotton from India; for Europeans could not pay with anything else. They did not know how to produce anything that the Asian economy wanted. Finding out how to produce things that the Indians and Chinese did want - or could be persuaded to want - and how to make them economically dependent on those goods, would be the secret to reversing the trade deficit and the balance of global economic power.

The first factor in the British success was simple, and in fact morally quite neutral, though it is regarded as heresy by most economists today: protectionism. The flood of Indian textiles was threatening to ruin English weavers, who could not compete. They protested, in print and on the streets, often violently, in favour of an import ban. The litany of complaint was more extreme than one might expect to hear today, but in at least one respect it was familiar: the English accused Indian weavers of undercutting them, of accepting impossibly low wages simply to ruin the competition. A 1719 pamphlet by J. Roberts entitled "The Spinster" inveighed against "a tawdrey, bespotted, flabby, ragged, low-priced thing called callico...made...by a parcel of Heathens and Pagans that worship the Devil and work for a half-penny a day" (cit. Geoffrey Turnbull, A History of the Calico Printing Industry of Great Britain (Altrincham: J. Sherratt, 1951), p. 21). Daniel Defoe, who had at first been employed to write propaganda in favour of the East India Company's interests in calico, later wrote on behalf of the English wool industry, "The People who make all these fine Works [calico] are to the last Degree miserable, their Labour of no Value, their Wages would fright us to talk of it, and their way of Living raise a Horror in us to think of it...the Wages they get cannot provide better food for them; and yet their rigorous Task-masters lash them forward as we...sometimes do our Horses" ("A Plan of the English Commerce" (1728), cit. Parthasarathi, p. 34). 

As logical as such accusations might have seemed, they were unfounded. As Parthasarathi convincingly demonstrates using primary sources, Indian cottons in most global markets were "by no means the lowest-priced cloths" (p. 35), simply the best-quality ones in a medium price-bracket; and the standard of living among Indian weavers was high, certainly quite comparable to that of their European counterparts. They ate a varied diet, and the more successful of them bought luxuries such as ghee and lived in multi-storey stone houses, the marks of rich villagers (Parthasarathi, p. 44). This particular global system of textile trade - the "old cotton system", which Riello calls "centrifugal" or distributive, rather than "centripetal" or exploitative, and into which the Dutch and British had to fit carefully, to begin with, rather than being able to dominate or transform - was not based on undercutting or the unjust treatment of labour. It was instead based on diversification, co-operation, and high quality.

In any case, the fact that the Indian textile industry was competing fairly was not common knowledge in Europe, and might not have changed the course of events even if it had been. The furore about cotton imports grew into possibly the largest issue in English politics in the decades around 1700, and parliament responded to the weavers' demands in a series of Calico Acts, progressively restricting the import of calico. This is an era not often given much space by historians, and usually summed up in the dull figure of Queen Anne. In fact the Calico Acts were crucial to the Industrial Revolution - and therefore to the course of global history. Unless the British government had protected their native textile industry, and at the same time systematically encouraged both the collection of knowledge and innovative research, British clothes would not have been able to compete with Asian imports. (Illegal imports of calico made things difficult as it was.)

The particular course of development taken by the industry before Arkwright's spinning jenny and the other innovations of the Industrial Revolution would prove almost as important to the future of cotton as the new technologies. One intermediate step was to promote the production of "fustian", a fabric with cotton weft going in one direction and linen threads for the warp that ran perpendicularly to it. Fustian was inferior to pure cotton fabric and everyone in England knew it, because linen did not hold dyes or show patterns to advantage as cotton did (which had been the main reasons for the popularity of calico). However it would do reasonably well as a method of producing striped and check patterns, with dyed cotton threads enlivening a plain linen background. The area around Manchester was already known for fustian, and was also near the major port of Liverpool. This was an advantage because the carefully-struck protectionist balance of the Calico Acts did not ban the calico trade completely (as had been done in France, and would have put the East India Company out of business had it been insisted on in Britain). Rather, it allowed it to continue for the re-export of cottons to Africa and the Americas. Cotton cloth was too important an ingredient in the Atlantic trade to be eliminated. The other ingredient in the Atlantic trade network of which the same could be said was, of course, African slaves.

The connection between industrially-produced cotton and slavery is well-known, but what Riello and Parthasarathi point to is its importance - as a trading rather than labour relationship - even prior to the establishment of the great cotton plantations in the American South. It was precisely the West African market, which was furthest away from the Indian Ocean trade and showed the most demand for lower-grade textiles, that allowed the Manchester cotton trade to expand, by a safe process of what Riello calls "re-export substitution". This is so termed by analogy to "import substitution", in which home industries attempt to manufacture themselves whatever products are being bought in from abroad; here the Lancashire textile industry was trying to substitute its own products for cheap Indian calicos which were imported by the East India Company and then re-exported in exchange for African slaves. Before it became a cotton port, Liverpool was a slave port. The two "goods" became equivalent. Parthasarathi reports that over the 18th century as a whole, two-thirds of British exports to West Africa consisted of textiles (p. 24), thus furnishing the main means of exchange for buying slaves from African slave traders. Between 1752 and 1754, 60% of British cotton cloth exports were exchanged for slaves in West Africa (Parthasarathi, p. 134).

An ugly business, then - in more senses than one. The re-exported cloth was not the English substitute for the kind of printed calico we saw above, for which the London market was primarily responsible, but cheap, dull and nasty fustians in gingham patterns. Riello confirms the connection:

The majority of 'cottons' from Manchester were mixed linen and cotton with dyed cotton yarns being woven as the weft of stripes and checks... Manchester's cotton production boomed in the 1750s when quantities increased and the overall quality of production seemed to have risen. From the mid century the so-called 'Manchester linen checks' became a significant part of the region's production, accounting from 48 to 86 percent of all exported cottons between 1750 and 1774. These products were of sufficient quality to find a market in West Africa, as suggested by...Thomas Melvin, the British governor of Cape Coast Castle (p. 153).

Cape Coast Castle, in case you need reminding, was the principal "slave castle" on the west coast of Africa, a fort extended by the British by the addition of underground dungeons that could hold up to 1000 slaves awaiting transport to America:

It still stands today in modern Ghana, and is as powerful a symbol of the monstrosity of Britain's Atlantic trading enterprise as Auschwitz is of the worst crimes of European anti-semitism. A friend visited in 2011 and wrote this excellent piece on its importance. Cape Coast Castle's operation was supported from 1750 by the sale of Manchester textiles, most in the so-called "gingham" or check pattern now ubiquitous on shirts, tea-towels and tablecloths all over the globe:

I personally find gingham hideous, and as it turns out, there are some pretty good historical and moral reasons for such a reaction. (Incidentally, the word even changed its meaning as a result of the Manchester trade: it originally came from the Malay word geng-gang, meaning "striped". Most earlier ginghams were striped, sometimes quite prettily so, but check patterns gradually took over a larger proportion of Manchester output, and with it, the word itself.) The spiralling exploitation of the English labour-force that went hand in hand with the expansion of the Lancashire cotton mills is the other side of the coin, of course, and was the major source of evidence in Marx and Engels' indictment of modern industrial capitalism.

But the "new cotton system" did not just concentrate labour; it concentrated the entire organization of the industry, orienting everything towards the factory and streamlined mass production (hence Riello's designation "centripetal"). Everything quite literally served the machine, from the deskilled factory operatives to the standardised patterns given to the appearance of the textiles themselves. Riello explores how the factory "brought standardisation: the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cotton factories inaugurated a notion of production based on predictability and consistency over time. Unlike a putting-out system, the cloth's pattern, its finishing and quality were not left to the decision of individual producers. The product of one factory might be indistinguishable from that of another...in a way quite dissimilar from the idiosyncratic production of individual Indian weavers" (p. 229). The process of aesthetic negotiation and diversification that had formed a natural part of the long Indian supply chains was replaced by a mechanical, centrally imposed series of patterns. Moreover, those patterns were now "protected" by property rights. The aesthetic value of textiles was centralized and legally fixed in order to prevent "piracy" (just as in the 19th century, that of music would also be centralized and fixed in the form of the score and, later, the recording, for much the same reasons). Designs were safeguarded for fixed periods, which "made it possible for those who had invested in the creation and marketing of new patterns to legally retain the right to exploit them against all those imitators who could otherwise steal them 'through a shop window'...as one contemporary put it" (p. 234). (Again, there was considerable irony, not to say hypocrisy in this: in the 17th century British piracy, both real and intellectual, was rampant, and played a major part both in the disruption of Mughal shipping and in the transfer of Indian technical knowledge about cotton production and dying to Europe.)

All this led to massive gains in efficiency, which enabled cotton cloth to be produced far more cheaply than had been possible under the previous system. The global trade in cotton was turned around.  In 1820 the British East India company ceased trading in Indian cottons, and by 1840 British cloth imports exceeded native production. The impact on the Indian weavers was calamitous: even the British Goveror-General George Bentinck opined that the decline in their prosperity "hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India" (cit. Riello, p. 273) - a dramatic image quoted by Marx himself in his contemporary writings on the Anglo-Indian economy. But even at this juncture, terms such as "efficiency" and "superior technology", with their implication of an irresistible, inherent trajectory of development whose consequences were simply "unfortunate" for those still "undeveloped", do not fully explain the situation. Subduing the Indian competition would not have been possible without the exploitation of Britain's political and military control over the subcontinent - in other words, without the Empire. The present-day economic and social situation of India is a result of a fatal combination of imperialism and globalized industrial capitalism.

One thing not often realized about pre-colonial India was how different it probably was to the present day. Orientalist stereotypes of the eternal and unchanging East obscure the fact that the advent of European influence had a huge impact, as indeed it has had everywhere else around the globe. India was not always poor; the population was not always either expanding or succumbing Malthusian-fashion to famine or disease; the main support of the Indian peasantry was not always agriculture; the caste system was not always a rigid framework hindering social mobility and progress; even the extended family - so often presented as the key to South Asian social identity - was not always quite so "extended" as it is supposed to be today. As we have seen, India was running up a trade surplus in the 18th century; the population was stable and protected from harvest failures and famines (which were rare) by a system of state-run financial aid, the so-called taccavi; as little as 25% of the peasantry were engaged in agriculture; the caste system was flexible and often helped commerce by promoting trust (because members of the same caste were engaged in the same trade); and surveys of Indian households in the early 1820s found  an average of less than 5 people per family and little more per house (including servants) - a figure entirely comparable to Europe (cf. Parthasarathi, chap. 3). Change across all these areas was primarily a result of colonialization.

And in economic terms, colonialization meant exploitation and unfair advantage. (It is one of the great ironies of history that the English have managed to claim "fair play" as one of our cardinal virtues - from the perspective of the rest of the world, nothing could be further from the truth.) Military power lay at the basis of British policy. It was a year after the battle of Buxar in 1764 - the real turning-point in the establishment of Company power in Bengal, historians now concur, rather than the more famous victory at Plassey in 1757 - that the British received the diwani or right to collect taxes in the provinces of Bengal and Bihar. As David Arnold puts it, "Nominally the British thereby became vassals of the Great Mogul, but in practice this meant they had a licence to prey upon the riches of the province. In this way Bengal became a bridgehead, from which the British could extend their dominion step by step" (p. 337). In his history of Bengal, Land of Two Rivers: A History of Bengal from the Mahabharata to Mujib (New Delhi: Penguin, 2011), Nitish Sengupta highlights how, "as a result of a series of crucial economic changes during the first hundred years of British rule, Bengal, traditionally a prosperous country, was transformed into an economically depressed, low-income country...a typical colonial economy which supplied raw materials for industries in Great Britain and served as a market for British goods" (p. 199).

The first of these changes was the ruthless levying of land taxes accompanied by an almost total lack of interest in actual agricultural development or investment. The system used changed - from private collection to fill the pockets of Company nabobs to the more detached zamindar system (based on the large-scale estate landholding system in England) that appeared with the Permanent Settlement in 1793, but the exploitative character of the arrangement remained. As painfully recollected in the lyrics of Bengali folk songs from the period that are still sung today, rents could be raised without limit and peasants evicted if they were unable to pay. In the south of India the relationship between landowners and peasants deteriorated to the point where the latter were actually physically tortured for non-payment of rent (as revealed by the Madras Torture Commission of 1855 - Arnold, p. 392). Nevertheless, more and more peasants were forced into agriculture because domestic industries were being destroyed by unfair tariffs. The situation did not just affect cotton: Sengupta reports that British silk imports into India received a charged of 3.5% while Indian silks going the other way were charged a duty of 20%; the ratio for woollen textiles was even worse (p. 201). Salt could not be manufactured at all in India and had to be imported (hence the symbolic value of Gandhi's famous "Salt March" in 1930). By the mid-19th century, when the East India Company had been ousted from its monopoly position and duties were reduced, England had acquired political control over most of the country and an unbeatable technological advantage at home, while decimating Indian manufactures and driving native banians or merchants out of trade and into the lower ranks of the British bureaucracy.

Then came the railways. They were not as much of an altruistic investment in local infrastructure as it might seem, for as Arnold points out, their "most important effect was the [further] opening of Indian markets for British industrial products and the facilitation of the export of raw materials" (p. 401). Together with the building of canals, they led to massive deforestation, and their embankments had unforeseen consequences for the drainage of water during the monsoon floods. Arnold's analysis reveals that the British were even to some extent thereby culpable for the growth of malaria to epidemic proportions in the subcontinent, for the areas of stagnant, undrained water that were created in the reshaped Indian landscape proved to be perfect mosquito breeding-grounds.

Malaria claimed even more lives among an undernourished population. From the Bengal famine of 1770 to that of 1943, famines in the province occurred with "unfamiling regularity throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, except for fifteen years between 1880 and 1895" (Sengupta, p. 204). With some exceptions, it is difficult to hold British officials directly responsible for Indian deaths from famine; but there is little doubt that the number of mortalities resulting indirectly from British economic policy over the long period of colonial rule would exceed by some margin the numbers of victims of the Holocaust and the Soviet gulags put together. The so-called Madras famine of 1877 resulted in the death of between 5.5 and 8 million people.

Arnold quotes an estimate of 20 million dead from famine between 1860 and 1910. Many were a direct result of lack of state intervention, of a laissez faire policy that allowed grain exports to double at the height of the 1877 famine and made aid conditional on "relief works", doling out rice only to those who performed a whole day of strenuous labour to earn it.

If you don't think Victorian economic policy could appear any more criminal, well, think again. Parallel to the Atlantic economy in which cotton was structurally connected to slavery, in Asia it became intimately bound up with the opium trade. Opium turned out to be the chief "good" that the Chinese didn't actually want but could be "persuaded" to want, and it came from India (modern Pakistan and Afghanistan), where it was bought in exchange for - what else - cotton textiles from Manchester.

It was by means such as this that the British global trade network was built up - a far more important entity than the "Empire" measured in crudely territorial terms, and also far more durable. We can no longer take a map of the world and colour a quarter of its land surface in pink; but we can still point to the trade exchanges that continue to exploit factory labour and concentrate capital in the hands of wealthy Western urban elites. And the justification for such unjust economic processes continues to be the same given by the Manchester mill-owners and the governors of British India: that trade must be "free", and the market must be left to operate without state intervention. That argument rewrote the realities of 18th-century economic history as if they conformed to Adam Smith's "classical" economic theory. In fact, they contradicted it. Britain's economic success was built on 18th-century protectionism and state intervention - and as far as that went, there was nothing wrong with such policy. The problem was that Britain then prevented Asia from reclaiming her advantage by similar means (until the last few decades, during which, as Will Hutton has shown, Asian industry has been successful precisely because it has protected its markets and invested large amounts of state capital in its industries). The "killer apps" ensuring the "rise of the West" were not science, the work ethic or competition, as Niall Ferguson has argued. Rather - and in this respect they really were "killers" - one should list factors such as slavery, the drug trade, naval and general military power, empire, child labour at home and forced labour abroad, racism, ecological devastation, and moral and political hypocrisy, hypocrisy of precisely the kind that encouraged others to respect absolutely an ideology of economic freedom to which the West only adhered when it suited it.