South Asia pioneered the spinning, weaving and especially the dyeing and printing of cotton, mastering mordant and resist techniques that produced brilliant, wash-fast colours unmatched elsewhere. From fine Bengal muslins to block-printed and painted chintz, Indian cloth was traded across the Indian Ocean and, from the seventeenth century, in enormous volumes to Europe. This dominance organised whole production regions, ports and merchant networks around textile manufacture. The hunger to imitate Indian cottons later helped trigger the mechanised European textile industry.
Indian textiles were the leading manufactured export of the pre-industrial world, shaping port cities, craft quarters and global trade routes for centuries. The drive to replicate them was a direct spur to the Industrial Revolution that remade the modern city.
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