he antiquity of cotton cultivation and textile production in West Africa would not be apparent to someone traveling across its present-day landscape, since varieties of New World cotton plants are no
Contents contributed and discussions participated by donclassico
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Mapping the History of Cotton Textile Production in Precolonial West Africa.pdf - 1 views
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e era of
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Africa might go. Surveys published by early twentieth-century botanists attempted to systematically document, identify, and compare plant specimens that had been collected world-wide, including Old World cottons, and suggested among other things that cotton had been widely grown in Africa prior to direct Euro
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per Niger bend.3 A more extensive survey by Dalziel indicated that G. herbaceum was still being grown in northern Nigeria and in Kanuri-speaking areas around Lake Chad as w
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orld varieties.' The history of cotton in precolonial Africa is still poorl
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Artisanal groups such as spinners, weavers, dyers, tailors, and embroiderers developed and honed their skills, created workshops, and marketed their products. They generated and maintained the crucially important links between raw cotton fiber and the purchasers of cotton textiles and garments. Thus tracing the history of cotton and cotton textile production can reveal a great deal about precolonial social an
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This is true because around 1841 in West Africa there we price differences between cotton and textile producers .One of the reasons was the quality of the products and the difference of materials used. For example; In Niger Eggan was selling quality textiles while Yoruba country was selling cheaper products because of the lack of materials available.
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tern Hemisphere."6 These important consumer markets for textiles predated the direct trade with Europeans, and conditioned its op
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othesis. No evidence could be found in southern Africa for domestication of the plant there, that is, there was no evidence of its having been cultivated or explo
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Textile Production in the Lower Niger Basin: New Evidence from the 1841 Niger Expeditio... - 2 views
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Although it has been already well established that textile manufacturing was a strong sector of the economies in the lower Niger basin, many specific questions have remained unanswered about what kind of textiles were produced and marketed, how, where, and by whom they were produced, and how textile production and trade changed over time.
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originally chose to undertake the analyses of these textiles for two reasons. The first concerns the variation I found in the literature regarding prices of textiles. Not only has there been agreat variety ofcloth types produced inthe lower Niger region, but prices could vary considerably among cloths of the same general type.
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In their explorations, they were to learn as much as possible about native industries and agriculture, especially cotton and textile production. Most of the cloths they collected and brought back to England were turned over to the British Museum in 1843 (they are now in the Museum of Mankind); another smaller group of cloths acquired privately by Dr William Stanger was purchased by the Wisbech and Fenland Museum in Cambridgeshire in 1858.
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This detailed documentation, together with myanalyses ofthe textiles, presents us with a clearer picture than we had before of textile production and trade in the lower Niger region in the mid-nineteenth century.
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The textiles are the earliest non-archaeological examples extant which are known to be from the lower Niger region, and they have been kept in excellent condition. Even more important are the circumstances of their collection, about which we know a great deal.
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She showed that general price levels for the cloths fell into a coherent geographical configuration -
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For the town of Eggan, in which most of the cloths were purchased, Johnson was able to distinguish an economy in which materials were imported to produce textiles for export while at the same time cheaper cloth was imported from Yoruba country (south of Eggan) for local use. She went on to infer that the Yoruba cloths were cheaper because they were woven on the vertical loom, which she claimed produced 'lower quality' products. My analyses show that this inference is incorrect.
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They revealed that prices could rise or fall according to the amount of silk used, the dimensions of yarns, and the density of the fabric weave.
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An explanation for the relatively lower prices of Yoruba cloths cannot, therefore, be based on an assumed difference in textile technology used