Artist Liz Rideal joined us to discuss her her practise, including her work featured in COTTON: Global Threads (11 Feb - May 13 2012). This talk was recorded on 10 May 2012. Presentation and images © Liz Rideal.

3. Manchester and Ahmedabad: From internationalisation to
globalisation – or where did cotton manufacture go and why?
• An historical and contemporary analysis of cotton manufacture in
Ahmedabad, Gujurat against the backdrop of British colonial rule.
• Past and contemporary technologies, products and markets, and
integration into the global cotton trade.

4. John Forbes Watson
(1827-1892) Photograph
from Journal of Indian
Art, Vol III, No 25

5. Forbes Watson did not travel to India to collect textiles.
Instead he and a team of assistants cut up fabrics from the
India Museum’s stores in London to create 20 sets of 18
volume sample books. Some fabrics in the India Museum’s
collection had been acquired through trade, but many had
come to the museum in 1855 after being shown at the Paris
International Exhibition.

7. …the material for which he is famed has not
hitherto been subject to any sort of detailed
analysis, and systematic attempts to assess the
relationship between his avowed intentions in
assembling two major series of Indian textile
samples and the actual impact their distribution
might have had on the industry are only now
beginning. (Swallow 1999: 30)

10. The 700 specimens … show what the people of
India affect and deem suitable in the way of
textile fabrics, and if the supply of these is to
come from Britain, they must be imitated there.
What is wanted, and what it is to be copied to
meet that want, is thus accessible for study in
these Museums.

12. India is in a position to become a
magnificent customer … to clothe
but a mere percentage of such a
vast population would double the
looms of Lancashire.

13. Indian taste in decoration is in the highest sense
refined. Such combinations of form and colour as
many of these specimens exhibit everyone will call
beautiful; and this beauty has one constant feature
– a quietness and harmony which never fail to
fascinate … There is [also] no want of
ornamentation … The portions which are
concealed when the garment is on the wearer are
rarely decorated.

15. …That we shall be able to determine what
productions can and what cannot be made
most cheaply by machinery. This is a point
which it is important to decide. It will
probably be found that many of the elaborate
Indian patterns have still to be produced by
hand.

17. …the mystery hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce.
The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of
India.
Governer General of India 1834-5.
The prefaces of Indian textile catalogues resonate, appropriately,
with condemnations of British imperial policy. But, ironically,
even if not surprisingly, the hero of those working on the ground
to support and reinvigorate the handloom industry today…(is)
the man whose intention was ostensibly to undercut that very
industry – the Reporter for the Products of India, Dr. John
Forbes Watson.
(Swallow 1999: 43)

19. http://tmoi.org.uk/