Textile trade

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The textile trade includes all types of textiles , especially yarns and fabrics , carpets and trimmings and, from the 19th century, other end products such as clothing and home textiles .

Long-distance trade in textiles, namely luxury fabrics such as Chinese silk , has been of great economic and cultural-historical importance since ancient times . From the Middle Ages onwards , this also affected the trade in woolen milled fabrics ( cloths ).

A European trader on the Silk Road in the eyes of a Chinese artist (Tang dynasty, 7th century)
A West Asian and a Chinese monk, Bezeklik , 9th century.

The silk road

Up until modern times, silk and spices were important trade goods from Southeast Asia . The production of large quantities of silk for export, along with the training of silk manufacturers, took place in China at the end of the " Warring States Period " in the 3rd century BC. The oldest finds of Chinese silk in Europe were made in the 6th century BC. Celtic princely grave from the Heuneburg ( Sigmaringen district ). At that time, silk was an extremely rare fabric in the West; like purple and glass, it was one of the luxury items in the Roman Empire . Although the Byzantines under Emperor Justinian I managed to establish their own silk production with the help of smuggled silkworms in the late antiquity , the import of Chinese silk via the Silk Road remained very important. Securing the trade routes and organizing transcontinental trade was extremely difficult. The valuable goods went through several middlemen.

The cloth trade in the Middle Ages

Heraldic shield of the Arte della Lana, Andrea Della Robbia , 1487, Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Florence)

In the Middle Ages, the woolen trade was the source of several great fortunes and the prosperity of cities like Ghent and Florence . But it also played a major role in the activities of the Hanseatic League .

In Florence in the 15th century, guilds and guilds came into being , which were referred to as the "arts" and which focused on the "higher arts", the "arti maggiori" (the "noble" professions) and the "lower arts", the "arti minori ”(the simpler trades such as blacksmith, shoemaker, stonemason). The guilds of the traders “Arte dei Mercatanti o di Calimala”, the money changers and bankers “Arte del Cambio” and those of the cloth and fur traders “Arte della Lana” were particularly important: the origin of the Medici's wealth was the textile trade. The Fuggers , too, are a Swabian merchant family who have lived in the Free Imperial City of Augsburg since Hans Fugger (? - 1408/09) immigrated from Graben in 1367 , and owed their wealth to the textile trade. Hans Fugger was indeed a member of the weavers' guild, but did not sit more at the loom, but acted probably at the end of the 14th century as "Weber publisher" with cotton from Italy since about 900 played the Brenner Pass and the transalpine route between Verona and the North Tyrolean Inn Valley plays a central role in the textile trade between Italy and Central Europe. This path connected the Po plain with the great river system in central Europe. Here, developed Bolzano with his ex 1202 detectable fairs into a major trading center for silk and wool fabrics . The cloth trade was of great economic importance in England and the Netherlands. In the Middle Ages, Ghent grew into one of the largest cities in Europe thanks to its flourishing cloth trade . Around 1356, the Company of the staple at Calais , an association of 26 English cloth merchants, obtained a monopoly of the English crown on the export of cloth to Calais . In 1359, in Bruges , the trading center of that time, privileges for English merchants can be proven. Probably from these individual organizations the Company of Merchant Adventurers of England was founded around 1407 . This London-based company is to be understood as a merchants' guild. She too was privileged by the English crown and was given the monopoly on the export of untreated cloth to the Netherlands. The Dutch region around Bruges was one of the centers of textile production and finishing , and the Company of Merchant Adventurers set up its first branch there. In 1446 she was offered better conditions by Philip Duke of Burgundy and she moved her Dutch headquarters to Antwerp . The society prospered and became very important to the English crown, as taxes on cloth exports made up a substantial portion of the state's revenue. Over the centuries the competitive position of the Tuscan traders weakened compared to the less guild-bound Great Britain.

In Germany the cloth merchants were called Gewandschneider , their trade fair or warehouse is called Gewandhaus .

British trade with India

After the English had gained a foothold in the coastal areas of northern India in the 17th century, the British East India Company, endowed with far-reaching trading privileges, built up a highly profitable cloth trade with the motherland. In Bengal in particular , numerous weaving mills produced for the British market. As early as the second half of the 17th century, textiles accounted for more than 50 percent of the imports of the East India Company (its second mainstay was the trade in tea). One of the deciding factors was the Europeans' enthusiasm for clothing made of cotton . The traditional British woolen cloths lost their importance. Due to the industrial revolution in Great Britain and the technical lagging behind in colonial India, however, machine-made British textiles became cheaper than handicrafts in India. The consequences were mass unemployment and the impoverishment of the Indian weavers' boxes, the paradoxical situation arose that Indian cotton fibers were processed in England and then re-imported to India.

Structural change from the 19th century

Department store in Görlitz

From the beginning of the 19th century there was the beginning of a fundamental structural change in the textile trade: previously, mainly fabrics and non-finished garments had been traded (the tailors were responsible for producing them by hand), now there was an increasing trade in finished and non-finished clothing if necessary, ready-made goods that can be corrected in detail. Ready-made clothing mostly refers to the serial production of garments , but also the garments themselves produced in this way. The gradual transition to new forms of production and sales began around 1800. Individual entrepreneurs employed a large number of seamstresses to have clothes manufactured in series, but still in the usual way Way sewn by hand. When there was greater demand, orders were given to so-called interim masters, who in turn let seamstresses work for them, mostly working from home and extremely poorly paid. This type of garment factories first emerged in France and England , while the strict association with guilds in small German states delayed development. A first notable clothing company was founded in Paris in 1770 , and since 1789 other companies have sprung up in Paris and other French cities. In 1799, the first German clothing store was established in Hamburg . In 1836 a company for the serial production of coats started work in Berlin , the city quickly developed into a nationally important manufacturing and trading center for ready-made clothing. Since around 1850, manufacturing has been used as an industrial technique on a larger scale. But this also required new techniques in textile retail. In step with the increasing industrialization of clothing production ( sewing machine, etc.), new forms of distribution in the textile trade were established. The department store (from the middle of the 19th century) and the textile specialist market (20th century) allowed and still allow the ready-made goods , which are now mostly produced in a low-wage country , to be widely sold. The pioneers of the department store were often merchants who had previously worked in the traditional textile trade. In Germany these were often entrepreneurs of Jewish origin. The political reservations of small businesses against the new forms of large-scale distribution (demands for special taxes, etc.) therefore had an anti-Semitic tinge in the first half of the 20th century .

Market restrictions

Historically, there have been repeated attempts to regulate the market and even monopolize the international trade in textiles in order to secure domestic production and its profits. It is well known, for example, that China's attempt to control silk production and thus monopolize trade in silk was ultimately unsuccessful. For the more recent past, the World Textile Agreement should be mentioned here (English: Agreement on Textiles and Clothing (ATC)), an international agreement for the textile and clothing industry valid from January 1, 1995 to 2004 . It regulated the gradual transition from this economic sector, which was previously protected by import quotas , to one that was subject to the World Trade Organization . Before that, the Multifibre Arrangement (MFA), which came into force in 1974, was in force, before it came into force again on October 1, 1962 and extended in 1967 and 1970 (Agreement in International Trade in Cotton Textiles). Since January 1, 2005, the textile and clothing industry has been subject to the normal rules of the World Trade Organization. Because of this gradual liberalization of the relevant international trade and because of the high proportion of labor costs in the production of textiles, this has been concentrated in low-wage countries in recent decades.

Traveling trade

Bandlkramer, presenting his bands in front of his stomach

Certain textile products were sold directly through wandering peddlers and traders, e.g. B. Linen from the Tüötten in the so-called "Töddenhandel" of the 17th and 18th centuries, haberdashery such as colorful ribbons from the Bandlkramern and Kiepenkerls . Ferggers were the traveling middlemen .

literature

  • Detlef Briesen: Department store, mass consumption and social morality. On the history of consumer criticism in the 20th century , Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2000, ISBN 3-593-36730-0 .
  • Marie-Christine Engels: Merchants, Interlopers, Seamen and Corsairs. The "Flemish" Community in Livorno and Genoa (1615-1635). Lost, Hilversum 1997, ISBN 90-6550-570-9 .
  • Heidrun Homburg: Department store companies and their founders in France and Germany or: A discreet elite and all sorts of myths. In: Yearbook for Economic History. Issue 1, 1992, ISSN  0075-2800 , pp. 183-219, online (PDF; 2 MB) .
  • Ulrich Hübner et al. (Ed.): The silk road. Trade and cultural exchange in a Eurasian route network (= Asia and Africa. Vol. 3). 2nd, revised edition. EB-Verlag, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-930826-63-1 .
  • Andreas Lehne : Viennese department stores. 1865–1914 (= research and contributions to the history of the city of Vienna. Vol. 20). With contributions by Gerhard Meissl and Edith Hann. Deuticke, Vienna 1990, ISBN 3-7005-4488-X .
  • Jürgen G. Nagel : The adventure of long-distance trading. The East India Companies. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2007, ISBN 978-3-534-18527-6 .
  • Jayanta Kumar Ray (Ed.): Aspects of India's International Relations 1700 to 2000. South Asia and the World (= Towards Independence. Pt. 6 = History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization. Vol. 10). Pearson Longman, New Delhi 2007, ISBN 978-81-3170834-7 .
  • Klaus Strohmeyer: Department stores. History, prosperity and decline in the sea of ​​goods (= Wagenbach's pocket library . Vol. 70). Wagenbach, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-8031-2070-5 .
  • Armin Torggler: Of gray loden and colored cloth. Reflections on the cloth trade and textile processing in Tyrol , in: Verona-Tyrol. Art and economy on Brennerweg (899-1516) , (= Runkelsteiner Schriften zur Kulturgeschichte 7), Athesia-Verlag, Bozen 2015, pp. 199–246, ISBN 978-88-6839-093-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ulrich Knefelkamp : The trade routes of precious textiles to Central Europe from the 10th to the 15th century. In: Michael Petzet (Ed.): Textile grave finds from the Sepultur of the Bamberg Cathedral Chapter (= workbooks of the Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation. Vol. 33). International Colloquium, Seehof Castle, 22./23. April 1985. Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-87490-906-9 , pp. 99-106; Hans-Jürgen Hundt : About prehistoric silk finds. In: Yearbook of the Roman-Germanic Central Museum Mainz. Vol. 16, 1969, ISSN  0076-2741 , pp. 59-71.
  2. ^ Martin Kluger : Fugger - Italy. Business, Weddings, Knowledge and Art. Story of a fruitful relationship. Context-Medien und -Verlag, Augsburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-939645-27-6 .
  3. ^ Armin Torggler: Of gray loden and colored cloth. Reflections on the cloth trade and textile processing in Tyrol , in: Verona-Tyrol. Art and economy on Brennerweg (899-1516), (= Runkelsteiner Schriften zur Kulturgeschichte 7), Athesia-Verlag, Bozen 2015, pp. 199–246, ISBN 978-88-6839-093-8 .
  4. ↑ See Engels: Merchants, Interlopers, Seamen and Corsairs. 1997, p. 35.
  5. ↑ See Nagel: Adventure long-distance trade. 2007, p. 82 f.

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