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 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
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| Title: | Guinée Cloth: Linked Transformations in Production within France's Empire in the Nineteenth Century |
| Author: | Roberts, Richard |
| Year: | 1992 |
| Periodical: | Cahiers d'études africaines |
| Volume: | 32 |
| Issue: | 128 |
| Pages: | 597-627 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | Africa France colonial territories West Africa Senegal |
| Subjects: | colonialism international trade textiles mercantile history History and Exploration Economics and Trade |
| External link: | https://doi.org/10.3406/cea.1992.1529 |
| Abstract: | This article traces the production and circulation of guinée cloth as a means of exploring a neglected side of colonialism, namely how economic and political changes in two widely strewn colonies within the same imperial systems were interwined. It examines the way guinée cloth linked different parts of the French empire - Pondicherry in India and Senegal in West Africa - and both to France and the Antilles. In particular, it shows the parallel transformations of capital into commodities and then into currency. Pondicherry guinée was exchanged in Senegal for slaves to be sent to the Caribbean and for Senegalese gum. It competed with locally produced indigo-dyed cloth in Senegambia and contributed to the decline of handicraft weaving there, replacing the locally produced cloth in the cloth currency zone on the Senegal river. When the French began to expand their dominion eastward into the Upper Senegal river and into the Western Sudan in the mid-1880s, they increasingly relied on Pondicherry guinée to pay for food and services so crucial to their military campaigns. The article assesses the production and export of Pondicherry guinée cloth from the beginning of the eighteenth century, the crisis in the gum trade in Senegal which undercut Pondicherry's export markets, and the competition between French guinée from Rouen and colonial guinée. This study supports F. Braudel's insistence that textiles have their own distinctive geography of production and consumption. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in French (p. 735). |
