Abstract

While most research on cotton highlights China’s imports of cotton manufactures from such industrial countries as England and the United States, this project investigates the trade, consumption, and production of Chinese Nankeen cloth and cotton in England and America. The Nankeen was a cloth with a naturally brownish yellow color and a firm texture that was produced in southern China, allegedly Nanjing. Americans purchased the textile primarily from England during the colonial period, since English consumers had used Nankeens imported from China to make children and male clothing by the eighteenth century. More nankeens came directly from China after the U.S.-China trade unfolded in 1784, enabling Americans to make more varieties of clothes in the United States. To produce the cloth domestically, nineteenth-century Americans invented dying techniques to imitate the naturally yellowish color of Chinese nankeens. Moreover, believing that the Chinese Nankeen was made of Gossoypsium religiosum, a species of cotton with a bright yellow color, Americans planned to grow this plant in American South and sold nankeen cotton in England to meet Britons’ demand for “Indian nankeens.” However, while white cotton dominated the international cotton market, the experiment had declined by the mid-nineteenth century and the yellowish nankeen became “colored people’s cotton.” Enslaved people wore nankeen clothes in the United States and nankeen cotton acquired much lower market prices. Thus, this case study of nankeen cloth, color, and cotton demonstrate how different cultural and economic contexts of the overseas markets reshaped the value of global commodities after they were produced by the laborers in the region of origin.