Introduction

While Indian competition propelled British innovation in textiles in the eighteenth century, Britain was not the only nation in Europe – nor was Europe the only region in the world – to face the competitive challenge of India. And much as in Europe, cloth producers around the globe began to imitate Indian-made goods. This dynamic of competition and imitation reached great heights in several centers in the Ottoman Empire, where vast quantities of Indian cloth were consumed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Ottoman centers, unlike Lancashire, failed to forge a revolutionary response to the Indian challenge, however. And Ottoman textile manufacturers, in contrast to those in Britain, did not reverse the longstanding east–west flow of cottons and establish a new global manufacturing order. The purpose of this chapter is to answer the question why Britain followed a different path in cotton textiles from the Ottoman Empire as well as its major competitor in Europe, the kingdom of France.