Global Connections of Raw Silk Production in 18th and 19th-Century Bengal

Bengal was a major global raw silk market player between the early 17th and mid-19th centuries. During this period, Bengal supplied both Asian and European markets with raw silk. The production of Bengali raw silk and its marketing organization successfully provided Indian and European merchants with increasing quantities of raw silk for the entire first half of the 18th century. But by the mid-18th century, the British East India Company had discovered that the finishing necessary to make Bengali raw silk marketable in London made it expensive and limited its use in the British silk industry. So, when the company gained political control of the province in the late 1760s, its Court of Directors changed Bengali reeling technology by introducing the most advanced European methods in their newly acquired territories in the eastern part of the South Asian subcontinent. However, the company’s upgrading process was only partially successful, for Bengali raw silk reeled with the new method never matched the high standards of Piedmontese raw silk. In any case, the company was able to produce vast quantities of low-quality raw silk from the 1770s to the 1830s. In the mid-19th century, the spread of pébrine—an epidemic silkworm disease—ravaged raw silk production in most of the world’s cocoon farms. The only country whose silkworm farms remained immune to pébrine disease was Japan, which had, however, remained relatively isolated from global markets over the previous centuries. Pébrine also infected Bengali silkworm farms in the 1870s, causing a decline in raw silk production. That marked the conclusion of the continued involvement of Bengali raw silk in the global raw silk market, a trajectory that had spanned the previous two and half centuries. The drop in Bengali raw silk production cannot be attributed solely to the impact of colonial policies on the Bengali economy. After the pébrine epidemic, there was a general restructuring of the global market and its interconnections, from the mid-19th century onward. This restructuring saw the downsizing of several silk economies, which had previously enjoyed a primary role in the global silk trade, and the re-emergence of the Far Eastern sericulture areas, especially Japan and China, as producers of raw silk for world markets, both the traditional European markets and the emerging raw silk markets in the United States.