The Weft of nations:Thomas Allom and his depictions of Chinese and British textile production in the nineteenth century

Abstract

The great age of European expansion was accompanied by demonstrated interest in Chinese labor and its production. As early as 1655 some of the earliest representations of Chinese women reeling silk cocoons to make thread in Europe appear in the marginalia of maps in Jesuit Martino Martini’s (1614-1661) Novus atlas Sinensis. Arguably informed by the newly emerging studies of China and in economics, Europeans were inspired by reports of Chinese wealth to emulate their manufacturing techniques. In 1735 the Jesuit Jean-Batiste du Halde (1674-1743) reproduced prints that depicted women performing labor reeling silk cocoons, weaving fabric, and quilling thread with attention given to the equipment that was used. Du Halde tells his readers that viewers should pay attention to the simplicity of such machines that are capable of producing such beautiful and costly silks. Approximately one hundred years later, by the 1840s, the illustrator and architect Thomas Allom (1804-1872) had depicted both Chinese and British workers producing fabric. Rather than viewing Chinese machines and techniques of textile manufacturing with envy, the texts associated with these images reveals a complex relationship to capitalist modes of production. As I argue, contemporaneous audiences would have viewed the representation of China’s manufacturing of textiles as frozen, static and outdated, rooted in the seventeenth century. In contrast the imagery that Thomas Allom created for depictions of Great Britain’s textile as advanced and enlightened. Situating the representations of weavings in the intellectual and historical engagement between China and Europe, I seek to elucidate the strategies deployed in Allom’s representations of textile production in both China and England that served to articulate England’s claims to national and industrial superiority.