Selling Madras

Over the 18th and 19th centuries, Indian textiles were sold to markets all over the world. The earliest recorded shipment of ‘Madras handkerchiefs’ was sent to West Africa in 1739. It is likely that Madras fashions were first popularised in the Americas by enslaved West Africans forcibly transported to the Greater Caribbean, a region that is centered on the Caribbean Islands but culturally extends to coastal southeastern United States and northern South America.

This 1767 map of the ‘West Indies’ shows ‘not only all the islands posses'd by the English, French, Spaniards & Dutch’ in the Greater Caribbean region, ‘but also all the towns and settlements on the continent of America adjacent thereto’. By the 1770s French records show that Madras handkerchiefs had become widely popular in French-Caribbean markets. When the British annexed French Caribbean territories in the 1790s, the British East India Company started ordering Madras handkerchiefs for sale to those same markets.