Crafting Culture, Crafting Comfort: East/West Exchange and the Development of Quilt Culture in the Western World, c. 1500–1800

India had an established quilt culture long before Portuguese ships first arrived at the subcontinent in 1498. Quilting in various parts of the subcontinent had an ancient history and these objects were renowned for their beauty, whether appliquéd with dyed cotton, embroidered on a plain silk or cotton ground or quilted with painted or printed cottons. In this paper I will explore the impact on Europe of the direct trade with India after 1500, as Indian quilts arrived in Europe in growing numbers. Indian quilts were traded to Europe over a three hundred year period, an inspiration for European needlewomen and artisans. Over the same time the structure and substance of Western-made quilting was transformed; European quilting developed new patterns and forms with the expanded trade in Indian cottons from the mid-seventeenth century and cotton soon became a staple in the production of these objects. Through what K. N. Chaudhuri calls a “transmission of culture” through trade, a hybridised type of bed-furnishing developed that became a key cultural idiom of western domestic furnishing, as well as a gendered medium of personal expression. Over several centuries, the patterns and styles of the early Indian quilted coverlets evolved in line with European tastes. An aesthetic evolution was one part of the process; the other part engages with this history of the cotton industry in Britain and the west more generally after 1800. The mass of printed cotton and patchwork cotton quilts that come to us from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are evidence of the profound impact of East/West trade. By charting this history of quilts, I will show how once rare exotics became transposed to become a feature of everyday western life, with the idiom of domestic culture enriched in the process.