Cloths with Names’: Luxury Textile Imports in Eastern Africa, c. 1800–1885

In the nineteenth century, a vast area of eastern Africa stretching the length of the coast and into the reaches of the Congo River was connected by long-distance trade mostly channelled through the Omani commercial empire based in Zanzibar. As studies have recently shown, a critical factor driving trade in this zone was local demand for foreign cloth; from the 1830s the majority of it was industrially made coarse cotton sheeting from Europe and America, which largely displaced the handwoven Indian originals. Employing archival, object, image and field research, this article demonstrates that until 1885 luxury textiles were as important to economic and social life in central eastern Africa, textiles known to the Swahili as ‘cloths with names’. It identifies the thirty or so varieties which élites — and, increasingly, the general population — selected for status dress and gifts, instrumental in building the commercial and socio-political networks that linked the great region. Finally, it shows that the production and procurement of most varieties remained in the hands of Asian textile artisans and merchants; most prestigious and costly were striped cotton and silk textiles handcrafted in western India, and in the southern Arabian nation of Oman. European industrial attempts to imitate them were hampered by several factors, including their inability to recreate the physical features that defined luxury fabrics in this region — costly materials, rich colours, complex designs and handwoven structures.