“The 72 Kinds”: The Cloth Classic, the Jiangnan Cotton Finishing Sector, and the Expansion of Cotton Dyeing in the Qing Dynasty
Rachel Silberstein
What the paper says
Abstract Though the topic of commercialization in the Qing dynasty cotton industry has been subject of much scholarship, little attention has been given to the improvements of finishing and dyeing in Jiangnan cottons over the course of this period. Using The Cloth Classic , a late eighteenth-/ early nineteenth-century cloth merchants’ compendium, this paper investigates the material basis and technical processes producing the “72 kinds” of cloth with particular focus on the expansion of the numbers of dye colors. It argues that three primary factors enabled this expansion: intensified use of certain dyestuffs and mordants; growing deployment of the “set dyeing” technique; and dyeworks color specialization. All three factors would have contributed to economic growth and improved living standards for those who could afford dyed cloth’s higher cost. However, in being enabled by the embodied expertise of the dyer and the middleman, and the organizational structure of the cotton finishing sector, rather than cost-cutting innovations or new materials, all three factors also reveal inherent restrictions to the Jiangnan cotton sector’s competitiveness.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.