Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York claims to be the first major exhibition to explore the transmission of taste across the known world through the medium of fabric. There are 160 textiles and garments on display, from tapestries and bedcovers to vestments, shawls and chintz dresses – most rarely exhibited, many never seen before – occupying nine big galleries. It is a blockbuster of a show proclaiming the role and significance of cotton, silk, wool and linen, dyeing, printing, weaving and embroidering in the history of our world.  How we should tell that global history, however, is a matter of fraught debate. There is a grandiloquent suite of tapestries in the show, commissioned by Louis XVI, showing the four continents. An allegorical Africa offers its resources – ivory and ostrich feathers – in exchange for commodities. Silks, pearls, porcelains, and chests of spices and tea swamp Asia's throne. America is a demure young woman needing French guidance. But Europe presides over shipping barrels and a sail, commercially supreme. The tapestries are a monument to complacent colonialism and the European grasp on the world's resources. The west takes the rest.  And indeed this was how the story used to be told: a heroic tale of discovery and conquest. Or as Adam Smith put it in The Wealth of Nations (1776): "The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events in the history of mankind."  It is inarguable that the golden age of European maritime navigation was transformative for the economies, aesthetics and worldview of the west, with far-reaching, mixed and often devastating consequences for the communities the mariners reached. To maritime trading nations the seas were not a barrier but a highway. Where we see emptiness, the Venetians and Genoese, Portuguese, Spanish, and later the Dutch and English saw sea-lanes and the road to El Dorado.  As far as Europeans were concerned, the oldest global commodities were not textiles but spices: pepper, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom, mace and cinnamon. Think Christmas cake. They were the mainstay of most world cuisines, but beyond flavouring, their uses were manifold. They were a vital preservative before canning or refrigeration, and key ingredients in perfumes, ritual preparations, love potions and painkillers. Spices were literally worth their weight in gold, but the most precious came predominantly from the so-called Spice Islands, now part of the Indonesian archipelago. Spices were transported by ship across the Indian Ocean, relying on the monsoon winds, by Turkish, Arab, Persian, Indian and Malay merchants, many Muslim. The spread of Islam across the Near East facilitated international trade for Muslim merchants as laws and commercial customs were shared. Arabic was the lingua franca of eastern trade for centuries.  The cargo tended to be handed on to Christian dealers in Cairo and Constantinople, and from thence to Venice and Genoa, and north. The Europeans had no choice but to pay a hefty mark-up price for Asian goods carried on Arab ships or by camel trade. It was direct access to spices that the first expeditions sought.  The dates of "discovery" are etched in the history of derring-do. As every schoolboy used to know, in 1492 the Genoese Christopher Columbus reached the West Indies in the pay of the Spanish. In 1498, Portuguese sea captain Vasco da Gama led a fleet of four ships around the treacherous Cape of Good Hope, and completed the journey to India. Three years later, Columbus, the "Admiral of the Ocean Sea", went with 20 warships to bombard and seize Calcutta. In 1500, the Portuguese claimed Brazil, and in 1521 Ferdinand Magellan reached the spiceries at last. In the same year, Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico, or "New Spain", laying waste to the Aztec with guns and germs within three years. The discovery of vast reserves of silver in northern Mexico in 1545 funded the Spanish crown for centuries, and led to a truly global exchange, because silver for coinage was one of the few things the Chinese desired from the west. From the 1560s, huge silver ships sailed every year from Acapulco in Mexico to Manila – the Spanish colony in the Philippines – returning laden with oriental delights. There was more Chinese porcelain in New Spain than in Spain itself.  Yet to see the Europeans girdling the world with trade as the defining moment in world history is to reproduce the myopia of the conquistadors, denying the complexity of pre-existing medieval interactions and assuming the globe has one centre (north-west Europe) with all else periphery: as if India, China, Persia and the Ottomans had no civilisation, international trade or imperial reach of their own. By the 14th century, the Chinese diaspora had spread across the South China Sea as far as Singapore and Java, at least the distance between Seville and New Spain. Between 1403 and 1433, Admiral Zheng He led expeditions from southern China to India, the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Gulf. Whether the Chinese reached Australasia centuries before James Cook is still open to speculation. Arabic merchants were in south-eastern waters from the sixth century. The dhow and the junk dominated the Asian trade for centuries.  A luxuriant hybridity is built into the DNA of Interwoven Globe. Textiles were not the primary lure of maritime commerce, but they were valuable cargo to be traded for spices and silver; over time they grew in volume and significance, especially for the British merchant marine. Lustrous Chinese silks and brilliant Indian cottons were much in demand in Europe. Defoe likened the insidious spread of exotic textiles to a plague in 1708: "… it crept into our houses, closets and bed chambers; curtains, cushions and chairs, and at last beds themselves were nothing but Callicoes". Yet alongside a beautiful, but familiar riot of chintz, the exhibition spotlights altogether different conjunctions: Inca tapestries woven for the new colonial elite in Peru, Netherlandish wool transformed into Samurai battle jackets, printed cottons dyed in Gujarat for the Japanese and Indonesian market, and silk chasubles crafted in China to be worn by Roman Catholic priests, most of them Spanish.  This intermingling of cultures was not a cosy and cost‑free bazaar. The Portuguese held their forts only by employing merciless force. When the Dutch ousted them in the 17th century they were just as ruthless. European wars fought on the colonial frontier escalated into a savagery unimaginable at home. An 18th-century Indian hanging represents a pitched battle fought between the English and the French East India Companies, abetted by their native allies – Hindu and Muslim – over the trading post of Pondicherry. A sample book from the London firm of Benjamin and John Bower advertises 500 basic cottons, targeted at the working poor and slaves (or more accurately their owners). The traffic of slaves – European, Asian and African, east and west – was a normal feature of medieval trade, but the American plantation system, used for growing tobacco, cotton and sugar, ate up humans on an industrial scale.  Religion plays a significant role in this economic history of cloth. The popes ruled between the competing territorial claims of Portugal and Spain in 1494 – the globe was divided "like an orange", according to a letter written to Charles V. Fashionable Jesuits crop up on Mexican ladies' shawls and a room of glittering clerical vestments in Chinese silk speaks to the material pretensions of the Counter-Reformation and Inquisition.  The least familiar exhibits reveal the material world of the Iberian globe. The social mixing of races, ethnicities and cultures was very evident in Central and South America, producing dazzlingly hybrid traditions in textiles and dress. The extent of direct trade between China and South America is revelatory, with Chinese embroideries embellishing traditional Andean and Mexican garments.  Textiles are usually low on the pecking order of objects in museums and galleries. "As far as we know," says Amelia Peck, Interwoven Globe's lead curator, "this is the first time that anyone has created an exhibition that uses textiles to tell the story of worldwide trade in the early modern period." When I asked her whether this is what the audience was expecting, she replied: "People seem to be surprised that what is essentially a historical and economic story can be told so compellingly through such beautiful objects."  The exhibition performs a delicate balancing act: on the one hand mapping European expansion in threads, and, on the other, evidencing a wealth of blended influences and interactions that bypass the west, provincialising Europe in the history of the world. Yet it is not just a material illustration of postcolonial history, it also makes an argument about the global visual impact of the textile trade – that, according to Peck, "more than any other type of object", commercial fabrics "influenced the visual culture of the locations in which they were marketed as well those in which they were produced. By the 17th century, the constant interchange of exotic design motifs, fibres and dyes between these now interconnected markets brought into being, for the first time, a common visual language of design that was recognisable throughout the world".  Whether this was the defining global moment in aesthetics will remain open to debate. A global economy was not created by "the Promethean touch of merchants from Europe", as John Darwin insists in his history of empires – it already existed, flourishing in the maritime commerce pioneered by Asians that linked China, Japan, India, the Persian Gulf and east Africa. The powerful resurgence of Asia that is now under way only re‑establishes these older patterns of trade and power. What we now call "globalisation" has never been only a European or western phenomenon.
An exhibition show at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art tells the story of empire and global trade through textiles. It's a stunning corrective to Eurocentrism, argues Amanda Vickery