Selling India goods: East Indies trade and the rise of female makers and retailers in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England

In late seventeenth-century Europe, textiles, porcelain, lacquerware and other ‘India goods’ abounded. While a large body of scholarship on the East India trade exists, the important role of women as merchants, makers and retailers has yet to be fully examined. This article contributes to scholarship on women’s retail businesses, the later seventeenth-century fashion system, and the consumption of Asian wares in Europe. Using a wide range of archival, printed and material sources, it recovers the activities of a previously unrecognised group of tradeswomen in London who played an integral role in promoting fashionable East India goods between 1670 and 1701. With this work came both celebrity and social influence: some were known as ‘Indian gown-makers’ or ‘Indian women’, and their shops were popular ‘Indian houses’ where prominent members of London society could shop and drink tea. Indian and Chinese textiles, primarily silks rather than calicoes, also influenced women’s participation in the fashion marketplace as mantua-makers, milliners and embroiderers. The opportunities that India goods afforded women during this period, and the popularity of their retail premises, made these tradeswomen and their clientele of tastemakers the arbiters of late seventeenth-century fashion and East India trade.