Jennifer Harris
“Imagine passing through the plain-coloured fabric entrance of a tent to be greeted by this exquisite interior; walls, nine metres in length, made from the finest decorated cotton. What a statement it makes about power and patronage.
These designs still take the breath away today. When the panels were undergoing conservation work before our exhibition, several fine art curators came rushing in to see such an astonishing object for themselves.
The Mughals were descended from central Asian nomads and their temporary encampments were like touring cities of tents, many of which had interiors every bit as grand as the state apartments in their fixed abodes.
Sultan Tipu was eventually conquered by the British and this tent became a powerful symbol of imperialism and war booty.
It’s on loan from Powis Castle, the ancestral home of Henrietta Herbert – renowned society beauty and Indian artefact collector – whose husband, the second Lord Clive, brought it back from the sub-continent. For many years, it was apparently used as a marquee for garden parties on the castle lawns.
The tent has a fascinating narrative, making it a talking point in our story of cotton exhibition, which looks beyond the traditional social history that is told so often in the north west of England.
We are showing fashion and textiles from India’s extensive global trade networks in cotton that thrived for centuries before production shifted to northern Europe.
Alongside some new commissions we are also presenting pieces from the museum’s own collections that have not been displayed for some considerable time.
But the production and consumption of the world’s first worldwide commodity has an often unhappy history, of course; tales of exploitation from the mistreatment of Indian textile manufacturers at the hands of British imperialists to the transportation of slaves to the plantations of the US or the poor conditions suffered by workers in British factories.
It continues to this day through child labour in Uzbekistan and Egypt as well as issues such as the subsidies that enable American cotton to be sold at a fraction of its production costs, thereby undercutting African manufacturers.
We all wear something made out of cotton every day and we explore the ethical and environmental issues involved in its production. A case of T-shirts in the gallery feature slogans that describe, for example, the quantity of water needed to produce just a single pair of jeans.”
Cotton: Global Threads runs until 13 May at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. The exhibition is part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad programme, Stories of the World
Jennifer Harris is the deputy director of the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester and curator of Cotton: Global Threads