Chalford has such a labyrinth of weavers’ walks and footpaths –
And on a mid-winter’s day, with plumes of smoke rising from Chalford Bottom
Mistletoe in the trees, light folded in envelopes of cloud,
It’s hard to imagine that this picturesque Cotswold village
Was once hand in glove with the East India Company,
As at Sevill’s Upper Mill,
Now a select residential development,
With the stream, now private and sequestered,
Between houses and a car park.
This landscape was once a fretwork of
‘Scarlet, Crimson, Blue and a variety of other delightful colours’,
A fretwork of profits and prices and exports and wages
And strikes and patterns of trade slumps and booms,
Linking the Thames and Severn Canal and the River Frome -
With the Ganges Valley, Bengal, Delhi, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Canton,
And with Robert Clive, Warren Hastings, the Marquess Wellesley,
And with muskets, cannon, Stroud Scarlet, slavery, opium, cotton, coffee and tea:
‘Gloucestershire seems to have had
almost the sole custom of the East India Company’.
Contemporary websites project a multicultural,
Almost spiritual, perspective, however:
On Stroud cloth and the East India Company:
‘Red is a colour of great symbolic importance to many cultures. …
Indian rulers copied the red coats of the East India Company,
Or
‘The indigenous communities trading with the Hudson’s Bay Company and the East India Company adapted the cloth and integrated it into their own traditions of material culture.’
There is no hint of oppression, imperialism, asymmetrical power, war,
Or the ideology of racism,
But rather more a projection of fair exchange and mutuality,
No hint of the fact that ‘trading and political power were closely interlinked’,
Nor that the East India Company was also involved in the slave trade
In Madagascar, St Helena, Bengkulu and Angola,
Exchanging guns, gunpowder, cutlasses, cloth, and piece goods,
No hint that Bristol merchants bought textiles from the Company
To exchange for slaves in West Africa,
No hint of the fact that the East India Company, in effect,
Governed on behalf of the British government,
For over a century,
Exploiting and contributing to the decline of the Mughal Empire,
No hint of the fact that the Company sold Indian grown opium,
To be smuggled to China, to flout the Imperial ban,
The profits paying for tea for domestic consumption;
Instead a comforting emphasis on: “Trade in spices, pepper, cloth, cloves, nutmeg,
Cinnamon, silks, tea, cotton, coffee, and so on”,
Instead a typical information plaque in Nailsworth:
‘Gigg is so small and tucked away that it is hard to imagine that it was once the generator of great wealth. In the 1790s John Remmington bought it and other mills. From the profits he added a sumptuous wing to his house up the hill at Barton End. His cloth was bought by the East India Company for sale to China.
An entry in the Company books briefly records the final settlement
after his retirement:
December 1811 Broadcloth J Rimmington £180
But our conclusion acknowledges a different final settlement:
These cottages clambering up the Cotswold hillsides, this Golden Valley harmony of water, wood and stone is derived, in some degree, from war,
slavery, racism, opium and imperialism.
We have written before of Raphael Samuel’s point that Heritage and Tradition can too easily morph into ‘an expressive totality … projecting a unified set of meanings which are impervious to challenge … a fixed narrative which allows neither subtext nor counter-readings’; but, ‘History is an allegorical as well as … a mimetic art … like allegorists, historians are adept at discovering a hidden or half-hidden order. We find occult meanings in apparently simple truths.’
