I doubt whether any of us could identify an exact moment or example that suggested the possibility of a connection between trade, text and textiles.  As an amateur embroiderer I have always had an interest in textiles and in recent years have been particularly interested in correspondences between textiles and text.  Metaphors relating the two are common place – ‘to spin a yarn’, ‘to follow a thread of narrative’, ‘to embroider a tale’.  All over the world there are long traditions of incorporating text into narrative.  In western culture, generations of little girls learnt their alphabet through embroidering it on samples along with edifying precepts and biblical texts.  Islam also has a long tradition of embroidering or weaving Koranic texts into cloth.  There are only two examples of many.  My own interest in feminism has also led me to consider ways in which textiles and the work of producing and embellishing them have traditionally been used to circumscribe women in various ways.  Even in Homer’s Odyssey the queen Penelope is told to leave business of state to men and get back to her weaving.  But women have also used textiles and textile allusions as a way of asserting their own point of view and subverting ideas of approved female behaviour.  There is an interesting exploration of the potentially subversive aspects of quilting in Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace.  Some women novelists have represented the woman who works with textiles as an image of the woman artist.  Jessica Anderson does this in her novel Tirra Lirra By the River and Kate Grenville in The Idea of Perfection.

Images of thread and weaving have also been used to symbolise social connectedness and were often used to signify the ties of empire.  Because cloth has been a principal trading commodity for centuries, it has been closely bound up with the economics of political domination and imperialism.  Colonialism intervened massively in processes of cloth production causing severe cultural dislocation among colonised peoples, for whom creation and exchange of cloth was crucially important in determining patterns of social relationship.  In India the British undermined the centuries old cotton textile industry to ensure the advantage of Lancashire cotton manufacture, so that India was eventually transformed from the world’s most advanced producer of cotton textiles to an exporter of raw cotton and an importer of cloth.  This led Gandhi to lead a revival of hand-spinning in India, so that the resulting cotton fabric, khadi, became accepted garb for asserting Indian national identity.  Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Circle of Reason uses accounts of cloth-making as a way of exploring the situation of India post-independence, and in Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame shawl-making becomes a subversive practice.