Cloth and tools: the goods that built the Atlantic trade

What cloth and tools did ships carry in 1715?

Ships leaving Europe carried manufactured goods, made in workshops and mills. The most important was cloth. Textiles were the single biggest thing the American colonies bought from England in the 1600s and 1700s.

• Woollens. Wool cloth, heavy and light, was England’s leading manufactured export.
• Linens. Much of the linen sold by English merchants was not English at all. Coarse, unbleached osnaburg was named after Osnabrück in Germany and made there; Scotland only began making it in the 1740s.
• Indian cottons. Calicoes and other cotton cloths from India, brought to Europe by the East India Company and shipped on again.
• Ironware. Hoes, axes, nails, edge tools, iron pots and brass pans, and plain iron bars.

The Crowley ironworks in north-east England, for example, made nails, edge tools and hoes for Virginia, Carolina and Barbados, and built that trade up after peace came in 1713.

Why did the colonies buy their goods from England?

Part of the answer is mercantilism: the belief that colonies existed to make the home country richer, sending home raw materials and buying its goods in return.

England wrote this into a set of laws called the Navigation Acts. The act of 1660 said colonial trade had to travel in English or colonial ships, and that goods such as sugar and tobacco could only be sent to England or its colonies. The Staple Act of 1663 went further: European goods could reach the colonies only by way of England. So German linen bound for Virginia had to pass through an English port first.

The other reason was simpler: English goods were often better and cheaper than anything colonists could make themselves.

Were colonists forbidden to make their own cloth and tools?

Not in the way people often think. Britain did pass laws to protect its own makers, but most came later and did less than their names suggest.

• The Wool Act of 1699 stopped colonists shipping wool, yarn or woollen cloth out of their own colony, even to the colony next door. It did not stop a family spinning and weaving for itself.
• The Hat Act of 1732 stopped colonists selling hats outside their own colony. It came after the game begins.
• The Iron Act of 1750 encouraged the colonies to send raw iron to Britain but banned new mills for turning it into finished goods. It came 35 years after 1715, and seems to have had little effect.

Colonists did make plenty for themselves. Families spun and wove “homespun” cloth, mostly household linens and some clothing. In New England this became women’s work in the 1700s, often shared between neighbours. Blacksmiths made and mended axes, hoes and nails. In Pennsylvania, ironmaking was just beginning: the colony’s first forge opened in 1716 and its first furnace about 1720.

What did plantations buy?

Caribbean and southern plantations bought tools and cloth in bulk for the people they enslaved.

The hand hoe was the main tool of enslaved field workers. There were broad hoes for weeding, narrow ones for heaping soil around plants, and heavy grubbing hoes for breaking ground. Many hoes came from England, and local smiths, sometimes enslaved men trained by their owners, reshaped them, put new steel edges on them, or made new ones. Ploughs pulled by horses came into use only slowly.

Enslaved people were usually given new clothes about twice a year, most often made of osnaburg, a cheap, rough linen chosen because it lasted. People did what they could with it: they mended, dyed and decorated their clothes, and some earned a little money selling garden produce or doing extra work, which they spent on better cloth, ribbons or hats. The same English ironworks that made hoes also made chains and shackles used on enslaved people, a reminder that these ordinary goods belonged to the business of slavery.

How was cloth used in the slave trade?

This is the hardest part of the story. On the coast of West Africa, at places such as Cape Coast Castle and Whydah, European traders bought captives from African merchants and rulers. What they paid with, above all, was cloth. One historian finds that cloth and clothing made up more than two-thirds of English exports to West Africa in the 1700s.

The kind of cloth changed. In the 1680s and 1690s, the English Royal African Company’s cloth on the Gold Coast was mostly woollens and linens. Further south, in Angola, Indian cottons already dominated. By the mid-1700s Indian cottons were the most important single good English traders gave for captives.

African buyers were demanding. Parts of West Africa wove cloth of their own, merchants wanted particular kinds, and goods that fell out of fashion went unsold. Fine imported cloth was a sign of wealth and good connections.

Iron mattered too. Standard iron bars, which traders called “voyage iron”, were used as money from Senegambia to the Bight of Biafra, and African smiths turned them into tools. In 1707 and 1708 the Royal African Company aimed to keep at least 1,000 tons of iron on the coast. Brass pans, brass bracelets called manillas that served as money, guns and powder and brandy made up much of the rest.

In all, about 6.5 million people were carried away from Africa during the 1700s.

What were the Calico Acts?

Indian cottons became so fashionable in England that Parliament restricted them. In 1700 it banned wearing or using dyed and printed Indian calicoes in England, and in 1721 it widened the ban across Britain.

But neither law applied to the colonies, and Indian cloth could still be shipped on to Africa. Colonists took to Indian cottons quickly; in 1702 the Board of Trade complained that “great Quantities” were going to the English West Indies. After 1721, Asian goods for the colonies had to be bought in London first. So cloth woven in India might cross two oceans before reaching a shop in Boston or a trader on the Gold Coast.