About

Welcome to the Dutch Textile Trade Project. This project aims to understand the circulation of textiles on Dutch ships around the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, by examining data drawn from trade records alongside samples of textiles and visual culture depicting the use of textiles. The Visual Textile Glossary is our centerpiece, providing each historical textile term with a short definition and a longer essay contextualizing that textile’s production and circulation, with visual and material examples, and you can explore and download the relevant data.

About the project

State of the project: This is an ongoing, collaborative endeavor, and more content and data is being added in increments. In 2023, the project debuts with a dataset reflecting 25 years of textile exchanges on Dutch ships (1700–1724), and 10 initial Visual Textile Glossary entries.

Overview of the website:

“Our data” explains the choices we made while assembling our datasets, and includes a link to download the full dataset (please note, you can also download focused datasets from within the data visualization apps).

“Contributors” describes our collaborations and support for the project and website.

“Data visualization” features two applications which allow users to delve into the textile trade data to explore and generate research questions, create interactive data visualizations, and download focused datasets.

“Sources” provides users with the most important archival and secondary sources.

Support:

This project has been supported in part by a Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Grant (2020), Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, two Samuel H. Kress Digital Art History Grants (2021–2022 & 2023–2024), and grants and technical support from Middlebury College’s MiddData.

How to Cite:

Chicago Manual Style bibliographic entry for the full site (and see footer):

Anderson, Carrie and Marsely Kehoe. Dutch Textile Trade Project. www.dutchtextiletrade.org. Accessed August 17, 2026.

Chicago Manual Style foot/endnote entry for the full site:

Carrie Anderson and Marsely Kehoe, Dutch Textile Trade Project, www.dutchtextiletrade.org, accessed August 17, 2026.

You might also cite specific pages within the site with the more specific url.

Data visualizations generated from the project apps can be cited like this:

Yifeo (Bell) Luo, Alec Gong, DJ Poulin, and Will Holzman. “Textiles, Modifiers and Values app.” The Dutch Textile Trade Project, edited by Carrie Anderson and Marsely Kehoe August 17, 2026.

Yifeo (Bell) Luo, Nicholas Sliter, Xingze Wang, Ev Berger-Wolf, Camryn Kluetmeir, Jason Richenbacher. “Textile Geographies app.” The Dutch Textile Trade Project, edited by Carrie Anderson and Marsely Kehoe August 17, 2026.