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Trade records
Data drawn from trade records.
Winner of the Renaissance Society of America’s 2024 Digital Innovation Award
Welcome to the Dutch Textile Trade Project.
The Dutch Textile Trade Project
This project aims to understand the circulation of globally-sourced textiles on Dutch ships around the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by examining data drawn from trade records alongside samples of textiles and visual culture depicting textiles in use.
Visual Textile Glossary
9,463 trade records
217 textile names in this dataset
25 years · 1700–1724
2 company archives · VOC & WIC
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About the project
The centerpiece of this project
Visual Textile Glossary
The centerpiece of this project, the Visual Textile Glossary, provides each historical textile term with a short definition and a longer essay contextualizing that textile’s production and circulation. Each essay also includes visual and material examples, an interactive web application, and open access data.
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Samples of textiles
Samples of textiles.
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Visual culture
Visual culture depicting textiles in use.
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Open access data
Each essay also includes visual and material examples, an interactive web application, and open access data.
Visual textile glossary
Visual Textile Glossary
The centerpiece of this project, the Visual Textile Glossary, provides each historical textile term with a short definition and a longer essay contextualizing that textile’s production and circulation. Each essay also includes visual and material examples, an interactive web application, and open access data.
01Chintz / Kalamkari
Open entry
02Gingham
Open entry
03Guinea Cloth
Open entry
04Muslin
Open entryData visualization
Data Visualization
These dynamic apps allow users to explore the project data by geography, date, company, textile name and/or descriptors of the textiles found in archival sources (modifiers), and value of textiles, producing data visualizations.
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Textile Geographies
Search the textile data set by a range of archival modifiers—including color, pattern, process, fiber, or quality and visualize this geographically and infographically. Identify specific textile names of interest based on modifiers and geography.
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Textiles, Modifiers, and Values
Explore specific textiles in greater detail, like the quantities, total values, or per-piece values of imported or exported textiles over time or across geographies. Users can compare different types (modifiers) of a given textile.
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Swatch Search
Explore our growing database of textile samples and swatches by textile name (if you know it) or (if you don’t) search by attributes (modifiers) like color, pattern, process, weave structure, and fiber.
Sources
Sources
Our data derives from Dutch East and West India Company archives and documents, which account for the movement and value of goods as they related to the Dutch economy, and which were produced from a Dutch perspective that justified territorial expansion and the enslavement of human beings in the name of trade, profit, and exploration.
These documents are often dry and abstract, but it is imperative to us as scholars and as humans to provide reminders that these documents and this trade were and are not inert, neutral accounting.
Read how the data was made