Import trade of cotton fabrics from the Ottoman Empire was one of the most original and the most important branches of French Levant trade in the eighteenth century. Original, because the other European countries such as England, Holland and Venice scarcely imported this article, and France herself imported mainly raw materials, foodstuffs and drugs. Cotton fabrics were almost the only manufactured goods that came from the Middle-East to Europe. Important, because this article occupied one-fifteenth to one-tenth of the Levant cargoes brought to Marseilles. Concentrated in Aleppo and secondarily in Egypt, cotton fabrics trading developed considerably and became one of the bases of the growth of French Levant trade. This development was owing to a growing demand for piece goods used for cotton printing in European countries. The vogue of "painted calicoes" had been provoked by import of Indian chintz, and English, Dutch and French East India Companies developed their trade of Indian cotton fabrics, which played a leading part in the rise of European cotton printing industry. However, this new industry had another origin in the Mediterranean regions where technics as well as merchandise were transported from east to west. Marseilles had introduced cotton printing as early as the first half of the seventeenth century by the help of Armenian technicians, and Levant piece goods were used there in large quantities for printing during the following century. In spite of the prohibition of printed and painted calicoes the government of Louis XIV had proclaimed in 1686 in order to protect old industries, Marseilles could develop printing industry thanks to her free port. Printed goods of Marseilles were exported not only to Spain, Italy and Balearic Islands, but also to African coasts for slave trade, as well as to French colonies in America. When the prohibition was abolished in 1759, her products pushed into the French market, especially to the southern provinces of Provence and Languedoc. The growth of Levant piece goods trading was nothing but an aspect of the general movement in eighteenth-century European economy where cotton industry was going to predominate in the formation of modern capitalism. Thus import of raw cotton from the Levant also increased strikingly, more quickly than that of piece goods. Raw cotton, cotton yarn and cotton fabrics occupied more than half of the Levant cargoes at the port of Marseilles on the eve of the French Revolution. After Indian pepper of the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century, after Persian silk of the seventeenth, it was Levant cotton, raw or manufactured, that created the dynamics of Mediterranean trade in an age preceding directly the Industrial Revolution.
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