A US berry company taught China to grow blueberries, and China ate its market. Everyone is sharing that story this week. Here is the original version of that story and the teacher was us (We Indians). 🙏🙏 I really wonder why we do not make it a part of our curriculum...Anyway..Let us hear this story.. On Christmas Day in 1722, it became a crime to wear one fabric in Britain. Printed cotton from India.... The cloth was chintz. Hand-painted and block-printed cotton from Masulipatnam, Ahmedabad, Sironj, Burhanpur. Wash it, and the colours came out brighter than before. European dyers simply could not do this. Their reds ran. Their blues faded. English wool and silk weavers panicked. In June 1719, mobs of weavers roamed London streets, tore calico gowns off women, threw ink and acid at others. "Down with the callicoes," they shouted. Parliament listened.... 1st, in 1700: every piece of printed or dyed calico from India had to be locked in a customs warehouse for re-export. Sell it in England and pay a 200 pound fine. Then, on 23 March 1721, a harder law. From 25 December 1722, anyone caught wearing printed, painted, stained / dyed calico paid 5 pounds per offence. A curtain / a cushion cover in the same cloth cost 20. The fine money went to whoever informed on you. Now the interesting part... While England banned the cloth, France sent men to learn how it was made. Georges Roques, a French East India Company agent, reached Surat in 1676. He wrote a 333 page manual (1678) recording, step by step, how the printers of Ahmedabad worked. 3 wooden blocks: one for the outline, one for the ground, one for the details. A sesame oil bath for the cloth. And the full shopping list of an Indian dye-house: a root for the red, alum, iron rust, gall-nuts, pomegranate rind, turmeric, indigo, sour wheat flour, tree gum, wax. His own opening line is honest: it can only be a good thing to know how these people apply colours that do not fade in the wash, but come out more beautiful than before. Then Antoine de Beaulieu, a Company lieutenant at Pondicherry. Around 1734 he wrote a 2nd manual, and pinned an actual sample of cloth at every stage of the process. French printers used it as a recipe book. Then a Jesuit, Pere Coeurdoux, also in Pondicherry. He watched the dyers, took lessons from 2 Indian craftsmen, and mailed the whole process home in letters (1742 and 1747) that were printed and passed around in France. Step by step, Europe learnt the Indian method. Then it mechanized it. What happened to the teacher? India exported about 4.5M pieces of cotton cloth a year in the 1790s. By the 1830s, under half a million. Around 1830 India became a net importer of cloth. By 1880-81, by one estimate, ~58% of the cloth worn in India was made in Britain. Roques' manual sat forgotten in a Paris archive until 1966. Even today, almost everything we know of how our own dyers worked comes from what the Frenchmen wrote down. The dyers left no book of their own. How much else did we know, and never write down? P.S. The real secret was the mordant: a chemical fixer (alum, iron) applied to the cloth before dyeing, so the dye bites into the fibre and never washes out. The words still carry the address: chintz comes from the Hindi chheent (spotted), calico from Calicut. Sources: Giorgio Riello, "Asian knowledge and the development of calico printing in Europe", Journal of Global History (2010); G.B. Souza, in "How India Clothed the World" (Brill, 2009); B. Gupta, "Cotton Textiles and the Great Divergence" (Univ. of Warwick); Old Bailey trial record, July 1719; London Gazette, April 1721. Photo: Coromandel Coast palampore, painted resist and mordant, the exact technique in the post.