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October 2, 2019 01:33 pm PDT

A Tangled Weave: when Louis XIV made owning calico cotton a crime

[Michael Skeet my longtime friend and sometime collaborator -- has just finished his latest novel, A Tangled Weave, which revolves around the weird historical moment when possession of cotton was a serious crime in France. In this essay, occasioned by the publication of A Tangled Weave, Mike gives us some backstory on the odd circumstances that gave rise to a prohibition on Indian cotton, and how they inspired a novel. You can read a sample chapter here. -Cory]

Prohibition just never works. If the U.S. Congress had been a bit more historically literate when contemplating the Volstead Act they wouldnt even have tried. There was a seventeenth-century example that would have demonstrated the foolishness of trying to ban something people want. Whether the reason for the ban is moral, economic, or whatever.

The something in this case wasnt a drug of any sort. It was cloth.

To be precise, calico cotton, hand-painted, from India. This stuff was such a huge and sudden hit in the mid-1600s that Louis XIV and his ministers decided it was an economic hazard to the French cloth industry. Hell, Indian cotton was becoming a greater and more coveted luxury than silk.

So they banned it. Importation, sale, even possession of this cloth was illegal. Which immediately made a whole bunch of powerful peoplethe only ones who could afford painted cottoncriminals. You can probably guess how it all ended up.

When I first came across this story, while researching for my first fantasy novel, A Poisoned Prayer, it came as one of those lightning strikes that almost never happen. Read the rest


Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/Tz_y-Wlf7Ts/a-tangled-weave-when-louis-xi.html

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