Dina I. Waked (Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po)) has posted The Making of Egyptian Cotton: An Alternative Narrative Between Empire and Global Capital on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Egyptian cotton has become a celebrated brand. Referring to cotton as “Egyptian” signals a certain quality, luxury, and durability. Egyptian cotton has, thus, become its own trademark, a signifier of value, and a symbol of national heritage. This image is carefully curated. It is now protected under a licensing scheme of branding and marketing that assures that fraudulently claimed “Egyptian cotton” does not benefit from the added value this geographic location ascribes to it. The Egyptian Cotton Association was thus created in 2005 to license and accredit the brand. Part of the curation of the brand image is a historical narrative of the making of Egyptian cotton. It is understandable that a curated narrative would highlight moments of pride while omitting those elements that unsettle or trouble the image it seeks to project. Yet, what the dominant narrative omits produces something beyond just forgotten histories. It is deliberately oblivious to the making of cotton as a global commodity, the abuse of the labor that planted and harvested the cotton, and the role of empire in the entire endeavor. In this Article, I focus on the making of Egyptian cotton as a starting point for a more nuanced and complex narrative that is not oblivious to the suffering of the native people and the violence of colonial domination. The goal is to do justice to histories of land, labor, and capital. The focal points chosen here are those structured in a legal apparatus that shapes arrangements of landownership, forced labor, debt and global trade. It spans from feudal and imperial laws at the beginning of the nineteenth century up until the British occupation.
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