TERMLY REPORT FELICIA GOTTMANN

MARCH 2014

Progress on the Monograph

The outline of the Monograph is:

Intro

Part I: Global Trade

1)The Trade of the French East India Company

2)Global Textiles

Part II: Smuggling

3)Smuggling Textiles into France

4)The Politics of Privilege and the Violence of Female Fashion

Part III: Making Economic Liberalism

5)The State of Knowledge

6)The Rhetoric of Enlightenment

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

In the autumn term I have written and submitted chapters 1, 2, and 3. This term I have written and submitted chapter 4 on consumption and also written chapter 5 on knowledge gathering and technology transfer which I will submit for the meeting on 8 May.

I have also drawn up and analysed statistics of arrests for cross-border smuggling, which will be included in chapter 3 and form part of the paper that I will give in Montreal in April.

I’m now working on the final chapter which focuses on the debates about the political economy of importing and producing printed textiles that led up to the 1759 lifting of the calico ban in France.

Presentations

I have written the paper that I will present at the Conference of the Society of French Historical Studies in Montreal in April, entitled, ‘Illicit Consumption, Smuggling, and the French State: ToilesPeintesand Asian Textiles, 1680-1760’. As a trial-run I have already presented it at a lunchtime seminar at Northumbria University on 12 March where it was very well received

Other

Apart from working on the monograph and writing the paper for the Montreal conference I have also spent quite some time applying for a LeverhulmeECR fellowship at Dundee, and for positions at Birmingham, Exeter, and Royal Holloway. I am currently in the process of applying for another such position atUEA. I have not yet had heard back from any of these.

Plans for the next term and the summer

Next term I will finish the last chapter, which I am working on at the moment and write an introduction and conclusion. I will also spent quite a bit of time in Warwick, at the AGM, project meetings, the Luxury Network Conference, and the Probity and Corruption Workshop organised by the two Marks where I will present some of my findings on smuggling and corruption.

I’m very much hoping that at the end of the summer term I will be able to go for a last trip to French archives in order to have a look at three sets of documents which I will need in order to offer reliable and convincing data on Levantine textile imports and arrests for smuggling, as well as a stronger argument about written reports sent by French observers of Indian and Chinese textile production.

Once I have gathered and analysed the data, I will be able to include it in my first draft, which I will then revise and send to my readers in July, hoping that I will get their comments in August which should leave me enough time to rewrite the second draft in time to submit it at the end of September as per my contract with Palgrave.