Department stores, advertising, and fashion emerged from one global textile boom

Evidence

The world exhibitions and the new large-scale commercial life of European cities were aspects of a political and economic transformation that equally affected Egypt. The new department stores were the first establishments to keep large quantities of merchandise in stock, in the form of standardised textiles and clothing. The stockpiling, together with the introduction of advertising (the word was coined at the time of the great exhibitions, Walter Benjamin tells us) and the new industry of ‘fashion’, on which several Egyptian writers commented, were all connected with the boom in textile production. The textile boom was an aspect of other changes, such as new ways of harvesting and treating cotton, new machinery for the manufacture of textiles, the resulting increase in profits, and the reinvestment of profit abroad in further cotton production. At the other end from the department store, these wider changes extended to include places like the southern United States, India, and the Nile valley. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 88

Categorization

• XREF: The globalized commodity chain from Egyptian cotton through Indian and Southern US production to European department stores connects to world-systems theory and commodity-chain analysis.
• SEED: An essay angle: the department store as the terminus of an imperial commodity network, tracing Egyptian cotton’s transformation into European fashion,
• CANDY: The word ‘advertising’ was coined at the time of the great world exhibitions, per Walter Benjamin.