Marseille’s Role in the Spanish Trade of Levantine Textiles, 17th and 18th Centuries

During the modern times, Catalonia and Spain were great markets for cotton linen, for Levantine linen first of all, and European linen in the more advanced stages of the 18th century. For political and religious reasons, cotton printing techniques did not arrive in Catalonia until the first decades of the 18th century. An industrialisation process, based on the progressive command of printing on Levantine cotton, was then put in place by switching to imports. This improvement was brought in by the Marseilles trade. In 1728, in order to thwart the growing arrival of Levantine and European cotton linen, the doors of the Spanish market opened to Maltese cotton yarn, which favours a few decades later the introduction of weaving alongside Catalan cotton printing. Finally at the very end of the 18th century, the mass arrival of American raw cotton adds the spinning phase to the process.