Calico Madams and South Sea Cheats: Global Trade, Finance, and Popular Protest in Early Hanoverian England

Abstract

In the summer of 1719, woolen and silk weavers took to the streets in cities and towns across England to protest the East India Company's importation of cotton calicoes from South Asia. English weavers viewed these popular imports as hurting their economic livelihoods. During the protests, they violently turned their anger against women wearing calico, tearing off their clothes and even throwing acid on some victims. Their actions spurred widespread condemnation, but the weavers got what they wanted in the end. In March 1721, an act banning the importation and use of all calico cloth in Britain received royal assent. On that same day, an act arranging the first in a series of financial rescues of the South Sea Company in the wake of the South Sea Bubble became law. Drawing from a range of archival and printed sources, the author explores the political and cultural connections between the calico crisis and the South Sea Bubble and investigates how reactions to both episodes intersected ideologically with fears of Jacobitism and foreign invasion and with broader anxieties about gender, the social order, and the political influence of financial corporations.