കോഴിക്കോട്

Calicut, known to its inhabitants as Kozhikode, was one of the great spice ports of the Indian Ocean long before any Portuguese caravel appeared on its horizon. Arab, Chinese, and Southeast Asian merchants traded there for centuries. When Vasco da Gama landed in 1498, he found a city already cosmopolitan, already rich, and already producing a fine plain-woven cotton cloth that would remake European wardrobes.

Portuguese traders brought the fabric back to Lisbon, calling it calico after their mangled pronunciation of the city's name. By the early 1600s, English and Dutch merchants were importing the cloth in enormous quantities. The East India Company shipped bales of it to London, where it was printed with bright patterns and sold as fashionable dress fabric. English textile workers, alarmed by the competition, rioted. Parliament passed the Calico Acts of 1700 and 1721, banning the import and sale of printed calico in England.

The ban had an unintended consequence. English manufacturers, denied cheap Indian cloth, invested in mechanizing their own cotton production. Richard Arkwright's water frame in 1769, James Hargreaves's spinning jenny, Edmund Cartwright's power loom -- the entire machinery of the Industrial Revolution was built, in part, because Parliament tried to protect English weavers from Indian calico. The fabric that England banned helped birth the factory system.

In American English, calico now refers to a plain, unbleached cotton fabric, often with a small floral print. In British English, it means unbleached cotton with no print at all. The word has also migrated to describe multicolored cats and, in the American West, calico towns -- places as patchwork and impermanent as the cloth. The city of Kozhikode still stands on the Malabar Coast. The fabric named after it changed the economic history of three continents.