374 of raw materials 3 , despite the fact that Indian artisans had appropriated new technologies and demands of global consumption since antiquity. 4 Notions of ‘Indian design’ emerged from the 1851 Great Exhibition. Abigail McGowan describes ‘the unitary terms’ of Indian design articulated by designer Owen Jones, India Office official John Forbes Royle, architect Matthew Digby Wyatt and South Kensington Museum administrator Henry Cole, who collected Indian works for the museum. Their primary concern was to improve British manufacturing by transferring Indian design lessons to British manufactures. Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament published only sections of objects without contexts or explanations of uses or consideration of medium. 5 Many Indian objects were already adapted to European forms (for example dining tables and chairs). To avoid confronting longstanding hybridity, Victorians forged a deraciné, abstracted ‘universal’ grammar of design for the purposes of transferring Indian design as a set of principles to British objects. These views changed from a mid-century design focus to late-century interpretations of design as symbolic of racial and historical essentialisms, partly prompted by the realisation that some crafts suffered under imperial policies. 6 Around 1880, Indian crafts became emblematic of an essentialised, racialised ‘Indian design’, as designs were subsumed into systems of classification, exhibition and art education. 7 George Birdwood’s influential writings on Indian crafts emerged from the Among the most vigorous cultural exchanges between Britain and India since the seventeenth century are in the areas of production and consumption of Indian crafts. During the nineteenth century, increasingly contentious debates embraced aesthetic, political, racial, national and social issues in a rich, inflected imperial discourse about Indian crafts vis-a-vis fine arts on the one hand and industrial manufacturing on the other, especially after the 1851 Great Exhibition linking commerce and culture. Craft became the site of converging ideological, visual and commercial assumptions. Readers, spectators and buyers consumed ideas about national, racial and political difference with their purchases of goods—ideas that had become signified by, and embedded in, craft production and consumption. By the 1880s, crafts were taken to embody racial and historical differences that constituted nations. Around 1900, Indian Swadeshi nationalists turned these debates on their heads into arguments on behalf of India’s political and cultural autonomy. In the seventeenth century, European manufacturers demanded tariffs or prohibi- tions to protect their textiles from popular imported Indian cloth. 1 By 1721, the East India Company was prohibited from importing Indian textiles into Europe, and India could not sustain production under the company’s aggressive land grab, especially after the 1757 Battle of Plassey, which destroyed India’s Asian markets. 2 By the mid nineteenth century, Indian craft production had been eradicated in some industries, leaving India an exporter 61 Imperial Exchanges of Goods and National Identities Victorian and Swadeshi Views of Crafts under the Raj Julie Codell, Arizona State University, Tempe 0531 CIHA_07_CULTURAL_1.indd 374 0531 CIHA_07_CULTURAL_1.indd 374 17/11/08 10:30:26 AM 17/11/08 10:30:26 AM Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, Convergence. Ed. J. Anderson (Melbourne U P, 2009), 311-15.