Cloth

A Fateful Compromise with the Cotton Trade

De: Elizabeth Anderson

Narrado por: Kelly Altman

John Grant, son of a poor Highlander, driven by the need to escape an impoverished Scotland and emboldened by the certainty of being among God’s elect, struck a dangerous bargain with oppressors. In choosing to become a cloth merchant, he sought to benefit from the cruel and barbaric treatment of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and American South, the American government's practice of expropriation of Native Americans' land, and the British East India Company's robbery of India's trade secrets for fine cottons.

The letters of this remarkable multi-generational family, previously unpublished, give immediacy to the profound dislocations created by British efforts to mass-produce cotton cloth, the generator of the Industrial Revolution. The legacy of these barbaric violations of human dignity would exact a price from the Grant family.

©2020 Elizabeth Anderspn (P)2021 Elizabeth Anderson