British Imperialism and its Legacies: Exported Turkey Red Textiles

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Glasgow Museums has a collection of over 100 items that relate to the Turkey Red industry, predominately in the European Dress and Textiles and Glasgow History collections. These include designs produced by the United Turkey Red Company, print blocks and textiles, including several given by Archibald Orr Ewing & Company in 1876, and export labels, including ones used by William Stirling & Sons, Glasgow, and Andrew Yule & Co.

Turkey Red is a printing process used to create strong red designs on cotton. The process was developed in India originally and introduced to Scotland by Pierre Jacques Papillon, a dyer from Rouen, France, who was invited to Glasgow by David Dale (1739–1806) and George McIntosh (1739–1807) in 1785. Glasgow was the centre of a burgeoning cotton industry, making use of the large imports of raw cotton from the enslaved labour plantations in the Caribbean and southern states of America, and as a result, secondary industries developed to turn plain cotton cloth into decorative embroidered or printed cotton textiles for both the domestic and growing export markets. Henry Monteith & Co. bought Dale and McIntosh's Turkey Red dyeworks in 1805 and began producing large handkerchiefs or bandannas with simple patterns of spots and stripes. By 1817 they were making 224 bandannas every 10 minutes. In the 1820s manufacturers opened dyeworks in the Vale of Leven, Dunbartonshire, which became the main manufacturing area for Turkey Red in Scotland dominated by Archibald, Orr Ewing & Co., John Orr Ewing & Co. and William Stirling and Sons. In 1886 nine print works in the Vale of Leven employed 7,000 workers, and produced 150 million metres of dyed or printed cloth and 9,000 tonnes of dyed yarn.

The red dye is alizarin, produced naturally from the root of the madder plant, which is fixed to cotton with the use of an alum mordant. In addition, the Scottish Turkey Red industry used ingredients derived from animals, such as blood, urine and dung, to produce a strong, durable colour that is relatively fade-resistant. This quality led to Turkey red cloth becoming a major textile export during the 1800s, especially to countries with strong sunlight. Early products, including Monteith's bandannas, were aimed at markets in America and the Caribbean. In the mid-to-late nineteenth century under the British Raj a major market for Turkey Red developed in South Asia, where red is auspicious, despite the use of bullocks' blood in the process. Many of these designs incorporated Indian patterns, including the buteh or buta motif, and elephants carrying howdahs and peacocks, or mimicked Indian textiles, such as Gujarati tie-dying. Some companies also developed designs aimed at markets in Africa, East Asia and Australia.

The export trade flourished until the 1890s when import duties were introduced in India, which encouraged Indian manufacturers to produce their own Turkey Red-style cottons using the cheaper German-manufactured artificial alizarin dye. In response, the three major Vale of Leven companies merged to form the United Turkey Red Company in 1897, but it never regained the scale of its former market.

See also Turkey Red and the Slave Economy

Broader term

British Imperialism and its Legacies: Exported Manufactured Textiles and Dress