During the workshop ‘A Tapestry of Rules: Institutions and cloth industries in global comparative perspective, 1750-2000’ organised by by the research team engaged in the European Research Council funded project ‘Race to the Bottom? Family labour, household livelihood and consumption in the relocation of textile production between ca. 1780 and 1990’, I will give a talk about Talk ‘Things That Talk: Fabric(s) of Leiden’.
In my current researchproject for the online platform Things That Talk I am diving into the history of the Leidsche Katoenmaatschappij (LKM) together with a team of students {of the University Leiden}. On the Zone ‘Fabric(s) of Leiden’ within the website we will make stories about this cotton-printing company with objects and documents kept in different Dutch collections.
The city Leiden has in many different ways a connection with textile; the textiles produced within the city and the textiles brought to Leiden for the museums-collections. An important company in all of this was the LKM. LKM is known by experts, but forgotten by many. The factory of LKM was located in the center of the city and produced printed cotton for export to Asia and Africa. So a local company with a global history. The company started in Belgium in 1756. In 1835 it moved to Leiden where it was bought by Van Wensen and Driessen. The LKM produced until 1932 and stopped officially in 1936. The name is slowly forgotten. Over time interesting objects that can tell us about this company’s history got spread out over different collections in the Netherlands. These objects can tell us more on the company; who run it, who worked there, the global connection and the development of cotton-printing. With Things That Talk we will tell these stories, using a samplebook or fragment, a complete cloth or written label, so people can learn more about the ‘Fabric of Leiden.
The workshop ‘A Tapestry of Rules: Institutions and cloth industries in global comparative perspective, 1750-2000’ will be held in a hybrid format: the live sessions will be held at Utrecht and virtual sessions on MS teams. We also welcome external participants who are interested in the workshop. You can do so by joining us virtually via MS TEAMS. For those interested, please send a request to Bianca Visser, at b.visser@uu.nl.
Thursday 30 June 2022 – 09:00
End date and time Friday 1 July 2022 – 17:00
For more information on the program click here