Muslin

Muslin emerged around 400 BCE in what is now Bangladesh, near the city of Dhaka, when weavers developed techniques to spin cotton into threads so fine that a 20-yard length weighed less than an ounce. The fabric—woven from Phuti karpas cotton native to the Ganges delta—was nearly transparent, extraordinarily light, and impossibly expensive. A single sari required six months of spinning and weaving by master craftspeople.

What had to exist first? Domestication of Gossypium arboreum cotton with fibers long and fine enough for ultra-thin thread. Spinning wheels capable of producing consistent thread at 300-count or higher. Humid climate that kept fibers pliable during spinning—Bengal's monsoon season provided ideal conditions. And critically, demand from elites willing to pay astronomical prices for luxury textiles.

The finest muslin, called "woven air" or "running water," could pass through a finger ring. Dhaka muslin reached thread counts of 1,200—modern high-end sheets achieve 800. The transparency was so extreme that morality laws in some regions banned its use in public. Production peaked during the Mughal Empire (1526-1857), when emperors commissioned ceremonial garments that showcased Bengal's textile supremacy.

British colonization destroyed the industry. The East India Company needed markets for Lancashire cotton mills, not competition from Bengali master weavers. Tariffs on Indian textiles and tax policies favoring British imports decimated Dhaka's muslin production. By 1817, a parliamentary inquiry documented the collapse. Weavers' thumbs were reportedly cut off to prevent production. The Phuti karpas cotton plant, carefully cultivated for muslin production, went extinct.

The loss reveals how path dependence in one location can be violently disrupted by path dependence elsewhere. British textile mills had invested in mechanized spinning and weaving—inferior to hand-spun muslin but vastly cheaper. Protecting that investment required eliminating competition. The selection pressure for industrial efficiency destroyed artisanal quality.

Modern attempts to recreate Dhaka muslin have failed. The specific cotton variety is extinct. The humid microclimate that enabled 300-count spinning no longer exists due to urbanization. The generational knowledge transfer from master to apprentice was broken. What took centuries to develop was erased in decades.

Today, "muslin" refers to any plain-weave cotton fabric, typically coarse and utilitarian—the opposite of historical muslin. The word survived but the referent changed completely. This linguistic path dependence obscures what was lost: a textile technology that achieved hand-spinning fineness modern machinery still cannot match.

The Dhaka muslin story demonstrates how technology requires ecosystems. The fabric depended on specific cotton genetics, climate conditions, spinning techniques, weaving skills, and market demand. Remove any component and the whole collapses. The conditions created the textile; British colonization eliminated the conditions; the textile vanished.