Spaces and Technologies in the Cotton Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: The Example of Printed Calicoes in Marseilles

Management of space was at the heart of the evolution of calico printing (indiennage) in Marseilles during the Ancien Regime. The local craft dynamic and the opportunities born of international business combined in the birth of a sector of activities which demonstrated strong technological capacity and whose growth was international until the middle of the eighteenth century. From that date onwards, calico printing in Marseilles began to decline. Its advantages became a handicap, its openness to the exterior a source of vulnerability, and local industrial powers did not permit the sector to integrate into the technical system of the first industrial revolution. Incapable of making the transition, the cotton industry in Marseilles was condemned in the short term.