#paisley pattern

Thanks for your stay. Have a relaxing day❤️

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This is the housekeeper talking to her employer about an old woman, now ill and possibly dying about a shawl that went missing. Notice that the word Paisley is capitalized. We think of it as a pattern and indeed it became known as a pattern, but the name is actually of a Scottish town and thereby hangs a tale of global trade.

Look in the Oxford English Dictionary, which traces the evolving use of a word and you will see that a Paisley shawl was “a large, highly patterned shawl, of a type produced in large quantities in Paisley in the 19th-cent., typically woven (or sometimes printed) with designs inspired by similar shawls imported from Kashmir (now chiefly historical)....”

So the first shawls were 18th-century imports from the East India Company with a distinctive design from that part of the world and then British began weaving or printing these patterned shawls in the early 19th century. And this was how the name of a Scottish town stuck to a pattern taken from the other side of the globe. And you thought global trade was a new thing. Or at least my students often do.