English Cloth in the Levant Trade

Only one kind of English cloth found its way in any quantity into the bazars of the Levant; the thick, heavy material known as broadcloth. Though the name now connotes a particular type of cloth, it originally implied no more than it said, a broad cloth, of something over a yard and a quarter in width, as compared with narrow cloths like the 27-inch-wide kersey. But as far back as the fifteenth century the name had come to be associated with a particular range of thick, finely woven and heavy cloth of high quality, which was England’s principal export product. In the seventeenth century broadcloths began to be replaced, in English sales to European markets, by types of lighter cloth known as says, perpetuanoes, serges and stuffs. In the Levant, however, demand for broadcloths was rising very rapidly, and the new fabrics found no favour. Turks, Arabs and Persians (and Indians too) remained faithful to broadcloth until late in the eighteenth century.1