Home > Multicultural America: > Indonesian Americans

The first batik cloths that traveled from Southeast Asia to Europe did so as a byproduct of the eastern spice trade that was underway in 1613. In that year Englishman John Saris reported, according to Woven Cargoes, that "twenty-one varieties of Cambay and Coromandel cotton cloths could be profitably bartered for cloves." European traders used silver and gold to purchase cloth in India that was traded for spices in Southeast Asia. Indian trade with the east had been established as early as the first century A.D., a time when textiles indicated wealth and position. In Southeast Asia societies, textiles were used in gift exchange and to seal political alliances. In Thailand and Malaysia, cloths were part of diplomatic and court protocol as well as important in marriage contracts of ordinary people.

There is historical evidence that suggests that batik, or resist-dying processes that developed in Southeast Asia,...