The Warp and the Weft of the Wealth of Yale

This MFA senior thesis delves into Elihu Yale’s 1718 donation consisting of a “large box of books, the picture & arms of King George, and two hundred pounds sterling worth of English goods.” Given the money collected from the cloth’s sale “exceeds the value of any other single donation given to the college for the next century,” Chakrabarti writes that the cloth woven in India “secured the transformation of a small school in Connecticut with a tenuous future into the invincibly solvent Yale University as we know it today.” Both her thesis and art examines the “financially extractive and epistemologically devaluing” relationship Yale College had with the cloth. Below is an excerpt of her introduction.

“Section IV of my paper looks at the specific role that Mr. Yale played in enforcing exploitative labor practices upon weavers in Madras, which were essential to the making of the cloth that Yale college received. These were practices that have had lasting effects on India’s textile industry, the second largest sector of employment in the country after agriculture, and on the lives of Indian weavers to this day. Section V of my paper looks at the fact that cloth woven in India, like the ones sent to Yale, was the item most in demand in exchange for captives in West Africa, and this aspect of the cloth is what gave it such great monetary value, the same value which was utilized to establish Yale college. Thus, while this may initially seem like an extremely small bone to pick, I will demonstrate through this paper that the contexts and specificities of the cloth used to establish Yale College, manifest the complicity of both Elihu Yale and the college that took his name in the practical implementation of colonialism in India and the economic structures of the Trans-Atlantic trade of enslaved people from Africa.”

Bhasha Chakrabarti YC’21 is an MFA candidate in Painting and Printmaking at Yale School of Art.

Previous
Previous

Yale Daily News Coverage of the University's Ties to Eugenics

Next
Next

The American Eugenics Society's Devastating Legacy of Racialized Reproductive Control