From the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, the shawl was Kashmir’s principal export commodity and its most celebrated material representation to the outside world. Acknowledged by Walter Benjamin as the ‘essential hot commodity’ of the first half of the nineteenth century and known simply as a ‘Cashmere’, the shawl was the object of insatiable desire in Europe; so widespread was this desire that Benjamin characterized it as the ‘disease’ of ‘Cashmere Fever’ (Benjamin, cited in Hiner, 2005, 76). In the late nineteenth century, demand for and production of shawls declined precipitously.