Pashmina Inequality

“Why is no one in this country talking about pashmina inequality?!”

Between the 1500s and 1800s, kashmiri shawls (pashminas) were so universally valuable that they functioned as a form of wealth. Napolean’s wife Josephine owned nearly 400 of the so-called “India shawls.”

In fact, there was such high global demand for pashminas, that they sometimes were used as currency between merchants hailing from different regions.

However, Bernie would have hated the pashmina industry for the wealth inequality it created in Kashmir.

As historian Kax Wilson noted, “The brokers and the tax collectors, not the weavers, made the profits; the weaver was often the first to die in a famine."

So why are pashminas no longer a defacto international currency? Well, in the 1870s, the Franco-Prussian War closed the French market, and the fashion for Kashmir shawls died soon after.

But if that hadn’t happened, then perhaps Bernie today would be railing against the millionaires, the billionaires, and the pashminaires.