Origins
The word 'calico' carries within it the entire history of the European spice and textile trade with India. It is named after Calicut — now called Kozhikode — a port city on the Malabar Coast of Kerala in southwestern India, and the story of how a city's name became a fabric's name is inseparable from the story of how Europe reached India by sea.
Calicut was one of the great trading ports of the Indian Ocean world long before Europeans arrived. Situated on the Malabar Coast, it was a hub of the spice trade — pepper, cardamom, cinnamon — and a center of textile production and export. Arab, Persian, Chinese, and Southeast Asian merchants traded there for centuries. The city's ruler, the Zamorin, presided over a cosmopolitan trading empire.
On May 20, 1498, Vasco da Gama, having sailed from Lisbon around the Cape of Good Hope, anchored off the coast of Calicut. It was the first direct sea voyage from Europe to India, and it changed world history. Among the goods the Portuguese encountered in Calicut's markets were fine cotton textiles — plain-woven, often printed with bright patterns — that were unlike anything produced in Europe at the time. European wool and linen industries had no equivalent.
Development
The Portuguese named the fabric after the city: 'calicute' became the trade term, and English shortened it to 'calico.' The earliest English attestations, from the 1530s, refer to 'Callicut cloth' or 'calicut.' By the seventeenth century, 'calico' was a standard English word for any plain-woven cotton fabric.
The fabric's popularity in Europe was so great that it provoked protectionist backlash. In 1700, the English Parliament passed the Calico Act, banning the import of printed calico from India to protect the domestic wool and silk industries. A stronger Calico Act in 1721 prohibited even the wearing of printed calico. These laws were a direct response to the flood of Indian textiles that was threatening European manufacturers — and they were among the economic pressures that spurred the development of the English cotton industry and the Industrial Revolution. The spinning jenny, the water frame, and the power loom were all invented, in part, to produce cotton cloth that could compete with Indian calico.
In modern English, 'calico' has different meanings on different sides of the Atlantic. In British English, it refers to a plain, unbleached cotton fabric — the kind used for test garments (called 'toiles') in dressmaking. In American English, it more commonly refers to cotton fabric printed with a bright, multicolored pattern — closer to the original Indian printed textiles.
Figurative Development
The 'calico cat' — a cat with patches of white, orange, and black — takes its name from the American sense of the word: the cat's multicolored coat resembles the bright printed patterns of calico fabric. British English calls the same cat 'tortoiseshell' (or 'tortoiseshell-and-white'), naming it after a different patterned material. The same animal, two different material metaphors, two different continents of association.