An Ocean of Textiles

Abstract

An Ocean of Textiles John Styles (bio) The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800. By Robert S. DuPlessis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 369 pages. Cloth, ebook. OF all the manufactured goods traded between regions and continents in what European historians call the early modern era, textiles were the most prominent. As the object of the initial, crucial mechanical inventions of the Industrial Revolution, they also helped bring that era to a close. It is not surprising, then, that generations of economic and social historians have lavished attention on the manufacture of early modern European textiles. From fifteenth-century Florence to eighteenth-century Lancashire, the work performed by European spinners and weavers has been minutely explored by historians, as has its management by clothiers, merchant capitalists, and governments. Yet these histories typically conclude when the finished fabric enters the merchant’s warehouse. Far less attention has been devoted to its sale to retail customers by shopkeepers and peddlers, still less to its final use, predominantly as clothing or furnishing.1 One of three major methodological achievements of Robert S. DuPlessis’s pathbreaking The Material Atlantic is its reversal of this conventional textile [End Page 531] historiography, focusing on the final markets for textiles from Europe and beyond, rather than their manufacture. Appropriately, the book opens with the 1761 inventory of a shopkeeper in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, replete with linens and woolens, silks and cottons. His stock consisted mainly of textiles manufactured in France, Britain, Germany, and India, although the fibers from which they were made had a wider provenance, extending to southwest Asia, the Caribbean, and deep into eastern Europe. DuPlessis is sensitive to the origins of the textiles he discusses, drawing on the enormous literature on early modern European textile manufacturing, to which he himself has made notable contributions. Nevertheless, his emphasis is unerringly on the way these textiles were incorporated into the modes of dressing characteristic of the peoples—indigenous and immigrant, enslaved and free—who lived around the shores of the Atlantic basin beyond Europe. DuPlessis’s second methodological achievement is to provide a convincing comparative analysis of the clothing worn by these various peoples. To do this he employs a relatively simple scheme for categorizing clothing, formulated in terms of fiber, color, and key parts of the body (principally feet, lower body, and upper body). Further detail is added by identifying specific articles and categories of clothing, mainly European, but also African and indigenous American. This scheme proves capable of incorporating the widely divergent sartorial regimes characteristic of the many peoples and climates of the Atlantic basin without collapsing into the particularism characteristic of some traditional dress scholarship. It involves a level of generalization that will inevitably raise concerns among specialists in the dress of particular nations and communities. For specialists, differences within a category such as upper-body garments can be crucial. To take an eighteenth-century example, the upper garments worn by Anglo-American women included gowns, bedgowns, and jackets, but they employed different yardages of fabric and marked significant social distinctions. Fashion, moreover, often turned on accessorizing—on buckles, ribbons, and hats—rather than main garments. Nonetheless, some degree of generalization is indispensable if comparisons are to be made across cultures. Broad categories of this sort are, moreover, appropriate for handling one of the principal sources DuPlessis employs—the probate inventory. A key document in the administration of inheritance for most Europeans, and therefore available across the colonies of the “European” Atlantic, the probate inventory nevertheless varied between places and states in both the degree of detail it incorporated and the kinds of people it represented. In addition, the specialist textile and clothing terms employed in inventories are notoriously difficult to define, let alone translate from one language to another. Textile terminology was ambiguous and mutable—in the eighteenth century, the word cotton in English could refer to a heavy woolen fabric, or to a mixture of linen yarns and cotton yarns, or to a lightweight [End Page 532] muslin made entirely from cotton. Indeed, the variety, the ephemerality, and the sheer slipperiness of early modern sartorial taxonomy constitutes some of the...