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NET FROM THE WARP Courtney J. Martin Nottingham's prosperity depends upon her monopoly , and her monopoly is the finest lace[.]1 B y strict definition, lace is a netlike ornamental composite of thread produced by either hand or machine. Whether handmade , as it was until the invention of the laceweaving machine in the eighteenth century, or machine-made, lace is formed by looping, interlacing , braiding, or twisting thread into a series of holes. The degree and variety of openwork, that series of holes, determines the style, type, and design of the lace. Designations like Torchon or Shadow or the nets Chantilly, Cable, and Mosquito speak to the variant dissimilarities in openwork net that are called designs. These lace types were germane to England's East Midlands from about the middle of the eighteenth century.2 The lace trade was centered in the city of Nottingham and in villages just outside its medieval border. Trade, storage, and the technology for the lace industry took place in the aptly titled lace market, in the center of the city. Nottingham was also home to the invention of the lace-making machine, an improvement on knitting machines (also called the stocking frame); its primary function had been the making of hosiery for both men and women.3 Though lace machine builders congregated near the city, lace production was disparate. Nottingham Lace could be, and often was, produced throughout the East Midlands in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, and Leicestershire, though there were great examples of Nottingham Lace produced as near as the south of the country and as far away as France. Nottingham Lace production even spread to the colonies; in the 1850s, Scranton, Pennsylvania's female immigrant population was well regarded for its Nottingham Lace production. Though the production of Nottingham Lace was not geographically specific, its name distinguished its product from the fine handmade variety. The name designated its process and implicated its replication of the real. Shadow, for example, was just that: a mimic form within the design. It is not surprising then, that the advancement of machine-made lace coincided with the decline of lace in male fashion and the rise of lace for female fashion and for domestic use. The ubiquitous English lace curtain is but one example. Nottingham's machines were made, serviced, and operated by men in a performance of semiskilled to skilled labour. In general, women and children were charged with the auxiliary work: threading needles, dressing, jennying, lace running, scalloping , white mending, and embroidering.4 As mechanization moved from hand-operated to powered machines, who made lace for whom remained constant. So, too, did Nottingham's near-total reliance on the mercurial lace trade—the whims of fashion and fad—cripple its economy on several occasions.5 Fancy Lace Nottingham's stock in trade was the fancy lace: machine-produced cotton and silk lace and embroidery, which were simulations of the handmade . The material was imported, cotton from the United States and North Africa and silk from the East, and then exported. Lace was one of the controlled cycles of Britain's colonial base, like sugar or spice. A series of united holes, bound at the edges to encourage uniformity and to discourage the possibly of fraying, lace's design replicates its func1 2 0 * N k a Journal of Contemporary African Art Francisco d e Go ya y Lu cien t es (1 7 4 6 - 1 8 2 8 ), The Duchess of Alba, 1797 (A1 0 2 ). Oil o n canvas, 2 1 0 .2 x 149.2 cm . Court esy of The Hispanic Societ y of Am er ica, N ew York. tion. Under the guise of ornament, it controls, reigning in bodies and social mores. Lace, not unlike the women who burned their hands bleaching it or hunched their backs grabbing its scraps, was tougher than it looked. One of the chief advancements of the Industrial Revolution, lace was a colonially dependent import whose exportation reinforced the strictness (known pattern) and dominance of the empire over its current and former subjects. The industry flexed its mechanical cunning over its colonial adversaries Belgium and France through seemingly delicate strands of net stitched sparingly onto...

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