The Material Bonds of Slavery

IN The Material Atlantic, Robert S. DuPlessis has crafted a singular study of the patterns, uses, and mores of dress in the Atlantic world of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The book draws upon inventories, commercial records, newspaper advertisements, travel accounts, and visual sources to understand how and why Europeans, Amerindians, Africans, and their descendants in the region acquired, wore, and understood clothing. In the process, the author makes a deeply convincing case for treating material culture and sartorial matters as inextricable parts of the social, economic, and cultural history of the Atlantic.

An especially significant contribution of the book is the terminology it introduces. Foremost and most useful is “dress regimes” (50), which DuPlessis uses in two instances. The first refers to the diverse sartorial traditions, customs, and norms that prevailed in disparate communities in various parts of the world on “the eve of the shared Atlantic” (50). The second describes the sartorial confrontations, transformations, and innovations that eventually took shape in this shared Atlantic. The term provides a framework for comparative analysis as well as for considerations of change over time.

The author’s analysis of dress regimes in slaveholding societies makes the book a welcome contribution to the history of slavery. The relationship between slavery and dress has captured the attention of a few historians, who have offered compelling snapshots of the importance of clothing and dress in Latin America, the United States, and the Caribbean. Herman L. Bennett, for instance, has illustrated the extent to which elegantly dressed slaves in seventeenth-century Mexico City formed key parts of their owners’ so-called “spectacles of ostentation.”¹ For his part, Ira Berlin has shown how urban slaves in wealthy eighteenth-century Charleston who appropriated their masters’ styles of dress—from pocket watches to powdered wigs—roused the ire of whites who believed that they alone held claim to elegant self-presentation.² Similarly, Stephanie M. H. Camp has detailed the lengths to which plantation slaves in the eighteenth-century South, particularly the women among them, would go in order to attend dances and other events that offered opportunities to wear festive attire.³

Taken together, this scholarship (along with the work of Helen Bradley Foster, Silvia Hunold Lara, Dylan C. Penningroth, and others, including myself) hints at just how much dress mattered to masters and slaves, to men and women, and to both urbanites and rural-dwellers throughout the centuries-long history of slavery in the Americas.⁴ But what we do not yet have is a comprehensive and comparative sense of the kinds of clothing slaves generally wore and how they tended to acquire it. Throughout the Atlantic world, DuPlessis writes, slaves’ dress emerged from a combination of “imposition and self-provision” (137). In the first instance, he shows how authorities in the region “intended slave status to be materialized in a remarkably consistent costume consisting of two loose-fitting, formless garments of cheap, coarse, often uncomfortable fabric, usually linen and/or, occasionally, woolen” (131). Consequently, owners were required by law to supply these basics, although they did so with varying degrees of diffidence and consistency (if they even bothered to do so at all). DuPlessis also notes examples of slaveholders supplying their human property with castoffs as well as gifts and favors of more fashionable clothing items such as calico petticoats, vests, hats, and fine linen ensembles, which they bestowed on slave drivers and chief housekeepers, in some cases “as a way to advance their goal of slave acquiescence, or at least quiescence,” and in others “in order to enhance masters’ power and slaves’ dependency” (133).

In terms of self-provision, DuPlessis details how slaves in the Atlantic world acquired everyday and special-occasion clothing by stealing (from the free population as well as from fellow slaves), making purchases with money earned through sundry work and market vending, bartering (which for women at times included exchanging sexual services for clothing), or making...