Distant Cargoes and Local Cultures in the Material Atlantic

METAPHORS spring to mind when reading The Material Atlantic: webs, threads, and braids. These images mirror the entangled histories addressed by the author, as European political ambitions directed the trade and management of cloth and clothing. Metaphors speak as well to the tangible making and using of fabrics by the widest range of Atlantic peoples. Robert S. DuPlessis demonstrates the centrality of cloth and clothing in the remaking of Atlantic world societies over a century and a half. During that era, more peoples were enmeshed in colonial relations, whether enacting, facilitating, or resisting these processes; their interactions with woven textiles and patterns of dress reflected these histories. Past decades witnessed an increased attention to material culture and material politics, as evident in the work of Kathleen M. Brown and Sophie White, among others. Brown asserts that “the spread of linen shirts to North America and the Caribbean was … a form of cultural imperialism,” acknowledging the powerful symbolic and tangible importance of linens and their intended discipline. The complications and contestations of shirts and shirt wearing—not to mention shirt laundering—were subtly explored by White, revealing the variability of race as expressed in emerging clothing regimes among Indigenous, Métis, and settlers in colonial French America.¹ DuPlessis moves his analysis to still wider precincts, offering close studies of populations encircling the north and south Atlantic, including African kingdoms and African enslaved; Spanish, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and British colonies; and Native Americans from many latitudes abutting the Atlantic. From this list he selects points for intensive study and sustained analysis. This is an ambitious, sweeping study, chronicling the transformations of clothing practice where “redressing” (82) was a recurring colonial motif. Gender, race, rank, and locality are revealed in a new light and the characteristics of colonialism are demonstrated in the telling.

Importantly, DuPlessis presents a dynamic and open Atlantic, infused with long-distance cargoes from Asia, most notably the silks and cottons that drew foreign merchants to those lands. This Atlantic world is not imagined as an artificially closed system, the default of some early scholarship on this topic. Rather DuPlessis notes many of the global connections that shaped particular zones. For example, he acknowledges the force of West African textile habits, plus the tastes of Europeans and Cape Colony settlers—all conceived a passion for Indian cottons. Older traditions of economic history that addressed textile making and selling in national or imperial contexts have been recast in recent years, and DuPlessis was a part of this process. Interest in the global impact of textiles reflects the zeitgeist of our age, evident in major exhibitions such as “Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2013–14) and a growing list of books.² Though Atlantic focused, this volume arises out of a wider effort to unravel the myriad material forces that defined the early modern world. Early modern globalization was notable for new commercial networks, appended to the old, enforced and defended by Europeans’ “networks that greatly heightened worldwide movements of people, products, images, and styles in the early modern era” (15).

The use of force in creating the material Atlantic is made explicit, time and again, as is the judicious use of gifts in diplomacy and alliances, both of which reshaped clothing cultures. Cumulatively, these initiatives drove change among colonizers and indigenous peoples, slaves and slaveholders, defining denizens of this system with powerful signs. Coarse linen garb and bare feet became two of the most potent markers of enslavement in tropical plantation regions of the Americas. Thus, free men and women of whatever ethnicity eschewed coarse linen and shod themselves whenever possible. In turn, the manufacture of coarse linen profited diverse regions of Europe. All the while, male and female settlers sought solutions to climatic and geographic challenges, crafting styles of dress with reference to metropolitan norms amid creolizing forces. DuPlessis meticulously parses the options at work...