Uniformity and Fashion in the Atlantic World

WHENEVER I teach Utopia in my undergraduate British history course, the students always bristle at Sir Thomas More’s description of the Utopians’ dress: “They have no tailors or dressmakers, since everyone on the island wears the same sort of clothes—except that they vary slightly according to sex and marital status—and the fashion never changes.”¹ This uniformity of appearance does not appeal to my undergraduates, who generally agree that such a fashion regime would be unnecessarily restrictive—this coming from a room full of young men and women all wearing the same black North Face jacket. Oh well, how did that old Devo song go? “Freedom of choice is what you got / Freedom from choice is what you want.”²

The fact that reading Robert S. DuPlessis’s The Material Atlantic brought both Sir Thomas More and Devo to my mind is a testament to its breadth in conception and execution. This is an ambitious book that reconstructs the textile trade on an oceanic scale, but it is not simply a commodity history that follows the production, distribution, and consumption of a ubiquitous trade good. Rather, DuPlessis takes us to the nexus where supply and demand meet, where markets create choices but also limit them, where both freedom of choice and freedom from choice intersect to create fashions identifiable by class, caste, race, and gender. This book is attentive to the materiality of dress—its fiber composition, cut, and design—but it primarily focuses on how economic forces, social relations, and cultural practices turn textiles into fashion. The tension that drives DuPlessis’s analysis is between homogenization and diversification, between the forces that limited the sartorial choices of settlers, slaves, and indigenous peoples in the Atlantic world and the irrepressible impulse for self-fashioning that countered those forces. Fashion is not just clothing arranged in different ways; it is the product of a dialectic between choice restricted from above and individual agency exercised from below.

Freedom of and from choice: who had it, who did not, and how did that calculus change over time? DuPlessis tackles these questions first from the supply side, explaining how textiles manufactured in Europe and Asia reached local and regional markets on the Atlantic periphery. Although some nations imposed mercantilist policies that either encouraged or inhibited the consumption of certain textiles in these markets, DuPlessis finds that supply was never successfully monopolized or controlled by government. Rather, private trade networks supplied the Atlantic market for textiles, providing a range of choices that grew over time. This growth was important because it meant that Old World dress regimes were imperfectly transplanted to the New. While colonizers carried preferences for certain fabrics and styles with them, in the New World they engaged in markets that made it possible to alter and adapt those preferences. Styles and fabrics bound by national or geographic borders in the Old World could mix more promiscuously in the colonial zones of the Atlantic world. And as the silks and cottons of the India and China trade found their way into Atlantic markets, this potential for diversification expanded even more.

But supply also had a way of limiting choice. In a market economy, consumers must choose from what retailers make available, and DuPlessis finds considerable consistency over time in the merchant stocks he reconstructs from probate inventories, commercial records, and similar sources. The four largest categories of consumer textiles, ranging from least to most expensive, were linens, woolens, cottons, and silks. DuPlessis’s data indicates a shift over time away from woolens toward cottons, but overall, consistency rather than change appears to have been the rule in what Europe shipped out, even if variations occurred in what local Atlantic markets took in: “Atlantic colonialism was a standardizing force, but commerce enabled distinction as well as homogenization” (238).

On the demand side, DuPlessis divides Atlantic consumers into three categories: settlers, slaves, and indigenous peoples. Obviously, these consumers...