The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800 by Robert S. Duplessis (review)

Historians have spilled a lot of ink recently to examine the production, distribution, and consumption of textiles across the world. Most famously, Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014) details the changing relationship that existed between manufacturing centers and agricultural peripheries to explain the great divergence that occurred between East and West after 1780. Bruce Baker and Barbara Hahn’s Cotton Kings (2015) uncovers the ways dishonest entrepreneurs manipulated the price of cotton until the United States government intervened and began regulating Wall Street. The bulk of this scholarship has focused on economic concerns such as industrialization and fraud. In his latest book, Robert S. DuPlessis weaves a richly textured portrait of the cultural landscape of clothing.

DuPlessis focuses on Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans who lived in the Atlantic World between 1650 and 1800. He examines “dress regimes” in this ocean-centered region, which consisted of “objects (garments and related items of dress), practices by which they were appropriated and deployed, and verbal and pictorial discourses that sought to direct, explain, and justify (or delegitimize) both objects and practices” (p. 19). People chose to wear certain items of clothing in particular areas. DuPlessis sucks every bit of cultural significance out of these decisions. He argues that early modern clothiers supplied an increasing variety of fabric to far flung locations and populations. Contrary to recent scholars, he argues that this supply fostered “both standardization and diversification of dress styles” (p. 20). By this, he means that free settlers in the New World tended to dress in similar ways as their metropolitan idols. Enslaved and indigenous peoples, by contrast, tended to develop syncretic dress regimes that combined imported cloth with their own adornments. In this way, early modern transatlantic commerce, a precursor to more recent globalization, reflected elements of the traditional and the modern.

This well-researched, intelligently written book is thematically organized. The first chapter focuses on factors that account for people’s sense of fashion. Here, DuPlessis explains why people choose to wear certain fabrics and styles and not others. He finds that certain consumers were more innovative than others, and some clothing was more available than others. In chapter 2, the author details how clothing was distributed across an ocean. As European governments and merchants involved with long-distance trade systematized the flow of goods, fashion became more uniform in the Atlantic World as a result. The next four chapters form the heart of the book.

Chapters 3 and 4 investigate voluntary and involuntary forms of appareling among marginalized peoples. One’s dress was not always an expression of free will, and this was particularly the case with enslaved and indentured populations. But while a host of European missionaries and government officials attempted to redress indigenous peoples in North and South America, results were mixed. There were those who refused European clothing, yet “Most Native people in the Atlantic Americas,” DuPlessis insists, “wove into their dress regimes” at least some elements of manufactured textiles (p. 123). In the case of enslaved men and women around the Atlantic World, the author finds that they were integrated into European dress regimes in societies with slaves. Slave societies in which every aspect of daily life revolved around human bondage, by contrast, clothed the coerced in “racially marked fabrics” and “singular work uniforms.” There were “differentially named, mandated, or furnished” garments provided to slaves in these societies (p. 162). Ironically, this difference produced more attempts at self-fashioning in slave societies, not less.

Chapters 5 and 6 look at free peoples’ sartorial regimes in the New World. Here, DuPlessis addresses the problem of cultural transfer by noting that European settlers brought dress regimes with them to the Western Hemisphere, but then they adapted to the diverse climates. In tropical regions such as Jamaica, Saint-Domingue, and Salvador da Bahia, free settlers typically clothed themselves in light fabrics of light...