Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World by Zara Anishanslin (review)

This book richly demonstrates the way a focus on material culture can open up a global history of peoples, technologies, and places. It explores two seventeenth-century objects, a silk dress and a portrait, as their makers moved back and forth across the Atlantic. The plot—“the traces of their interconnected lives,” as Zara Anishanslin puts it in her Coda—is fascinating, linking producers and consumers from London to Philadelphia, Boston, Newport in Rhode Island, and the plantations of South Carolina.

Women stand at the beginning and end of this narrative. The first is the English textile-pattern designer Anna Garthwaite, a resident of Spitalfields in London’s East End, whose artistry led to the weaving of a floral silk gown worn by Anne Shippen Willing, the wife of a Philadelphia shipping magnate, featured in a 1674 portrait by Robert Feke. Anishanslin then analyzes the careers of two men: Simon Julins, a master weaver and trader in silk damask who profited from the labor of London weavers in Spitalfields, and Feke, a portrait painter first in England, then in Philadelphia, who depicted Americans who had become wealthy through the shipping routes by which merchants like Charles Willing imported luxurious European goods, including English-made silk, to the port cities of New England.

Another portrait in the book emphasizes relationships among wealthy American women. Anne Willing’s sister-in-law, Mary Gray Shippen, was depicted by John Hesselius in a gown made of the same fabric and cut in the same style as the one in which Feke had depicted Anne in his earlier portrait. Anishanslin argues that the dress is Anne’s, given to Mary as a present, but it seems possible, given the centrality of this Garthwaite-designed silk in the crisscrossing process of world trade (Mary Shippen’s husband, like Anne’s, was a transatlantic merchant) that the gown was Mary’s to begin with, made of the same floral brocade as Anne’s. Either way, the portrait materializes the bond between the two women, based on their shared participation as consumers in the mercantile commerce celebrated by British writers: “it is to the industrious merchant that we owe every delight [that] peace and plenty bring:. . .exotic fruits, tea, coffee, chocolate” and “ornaments of dress and furniture” (270).

Anishanslin’s “full biography of a thing” allows her to reconstruct an ever-widening network of relationships (315), not only among the elites of Philadelphia, Newport, and South Carolina, but, in a darker history, between these and the enslaved people they imported from Africa and the Caribbean. A woman such as Eliza Pinckney of South Carolina, who studied sericulture and used techniques recommended in books by English writers, oversaw her plantation slaves—girls and women taken from Africa—as they fed silkworms, cleaned their trays and frames, boiled and unraveled their cocoons, and spun their strands into thread, some of which was exported to England to be woven into the kind of brocade worn by English aristocrats, and then shipped back to America to be made into the gown sewn for Anne Willing and Mary Shippen. From the kind of telling detail typical of the book, we learn that Pinckney’s daughter wore silk spun in America and woven in England to meet George Washington in 1791 on her family plantation.

Anishanslin tells a second dark story: the quasi enslavement of English weavers, who suffered from extreme poverty in Spitalfields as a consequence of competition from French and American silk-makers. Their resistance, including the formation of workmen’s clubs and violent demonstrations, was met with harsh punishment, from imprisonment to hanging. By the end of the American Revolution, silk that had traveled from American soil to the looms of English workmen and back to American cities such as Philadelphia was saturated with forced labor performed by women and men alike...