Robert S. DuPlessis. 2016. the Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650-1800

Abstract

Robert S. DuPlessis. 2016. The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 351 pp. Between the mid-seventeenth and the late eighteenth centuries European expansion and commerce were at their zenith. They gave shape to the early Atlantic world, a world of complex internal and external networks, which made it dynamic, diverse, enduring and ultimately global. These networks were involved in extensive cultural and population transfers and ruptures and set up new economies and societies. Following the construction of the Atlantic world, commercial trends, fabric consumption, and sartorial cultures appeared. Clothing was at the core of these diverse economic and socio-cultural phenomena. The Material Atlantic is primarily about these commercial patterns, their acquisition and uses. It looks into how men and women belonging to various ethnic, social, occupational, and class categories designed the apparel from all sorts of materials in a variety of geo-climatic, political, and socio-cultural environments, which offered opportunities for innovation and imposed stringent constraints at the same time. This engaging and profoundly documented account alters and extends the existing scholarship on globalization in the early modern period, the Atlantic world, and consumption. It depicts the fabrics and attire accessible to consumers, traces the methods and occasions of their acquisition, analyzes the meanings of their usages, and explicates the implications of these crucial developments on global textile industries before the advent of the factory system. These developments included large-scale enslavement, the proliferation of new and sourced goods, the alteration of consumer behavior and attitudes, and the assertion of social identities. Fabrics and garments became indeed the dominant interculturally exchanged consumer goods. Their economic significance was obvious, while their meaning was less so. Dress includes personal expression and social status and prestige. For that, it provokes a whole range of pictorial representations. The material Atlantic covered a vast geographical area stretching from the independent indigenous states of Cape Coast Castle on the West African Coast, Angola and neighboring kingdoms in West Central Africa, to Spanish Buenos Aires, Dutch Cape Town, the Southern district of French Caribbean Saint Domingue, British colonial Port Royal, and the continental North American French colonies of New Orleans, rural Louisiana, and Montreal. In this Atlantic, European rafficking, Catholic conversion, and colonization intermingled and thrived. …