The texture of change : dress, self-fashioning, and history in western Africa, 1700-1850 / Jody Benjamin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Benjamin, Jody, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Clothing and dress--Africa, West--History.

Clothing and dress.

Textile fabrics--Africa, West--History.

Textile fabrics.

Clothing trade--Africa, West--History.

Clothing trade.

Africa, West--History--To 1884.

Africa, West.

Place of Publication:

Ohio University Press 2024

Summary:

"This book looks at how a range of West Africans interacted with the regional and global trade in textiles from 1700 to 1850, how their choices as consumers and agents shaped a global textile trade that was critical to the emergence of capitalist and colonial economies, and what their dress tells us about how their societies changed over time"-- Provided by publisher.

"The Texture of Change examines historical change across a broad region of western Africa-from Saint Louis, Senegal, to Freetown, Sierra Leone-through the development of textile commerce, consumption, and dress. Indigo-dyed and printed cotton, wool, linen, and silk cloths constituted major trade items that linked African producers and consumers to exchange networks that were both regional and global. While much of the historiography of commerce in Africa in the eighteenth century has focused on the Atlantic slave trade and its impact, this study follows the global cloth trade to account for the broad extent and multiple modes of western Africa's engagement with Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Jody Benjamin analyzes a range of archival, visual, oral, and material sources drawn from three continents to illuminate entanglements between local textile industries and global commerce and between the politics of Islamic reform and encroaching European colonial power. The study highlights the roles of a diverse range of historical actors mentioned only glancingly in core-periphery or Atlantic-centered framings: women indigo dyers, maroon cotton farmers, petty traveling merchants, caravan guides, and African Diaspora settlers. It argues that their combined choices within a set of ecological, political, and economic constraints structured networks connecting the Atlantic and Indian Ocean perimeters"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Twelve Metres of Cloth and a Magnificent Bubu: Bamana Kaarta between Sahel and Sea

Cotton Cloth in Western Africa: Barafulas, Bafetas, and Piezas De India

Centering the Sahel in the Early Eighteenth Century: Indigo Dyers, Precarity, and the Pull of the Faleme River Valley, 1730-1750

The Politics of Dress at Saint Louis during the Age of Islamic Revolution, 1785-1815

Merchants, Maroons, Mahdis and Migrants on the Upper Guinea Coast, 1795-1825

Textures of a Changing Era: Old Red Coats, Groundnuts and Afro-Atlantic missionaries, 1825-1850

ISBN:

9780821425480