The Texture of Change

Dress, Self-Fashioning, and History in Western Africa, 1700–1850

Jody Benjamin (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

268 Seiten

2024
Ohio University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8214-2546-6 (ISBN)

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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.

Jody Benjamin is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. His research and teaching interests include West Africa (Senegal, Mali, Guinea), textiles, dress, fashion history, African Atlantic migration, diaspora, and intellectual history.

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1 Twelve Measures of New Cloth and a Magnificent Bubu: Bamanan Kaarta between Sahel and Sea

Chapter 2 Cotton Cloth in Western Africa: Barafulas, Bafetas, and Piezas de India

Chapter 3 Centering the Sahel in the Early Eighteenth Century: Indigo Dyers, Precarity, and the Pull of the Faleme River Valley, 1730–1750

Chapter 4 The Politics of Dress at Saint-Louis during an Age of Islamic Revolution, 1785–1815

Chapter 5 Merchants, Maroons, Mahdis, and Migrants on the Upper Guinea Coast, 1795–1825

Chapter 6 Textures of a Changing Era: Old Redcoats, Groundnuts, and Afro-Atlantic Missionaries, 1825–1850

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	29.10.2024
Reihe/Serie	New African Histories
Zusatzinfo	49 illustrations - 7 Maps
Verlagsort	Athens
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Design / Innenarchitektur / Mode
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Wirtschaft ► Volkswirtschaftslehre ► Makroökonomie
ISBN-10	0-8214-2546-3 / 0821425463
ISBN-13	978-0-8214-2546-6 / 9780821425466
Zustand	Neuware