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New African Histories
The Texture of Change

The Texture of Change

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

by Jody Benjamin

Published by: Ohio University Press

Series: New African Histories

Imprint: Ohio University Press

268 Pages, 152.00 × 229.00 mm, 49 illustrations - 7 Maps

Paperback
9780821425473
Published: November 2024

£26.99

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Hardcover
9780821425466
Published: November 2024

£64.00

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Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

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.

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

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.

The Texture of Change is a striking social and cultural intervention focusing on a textile trade that, in tandem with the transatlantic slave trade, had a transformative effect on West Africa. Writing with fluidity, clarity, dexterity, and with analytical depth, Benjamin makes an original contribution to the study of the period’s global system of exchange.
- Michael A. Gomez, New York University
Jody Benjamin has crafted an engaging and deeply researched study that opens new vistas in African history. He deftly demonstrates the critical role that textile production and consumption played in expanding regional economies-western Africa-while also integrating Africa into global networks of trade that linked the continent to India, Europe, and the Americas. Chapters may focus on methodology, an event, or a social group, yet collectively they capture the multiple, and sometimes overlapping, processes that led the region to cohere: environmental crises, rise of new states, resistance to enslavement, the transatlantic slave trade, and the emergence of new social groups. Through analyses of dress and adornment in oral traditions, images, travel accounts, museum collections, and government reports, Benjamin provides a more granular perspective on how these changes shaped the lived experiences of elites, popular classes, and laborers in multiple occupations. This book will be of great value to scholars in social and economic history, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and fashion studies.
- Judith A. Byfield, Cornell University