Reviews
An innovative and important study of textiles as texts. Skeehan's genealogy of objects interconnects fabric and print, taking readers on a world tour to reveal how the physical object of fabric became a locus of ideas and emerging changes in world culture and politics. I would give the author the highest praise I can give to an interdisciplinary scholar: I could not tell what her home discipline was.
This superbly researched, theoretically sophisticated book succeeds brilliantly in circumnavigating four continents and at least a dozen literary and material genres to bring into conversation an astonishing breadth of sources. Textiles truly come alive in this story, recording the knowledge, history, and lived experience of a host of otherwise silent historical actors: enslaved Africans and African Americans, dispossessed Native communities, industrial laboring women, indentured servants, rag pickers, and many more. A timely, bold, and courageous work.
This riveting study illuminates the bonds between text and textiles in the age of empire. As Skeehan argues for the centrality of fabric and its makers to the story of global modernity, she dismantles colonial legacies in early American studies by unsettling the eminence of book knowledge in favor of an expansive understanding of authorship and intellectual production.
The Fabric of Empire makes a vital intervention in the study of print culture. Skeehan's brilliant insights into eighteenth-century global textile networks reveal the central role of free and unfree laboring women in the process of modern subject formation. A timely intellectual and literary history that acknowledges its own indebtedness to modern indigenous decolonization and repatriation movements.
A brilliant and field-changing book. Reading textiles as multifaceted texts, Skeehan reveals new networks of meaning-making in the early Atlantic world and foregrounds the role of enslaved people, Indigenous Americans, and non-elite laborers in these networks. Her magisterial engagement with the material archive of empire yields startling new insight into the politics, aesthetics, and culture of the imperial Atlantic world.
Book Details
List of Illustrations
Series Editor's Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction. The Material (Con)Texts of Global Modernity
Part 1. The Empire's New Clothes: British Publics and Imperial Politics, 1650–1720
C
List of Illustrations
Series Editor's Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction. The Material (Con)Texts of Global Modernity
Part 1. The Empire's New Clothes: British Publics and Imperial Politics, 1650–1720
Chapter 1. Patterns for Plantation: New World Silk and the Natural History of Settler
Colonialism
Chapter 2. Indo-Atlantic Modernity: The Early Global Cotton Trade and the Emergence of Racial Capitalism
Part 2. Revolutionary Threads: New World Publics and Insurgent Economies, 1750–1800
Chapter 3. The Republic of Homespun: Material Economies of the American
Revolution
Chapter 4. Materializing the Black Atlantic: African Captives, Caribbean Slaves,
and Creole Fashioning
Part 3. The Fabric of American Empire: Imagined Communities and New Geographies, 1600–1865
Chapter 5. Oriental America: Silk Geographies in the Era of the Early Republic
Chapter 6. Empires in Rags: Hemispheric American Material and Literary Texts
Conclusion. Weaving Revolution in the Global South
Notes
Essay on Sources
Index