Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-d8cs5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-14T11:16:33.062Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

11 - Fashion and the Maritime Empires

from Part II - Early Modern Global Entanglements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2023

By
Meha Priyadarshini
Edited by
Christopher Breward ,
Beverly Lemire  and
Giorgio Riello
Christopher Breward
Affiliation:
National Museums of Scotland
Beverly Lemire
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
Giorgio Riello
Affiliation:
European University Institute, Florence
Get access

Summary

These are the opening lines of a popular French song that has its roots in the Caribbean islands that were colonized by France.2 It is written from the perspective of a Creole woman who is expressing her grief as she realizes that her lover – presumably a white French sailor – has left the island. In the song there is a deliberate deployment of textile artefacts (foulard and Madras) as symbols of the loss that the woman experiences. She is not only sorry that her lover is leaving, but also lamenting that she will no longer have access to fine things like textiles and gold jewellery (collier choux), which were fashionable in the eighteenth century in the French Caribbean.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Global History of Fashion
From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century
 , pp. 363 - 398
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Select Bibliography

Bonialian, Mariano, ‘La Seda China en Nueva España a Principios del Siglo XVII. Una Mirada Imperial en el Memorial de Horacio Levanto’, Revista de Historia Económica, 35/1 (2016), 147–71.Google Scholar
Clulow, Adam, ‘“Splendour and Magnificence”: Diplomacy and Sumptuary Codes in Early Modern Batavia’, in Riello, Giorgio and Rublack, Ulinka (eds.), The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 299–324.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Daly, M. Catherine, Joanne Eicher, and Tonye Erekosima, , ‘Male and Female Artistry in Kalabari Dress’, African Arts, 19/3 (1986), 49–51 and 83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DuPlessis, Robert, ‘What Did Slaves Wear? Textile Regimes in the French Caribbean’, Monde(s), 1 (2012), 175–91.Google Scholar
Earle, Rebecca, ‘Race, Clothing and Identity: Sumptuary Laws in Colonial Spanish America’, Riello, Giorgio and Rublack, Ulinka (eds.), The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 325–45.Google Scholar
Flynn, Dennis and Giráldez, Arturo, ‘Born with a “Silver Spoon”: The Origin of World Trade in 1571’, Journal of World History, 6/2 (1995), 201–21.Google Scholar
Hall, Kenneth, ‘Textile Reorientations: The Manufacture and Trade of Cottons in Java’, in Machado, Pedro, Fee, Sarah, and Campbell, Gwyn (eds.), Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures, and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 181–208.Google Scholar
Kriger, Colleen E., Cloth in West African History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).Google Scholar
Norton, Marcy, ‘Subaltern Technologies and Early Modernity in the Atlantic World’, Colonial Latin American Review, 26/1(2017), 18–38.Google Scholar
Phipps, Elena, ‘Garments and Identity in the Colonial Andes’, in Phipps, Elena, Hecht, Johanna, and Esteras Martin, Cristina (eds.), The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork 1520–1820 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2004), 16–39.Google Scholar
Riello, Giorgio and McNeil, Peter (eds.), The Fashion History Reader: Global Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).Google Scholar
Root, Regina (ed.), The Latin American Fashion Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2005).Google Scholar
Skeehan, Danielle, ‘Caribbean Women, Creole Fashioning and the Fabric of Black Atlantic Writing’, The Eighteenth Century, 56/1 (2015), 105–23.Google Scholar
Warsh, Molly, American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, Sophie, ‘“Wearing Three or Four Handkerchiefs around His Collar, and Elsewhere about Him”: Slaves’ Constructions of Masculinity and Ethnicity in French Colonial New Orleans’, Gender & History, 15/3 (2003), 528–49.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×