Robert DuPlessis’s The Material Atlantic is a kaleidoscopic history of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century textile trade and the concurrent development of consumer preferences across the Atlantic basin. Of inherent interest to those who study textiles and clothing, the book offers a narrative of the expansion of European-manufactured woven cloth into the Americas and Africa that will hold appeal for many scholars of the early modern period. DuPlessis’s embrace of the “Atlantic World” as a unit of analysis allows him to bring the more familiar terrains of mainland British North America and French settlement in Louisiana and New France together with the West African Gold Coast, Spanish Buenos Aires, Dutch South Africa, and the Caribbean. The result is a wide-reaching multi-imperial, interracial, and multiethnic comparative history that carefully interrogates how and why “dress regimens”—shared preferences for fabric and modes of styling that fabric into costumes—developed in certain locales and changed over time (19). Throughout the book, DuPlessis makes a compelling argument for textiles’ fundamental importance in shaping and registering cultures and illuminates fabric’s role in European colonialization and the creation of an Atlantic and global economy. As he argues, “Fabrics and garments became the pre-eminent interculturally exchanged consumer manufactures” (4). Users’ constant need and demand for cloth, the ubiquity of textiles as gifts and trade goods, and the many forms of clothing into which cloth was transformed enabled textiles to function as potent carriers of meaning, especially between Europeans and indigenous and enslaved peoples. DuPlessis’s emphasis on the global reach of the textile trade and the multiple appropriations that took place across textile production, sales, and use places The Material Atlantic within recent trends in textile scholarship and museum exhibitions.^{Footnote 1}

The book intriguingly blends material culture study with cultural, business, and economic history. In DuPlessis’s confident hands, data mined from probate inventories, paintings, prints, merchants’ advertisements and accounts, and travelers’ observations—among other sources—allow him to painstakingly draw distinctions between the dress of settlers from varying socioeconomic positions, genders, occupations, and locales. To give one compelling case study of many, DuPlessis demonstrates that free settlers in the “torrid zone” (Jamaica, Bahia, and Saint-Domingue) “increasingly clothed themselves in textiles that were lighter in fabric and … in color,” preferring cotton over heavier woolens (179). By contrast, French planters in Louisiana, despite the warm climate, clung to silks and woolens. For Iberian settlers in Argentina and Brazil, likewise, “silks and woolens retained their status as a badge of free settler identity” (207). DuPlessis’s broad comparative approach enables him to make cross-cultural and cross-imperial comparisons like this one to ask why colonists facing similar situations made different decisions. His intriguing answer in this case—because “cottons and linens remained so strongly associated with indigenous and enslaved populations”—represents The Material Atlantic’s success in demonstrating how closely intertwined European settlers’ need to dominate “others” was with their own attempts to achieve social standing (206). As this example also suggests, the book asks much of the reader in terms of textile knowledge. Those who have not studied early modern cloth might find themselves overwhelmed. (What is the difference between a broadcloth and a fustian?) Perplexed laymen could turn to Florence Montgomery’s classic volume Textiles in America for definitions.^{Footnote 2} But the inclusion of illustrations of fabric types or a glossary would have aided the uninitiated reader.

DuPlessis’s detective work is fascinating and impressive given the fragmentary evidence that survives. As he notes, “Direct evidence about consumer preferences … is at best scanty” (8). Most notable is the attention paid to indigenous dress (or what European settlers deemed “undress”), enslaved Africans’ involuntary consumption, and free people of color’s sartorial choices. Despite a paucity of sources, these groups emerge as active agents in selecting or shaping dress regimes. However, The Material Atlantic struggles at certain points to connect technical distinctions between fabric types to consumer choice and larger beliefs in a compelling fashion. Did it matter to residents of a colonial port that they imported X amount of Y fabric? For the most part, DuPlessis transforms tables of numbers into arguments, but occasionally the author presents a range of possible reasons for dress regimes’ formation that may leave the reader dissatisfied. Which of the factors were determinant in leading individual consumers to make the choices that cumulatively created these trends? For instance, what led Caribbean settlers to reject the association of linen and cotton with slavery that held sway in Iberian and French colonies? Climate was clearly operative, but did the differing nature of slavery in these places matter? Could planters’ domination have been so evident in the Caribbean that they did not fear wearing similar clothing to the enslaved? Or were bondspeople more poorly clad in the Caribbean than elsewhere so that this association of linen and cotton with enslavement did not take hold? Connecting dress regimes to historical processes, local political events, or regional tastes and styles as documented in other forms of cultural production might have permitted the author to translate such tantalizing discoveries into a fuller exploration of local variations in material practice. While The Material Atlantic makes excellent use of recent scholarship in history, turning to the work of art historians, architectural historians, and material culture specialists could have enabled the author to recover how dress regimes formed in individual locales alongside other forms of material culture. Textiles did not operate in a vacuum, and while they constituted an overwhelming proportion of European imports, they were not the only goods traveling across the Atlantic. Nevertheless, The Material Atlantic’s exclusive focus on textiles illuminates the vitality of this object type and demonstrates how much we can, and still need to, learn about the commercial development of the early modern Atlantic world.