The Texture of Change; Cloth, Commerce and History in Western Africa, 1700-1850

FAIN: HB-263188-19

Jody Arthur Benjamin
Regents of the University of California, Riverside (Riverside, CA 92521-0001)

A book-length study about the history of textile commerce and consumption in western Africa during the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Texture of Change re-examines social and economic change of the 18th and early 19th centuries across a broad region of western Africa from Senegal to Sierra Leone through its history of textile commerce and consumption. Historiographical debates for this region have obscured full consideration of the multiple ways west African societies engaged global exchange beyond Atlantic slaving. This research illuminates Africans’ varied engagements with a major trade that was effectively global in scale. It argues that they were critical actors during this period of global integration — contributing in their own right to the birth of the modern era. Far from being driven solely by external demands for labor or raw commodities, this process was heavily influenced by local conditions and patterns of social and market relations. This study offers insights into a diverse array of historical actors across ethnic, religious and imperial lines in western Africa.

Associated Products

Memory in Fragments, Layers and Sound: Tracing the History of Bamana Kaarta in the Eighteenth Century (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Memory in Fragments, Layers and Sound: Tracing the History of Bamana Kaarta in the Eighteenth Century
Author: Jody Benjamin
Abstract: This paper will discuss convergence and dissonance across a range of sources for Bamana-speaking Kaarta, a non-Muslim led polity in the West African Sahel that sat at the intersection between networks of trans-Saharan and Atlantic trading networks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In response to a generalized lack of attention to Africa in narratives of early modern history, Africanists have emphasized the parallel and interconnected nature of processes unfolding in continental Africa with those elsewhere, while at the same time pointing out distinctive qualities that modify or qualify larger Atlantic or global trends. Though indispensable for historians, African oral and European written sources for the West African Sahel were created for distinct purposes, organized around divergent premises and centered different audiences. Limits imposed by available sources and certain conceptual frameworks have continued to pose significant challenges— especially for incorporating the historical experiences of non-elites, and of relations across gender, ethnicity and other forms of socially constructed difference. How should historians of western Africa approach these sources to illuminate the complexity and contingency of earlier contexts for a polity heavily reliant on mercenary warfare in the larger economy of slaving while also asserting itself within a religiously and culturally heterogeneous region? This paper will argue that comparative close readings, and contextualization of traditional oral narratives, archival documents and material sources can produce historical insight submerged within these sources about the beliefs, attitudes and assumptions about the people of Kaarta and their dynamic interactions with a wider world.
Date: 01/30/2020
Conference Name: Early History of Africa Symposium: New Narratives for a History of Connections and Brokers, UCLA,

The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning, and History in Western Africa, 1700–1850 (Book)
Title: The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning, and History in Western Africa, 1700–1850
Author: Jody Benjamin
Abstract: 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.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: https://www.ohioswallow.com/9780821425473/the-texture-of-change/
Primary URL Description: Publisher's link.
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780821425473
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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