Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- List of figures
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Maps
- Introduction: Fashioning the Atlantic world
- 1 Dress regimes at the dawn of the shared Atlantic
- 2 Acquiring imported textiles and dress
- 3 Redressing the indigenous Americas
- 4 Dress under constraint
- 5 Dressing free settlers in the “torrid zone”
- 6 Free settler dress in temperate zones
- 7 Atlantic dress regimes: fashions and meanings, implications and ironies
- Appendix 1: Sources for Tables 2.1, 2.2, 2.3
- Appendix 2: Inventory sources for free settler garment holdings
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Plate section
5 - Dressing free settlers in the “torrid zone”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- List of figures
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Maps
- Introduction: Fashioning the Atlantic world
- 1 Dress regimes at the dawn of the shared Atlantic
- 2 Acquiring imported textiles and dress
- 3 Redressing the indigenous Americas
- 4 Dress under constraint
- 5 Dressing free settlers in the “torrid zone”
- 6 Free settler dress in temperate zones
- 7 Atlantic dress regimes: fashions and meanings, implications and ironies
- Appendix 1: Sources for Tables 2.1, 2.2, 2.3
- Appendix 2: Inventory sources for free settler garment holdings
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
There is great luxury in the Antilles. People are especially desirous of fine linen, and because most don't wear a doublet they have very beautiful Holland linen shirts with neckcloths more than an ell and a half long. Breeches are made from handsome broadcloth or beautiful serge embroidered with gold and silver braid, or covered with lots of trim … Cloaks are only worn when it's raining, or for travel.
Our English belles in Jamaica … do not scruple to wear the thickest winter silks and sattins; and are sometimes ready to sink under the weight of rich gold or silver brocades. Their headdress varies with the ton at home; the winter fashions of London arrive here at the setting in of hot weather … Nothing surely can be more preposterous, and absurd, than for persons residing in the West-Indies, to adhere rigidly to all the European customs and manners; which, though perhaps not inconvenient in a cold Northern air, are certainly improper, ridiculous, and detrimental, in a hot climate.
European settlers in the Atlantic colonies brought dress regimes with them, and they retained commercial, political, cultural, and personal links with their homelands that could serve to perpetuate styles, habits, even garments. Yet in the colonies they encountered diverse geoclimatic conditions and socioeconomic ecologies, disposed of dissimilar resources, and developed novel ambitions and identifications. How they adapted sartorially to their new environments is the subject of the next two chapters. Employing sources concerned particularly with Jamaica, Saint-Domingue, and Salvador da Bahia, Chapter 5 investigates free settler dress regimes in tropical Atlantic colonies. It begins with contemporary accounts that identified but disparately evaluated a cluster of issues defining torrid-zone free settler dress, then establishes the general sartorial profile of the three colonies, before focusing on the role of some specific social groups in promoting or resisting sartorial change.
“Colonial livery” in the eyes of contemporaries
As the excerpts from the French missionary and botanist Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre and the Anglo-Jamaican planter Edward Long indicate, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century commentators often remarked on the allegedly ostentatious dress of settlers in tropical American colonies. By some accounts, virtually all colonists indulged a taste for luxury, even to excess.
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- The Material AtlanticClothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800, pp. 164 - 196Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015