The Fabric of Empire: Material and Literary Cultures of the Global Atlantic, 1650–1850

Danielle C. Skeehan’s The Fabric of Empire is an important contribution to the field of literary studies that combines emerging currents from material culture studies and book history to analyze and examine lesser-known artifacts and sources held in antiquarian and historical societies, museums, and library collections. As a title in the important series Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia, edited by Cathy Matson, Skeehan opens new avenues for the interdisciplinary study of text and textile production across two centuries of global capitalism. These sources, often on cotton and silk, lie beyond the availability and classification of printed texts and remain outside the reach of traditional library catalogs and databases. Skeehan incorporates a range of theoretical frameworks into the book’s three major sections to view texts and textiles created and consumed within early Atlantic communities, including African Americans, Native populations, servants and women laborers, and other less visible historical actors and agents whose lived experience are not always evident in available print sources.In establishing textiles as a technology of record, Skeehan ascribes her research with the meaningful possibility of upending the history of the book in America. To understand this challenge, it may help if the reader is aware of advances in the field since the multivolume A History of the Book in America, edited by David D. Hall, published 2000–2010 by the University of North Carolina Press. This previous history of the book included topics on book selling, printing, publishing, reading, and other aspects of print culture. However, gender, race, and archival theory were often missing as evaluative lenses through which bibliography and the study of print could progress.1 Skeehan succeeds in bridging disciplines to inform her version of the history of the book with syntheses drawn out of new global histories and material culture studies. Textiles created via forms of resistance by women, native populations, and enslaved persons appear as material texts. There are interesting and informative passages on the production and sale of textiles ranging from guinea cloth, a British textile produced for export, to fine cottons and silks upon which popular narratives were printed. The American consumption of Chinese commodities is explained alongside a reading of how indigenous material culture in Peru reflected the colonization process. Positioning the research into the global manufacture and commerce in textiles ultimately allows for deeper historical rendering of the feminization of New World colonial spaces including British cities, New World frontiers, and the American interior.Developments in textual studies presented in The Fabric of Empire will allow historians and literary scholars to contend with a rich and complex conception of textuality beyond print sources. This also addresses the need to view texts and textiles combined at the center of economic and social paradigms where disenfranchised workers closely intermingled with privileged elites. The work is also important for historians of Pennsylvania as Philadelphia has long been considered a significant location for the history of print in the national history of the United States. Skeehan suggests her work understands America as “a phenomenon, a global process, and a world system that arises through a series of entangled relations” (7). Philadelphia is put into a global perspective as one location where millions of yards of imported English and Irish linens were received and ultimately ended up in the labor of nearby paper mills. The city’s growth during this period that resulted from the textile and interrelated slave trade is mapped onto similar growth in the codification of racial difference in the Americas.The three main sections of the book marry broad chronological periods with theoretical categories that fit the Anglophone and global primary sources that are then closely observed and explained. The book succeeds in framing the limitations of Atlantic studies to embrace geopolitical frameworks and more directly show the presence of Africa, China, and India in global networks at the outset of European colonial efforts after the sixteenth century. The first section of the book spans the period from the first Navigation Act of 1651, which dictated English ships must carry imports bound to England, up to the Calico Acts of 1721 that banned the import of cotton textiles into England altogether. Between these points of stricter British economic protectionism, Skeehan looks at the print culture transmitted and shared in the Atlantic world. This approach, based on details and evidence taken directly from contact with material texts, proves to be the real allure of the book. The reader can vicariously feel the thrill of reading room discoveries and close archival research. As an example, a copy of Gerhard Mercator’s Historia Mundi, held in the John Carter Brown library in Providence, Rhode Island, opens up an investigation of Virginia Ferrar, the granddaughter of the governor and treasurer of Virginia Company of London, who wrote into the margins of this book once held in her family’s library. Additional sections move to locations in the Caribbean, South America, and the American west to develop a workable notion of hemispheric American material and literary texts.Perhaps the driving force behind Skeehan’s project is the contention that there exists an unnecessary, even intentional, divide between written and woven work, which has fostered a sense of superiority for the output of men over a supposed inferiority of crafts created by women: “By showing that textiles are woven texts, it also seeks to model potential ways to decolonize literary studies” (138). This observation requires real attention and insofar as it can be demonstrated that printed textiles lack index points in traditional bibliographic systems, the book is a stunning example of well-researched fieldwork. However, the emphasis may overlook foundational work in the field of bibliography and textual criticism. For example, analytic bibliography considers books and other embodiments of texts as witness to the process that brought them into being. D. F. McKenzie’s 1985 Panizzi Lectures, published as the seminal Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, clearly described print as a single phase in textual transmission and its importance was even then overstated. In this more traditional bibliographic approach, the codex was received as a technology and understood as a product of human agency created in volatile contexts, which the purpose of bibliography was to recover. In the work of Roger Chartier, who brought Annales school histoire du livre to America and helped to formalize material text studies, the idea of a text was loosely understood to serve the purpose of the study of its intellectual milieu.2 Print culture studies has therefore long accepted the intersection of literary and bibliography to include the study of readership based on material evidence outside of printed works. In light of these strains of bibliography and material text studies, the originality of Skeehan’s work is less about the study of textile production but rather the interdisciplinary fluidity evidenced in the theoretical concepts employed such as global modernity, racial capitalism, and the colonial invention of whiteness. Ultimately, The Fabric of Empire proposes new directions for literary studies more welcoming of approaches borrowed from material culture studies that advocate for close analysis of artifacts and objects held in libraries and museums, a practice that remains a bright light for new forms of humanities discourse.