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Threads of Empire: Art and the Cotton Trade in the Indian and Atlantic Ocean

Worlds, 1770-1930

Anna Arabindan-Kesson

PhD Prospectus, History of Art and African American Studies,

Yale University, 2010

“if you take a handkerchief and spread it out … you can see in it certain fixed distances. Then take the

same handkerchief and crumple it … Two distant points are suddenly very close, even superimposed”1

Cotton fabric inscribed a new economic geography on the contours of the Indian and

Atlantic oceanic spaces, through its cultivation and by the routes of trade that connected

ports, cities and plantations. Drawing on material culture studies, histories of slavery and

art histories of empire this dissertation identifies cotton as a paradigmatic material of

empire.2 Cotton cloth wove together a colonial trade in commodities that was

underpinned by the slave trade. The subject of my dissertation is cloth: its materiality,

the historical and social process from its making to its consumption, and the theoretical

paradigm of representation it opens up. The dissertation will show how the look and feel

of cotton cloth was embedded in, and inflected by, the historical and commercial

networks that shaped its production and use. Cloth’s ability to drape, shape and dress

gives it a screen-like quality: inscribed upon, yet it can also inscribe. These are not

1 Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (University of Michigan Press, 1995), 60. 2 James Walvin, Fruits of Empire : Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660-1800 (New York :: New York University Press, 1997).

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simply metaphors for the process of representation. Cloth actually constitutes the fabric

by which bodies and spaces become visible and connected.

Cotton’s popularity as a commodity – first as an import from India – helped spur

industrialization and design practices in Britain. This rested, in large part, on the bodies

of American slaves who picked cotton, were forcibly transported from West Africa in

exchange for cotton cloth, and were later clothed by other forms of the fabric. I want to

suggest that it is this intersection of materiality, labor and representation that gives cotton

cloth its own unique visuality. Indian cotton cloth production – has always – intersected

with this triangular trade. My study focuses on this intersection through changing modes

of production and fabric pattern design. In doing so I emphasize the importance of

particular fabrics and patterns – traded between Indian merchants and East African

traders – in the historical (self) representation and contemporary art practices of the black

diaspora. In these ways my dissertation considers the historical conditions of the visual

significance of cotton cloth on the body and on the map. I argue that this unique visuality

is imbricated in cotton cloth’s representation and its use as a form of representation.

I situate my study primarily in the nineteenth century, following these historical circuits

of exchange in relation to the changing social and economic landscape of the British

Empire and its involvement in the slave trade. Recent visual art has opened up these

historical processes of visuality and perception. Therefore I end by asking whether

contemporary art – particularly in the work of Yinka Shonibare – presents another kind of

historical archive whereby the fabric of cotton and its patterning become part of a post

colonial art practice. This is not to suggest any easy or direct connection between the

past and the present, but to consider how it is that the past and the present – like the folds

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of a cotton handkerchief or bandana – are spatial as well as temporal constructions. It is

also to ask how these constructions might fold in, twist around and onto each other,

creating histories that can only be “seized as an image which flashes up at the instant

when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”3

Methodology

Juxtaposing visual, material and written media I consider how the production and use of

cotton cloth connected Manchester, the United States, the Caribbean, India and West

Africa. In its geographical scope my study is both transnational and comparative. It

uses the work of several well – and many lesser – known artists alongside commercial

prints, photographs and illustrations with fabric, pattern books, tools and written media.

Employing a methodology of “thick description”4 borrowed from cultural anthropology, I

show how these objects are drawn together by the global cotton trade of the nineteenth

century and were constituted through networks of exchange. As a cultural art history,

this work is founded on “the axiom that the full richness of the work of art and the work

of art-making can be understood only within the matrix of historical reference.”5 It is

particularly indebted to the paradigm of art and circulation explored in the 2007 Yale

Center for British Art exhibition Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes

3 Walter  Benjamin,  Illuminations  (New  York:  Schocken  Books,  1969). 255 4 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (Basic Books, 1994), 13. As Geertz explains this involves “fit[ting] lumps and fragments, objects and images … in relation to each other.” 5 See T. J Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for studies in British art by Yale University Press, 2005), 17.

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Belisario and His Worlds.6 The exhibition’s breadth and exploration of transmission and

exchange provided an important art historical foundation in the assembling of this

project. Art and Emancipation brought to light how visual forms, geographical spaces

and temporal experiences might be inter-connected with each other. Embedded in these

routes of interconnection were questions surrounding the nature of history and the role of

the art historian in examining the past: questions that I am also engaged with in the

writing of this project.

I draw on the work of Jules Prown and his theorization of the relationship of art and

history paying close attention both to the formal and stylistic condition of the works as

much as the underlying cultural values and attitudes they may be said to be embedded in.7

For, as Prown suggests, an artifact – be it high or low, visual or material – is a historical

event that continues “to exist in the present.”8 In its continued existence in the present

an object can never reflect its context fully, thus any historical narrative that emerges is

only partial. I think of this relationship between past and present as something like an

illumination by which, through careful and attentive exploration, the power of objects to

open up onto the worlds they are part of might be understood.9 In creating the scope and

trajectory of this project I recognize my own role in the (re)construction of the past. It is

for this reason that I also consider the relationship between contemporary art practice and

6 T. J Barringer and Gillian Forrester, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2007). 7 Jules David Prown, Art as Evidence: Writings on Art and Material Culture (Yale University Press, 2001). 255 8 Ibid. 255. 9 Benjamin, Illuminations.

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histories of colonialism to suggest that reconstruction might also be a form of translation

or dynamic encounter only emerging from an intensive engagement with the object itself.

The relationship of objects to the cultural worlds of empire is an important facet of their

materiality as Natasha Eaton has argued. In her discussion of the uses of English prints

in colonial India, she argues that a colonial existence was a networked one. Objects

complicated, confused, and even enchanted, the production of knowledge and meaning

created within colonial social structures.10 Eaton, drawing on Bruno Latour, emphasizes

the relational and dialogic modes of interaction – the chains of associations – that

assemble and reassemble the social worlds in which humans and objects exist.11 Art

histories that imagine a simple binary of center and periphery have often overlooked

these networks and circulations of empire. In revealing their inadequacies by an

intensive study of objects within these networks, I also extend scholarship into the

material and ideological meanings of the encounter between objects and people central to

Art History and African American Studies.

In each chapter I explore how the circulatory aesthetics of global trade, techniques of art

making and modes of display are imbricated in the materiality of cotton cloth.12 As

10 Ibid, 45. 11 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Clarendon lectures in management studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard University Press, 1993); Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (U of Minnesota Press, 1993). 12 I think of each chapter as a kind of “imaginative geography.” See Edward  W  Said,  Orientalism,   1st   ed.   (New   York:   Vintage,   1978). Here Said describes how regions become poetically endowed in such a way such that they become places that come to mean more than what is empirically known about them. See also Edward Ziter, The Orient on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and

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cotton cloth held together disparate geographies through the material conditions of its

production, I also show how its representation, patterning and texture shaped the

visibility and concealment of bodies. In doing so I argue that the aesthetics of display

and the aesthetics of trade, intrinsic to the production and use of cotton, were central to

broader questions of visuality and nationhood in nineteenth century Britain. In

constructing my chapters the work of Marcia Pointon has been particularly useful. In a

series of detailed case studies that interweave close readings of paintings, prints and

gems, Pointon shows the material significance of jewellery and brings together a series of

interconnecting themes around the body, decoration and ornamentation.13 In doing so she

shows how jewellery plays a part in the overall process of visual communication and

opens up a dynamic world of connection and contention surrounding the body, art

histories of representation and geographical encounters. Similarly, my case studies plot a

kind of cartography of empire. They radiate outwards, but always remain grounded

within the objects themselves in an attempt to mirror the geopolitics of imperial

encounter and the aesthetics of art, commerce and empire that textiles wove into place.

Literature Review

My dissertation sits at the nexus of several intersecting bodies of scholarship. It

contributes to and extends, in its geographical and material breadth, current art historical

Driver, Felix, “Imaginative Geographies.” in Introducing Human Geographies, ed. Paul Cloke, Philip Crang and Mark Goodwin, 2nd ed. (London: Hodder,, 2005), 155. According to Driver, imaginative geographies are “representations of place, space and landscape that structure people’s understandings of the world, and in turn help to shape their actions” 13 Marcia R Pointon, Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

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studies of the relations between art, labor and the British Empire. Art Historian Tim

Barringer has provided the clearest exploration of the interpenetration of British domestic

and colonial histories through the aesthetics of art and labor. His description of the

“Colonial Gothic,” is a particularly nuanced reading of the materiality of representational

forms by which bodies, labor and space could be conflated and made visible in mid

nineteenth century Britain. 14 Kay Dian Kriz’s study on the centrality of slavery to the

circulatory networks of art, commodities and the creation of social identity in nineteenth

century Britain and its colonies is also important to my work. Kriz’s discussion of how

slavery is evoked through the politics of concealment provides a particularly evocative art

historical perspective that I have sought to explore more fully through the aesthetics of

design and dress.15 In thinking through the relationship of art histories of the nineteenth

century and to contemporary art of the black diaspora, I have also been influenced by

Krista A. Thompson’s work on tourism, photography and the Caribbean. Her study

brings together the complicated relationship of art, geography and labor in the nineteenth

century British world but also considers its implications for, and influences on,

contemporary art making.16 Any art historical discussion of transmission as it relates to

14 T. J Barringer and Tom Flynn, eds., Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum, Museum meanings (London: Routledge, 1998). T. J Barringer, Geoff Quilley, and Douglas Fordham, eds., Art and the British Empire (Manchester [England]: Manchester University Press, 2007). 15 See Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700-1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 16 Krista A Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). See also Cheryl Finley, “Committed to Memory the Slave Ship Icon in the Black Atlantic Imagination,” (Unpublished Thesis, Yale University, 2002). Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Duke University Press, 2004) and Michael D

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the Black Atlantic must always attend to the work of Robert Farris Thompson. In

particular my chapters on the relationship of cloth, style and memory reference his poetic

evocations of the embodied meanings of style and aesthetics.17

The ‘postcolonial’ beginnings of this project might be said to have emerged when I first

read the work of Stuart Hall. His writings on race, diaspora and subject formation

remain central to the intellectual framework of this dissertation. The elucidation of

heterogeneity and hybridity found within Hall’s discussion of identity formation and the

postcolonial, demands that we explore and remain sensitive to the material experience

and conceptual possibilities of movement.18 To engage with the dynamism and

transformative aesthetics of this multiplicity requires that we historicize these processes,

as Hazel Carby explains, with an eye to the geo-political conditions of empire and the

spaces and overlaps of home/abroad, margin/center, metropole/colony.19 In examining

these ‘overlaps’ of empire my project is framed by studies of the Black Atlantic and

circum-Atlantic networks emphasized by Paul Gilroy and Joseph Roach. The triangular

trade of slavery that connected British ships carrying manufactured cloth to Africa,

returning to the Caribbean carrying black women and men and then back to England with

monetary profits, rum and sugar is central to this study. For this trade maps out a network

in which the concept of movement underpinned the material realities of colonial spaces.

Harris, Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 17 Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1983). 18 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Frameworks 36, 222-237 19 Hazel V Carby, “Becoming Modern Racialized Subjects: Detours Through our Pasts to Produce Ourselves Anew,” Cultural Studies, 23:4, July, 2009, 624-657.

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Moreover Gilroy’s description of the Black Atlantic as a space of transitions and

transaction also provides a conceptual beginning for approaching that other oceanic

geography of the British Empire, the Indian Ocean.20 The work of Performance Studies

scholar Joseph Roach sits in tandem with Gilroy’s work. His elucidation of the circum-

Atlantic world as a “geohistorical locale” emphasizes the importance of cultural

exchange and transmission.21 Roach’s attention to the “genealogies of performance,”22

his tracing out of the lineages of movement, design, iconography and pattern in the

translation and production of works of art across these spaces is enlightening. In this way

his work reminds us of the way objects (and people) perform through and in the process

of translation.

Roach’s work brings the agency of objects to the foreground, an agency central to

material culture studies and anthropology.23 Following the textures and traces of cloth –

and its representation – provides a particularly evocative way of engaging with this

concept of agency. As Danny Miller explains “what cloth feels and looks like – is the

source of its capacity to objectify myth, cosmology and also morality, power and

values.”24 As such this study seeks to explore the multiple registers that cotton cloth

20 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993). 21 Joseph R Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 4. 22 Ibid., 25. 23 My understanding of agency is also influenced by the work of Arjun Appadurai and his work on the social lives of objects and their entanglement within colonial contexts. Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 24 Susanne Kuchler and Daniel Miller, Clothing as Material Culture (Berg Publishers, 2005), 1.

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functioned through: its pattern, form, texture, production and its social connotations.

Arguing that in Sartor Resartus (1833-34),25 Thomas Carlyle “sought to discover in the

naked facts of clothing something about the constitution and character of the human

subject”26 William F Keenan points out that cloth, dress and the human condition are

closely connected. Dress “[is a] solid, hard reality located fully in the midst of human

interaction and as such fully deserving of our most meticulous apprehension and utmost

respect.”27 I am particularly taken by his discussion of the way dress makes bodies a

‘screen.’ This art historical allusion gets closest to the way scholars such as Christopher

Breward and Alison Ribeiro have created evocative art histories of fashion and dress,

showing how cloth and its use in representation provides scholars with new avenues by

which to examine the embodied experience of coming into view.28

To consider further this complicated relationship between art, cloth and representation I

have engaged with scholarship that explores the material and tangible nature of ‘seeing.’

Saloni Mathur’s account of art, cultural history and the relationship between India and

Britain maps some of the conceptual and visual formations that connected and made

Indian fashionable between these two spaces of empire. It is Mathur’s understanding of

the meaning of design – as a convergence between visual and conceptual formations –

that particularly interests me and offers more creative ways of understanding the uses of

25 Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (Ginn & Co., 1834). 26 William  J.  F  Keenan,  ed.,  Dressed  to  Impress:  Looking  the  Part  (Oxford:  Berg,  2001). 27 Ibid, 26. 28 See Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). Aileen Ribeiro, The Visual History of Costume (London: Batsford, 1989).

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pattern in visual representation.29 Lara Kriegel’s work on the culture of British

exhibitions provided another angle on the significance of pattern and design. Her work

on discourses of design in relation to the 1851 Crystal Palace Great Exhibition of the

Industry of all Nations, held in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park, London, deepens our

understanding of nation building and visuality on both material and conceptual levels.30 I

extend the work of Mathur and Kriegel work in my comparative examination of the

meaning of pattern, cloth and design in the visualization of bodies across the colonial

worlds of the Atlantic and Indian oceans.

Thinking about cotton cloth and its relation to space through the concept of a screen

connects material to structure in other ways too. If clothes transform the body into a

screen for their display, then perhaps we might move to consider how the fabric of cotton

figuratively transforms the geographies of empire into a screen for another kind of

display. In the materiality of cotton is embodied a relationship between geography, labor

and display that could reshape notions of the transnational. Here the work of Sonia

Ashmore and Philip Crang is useful, for their attention to the “transnational spaces of

things.”31 This I argue is crucial to the consideration of cloth and what it does. In the

movement of cloth, its flows, associations and transformations, we might also see new

29 Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 30 Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture, Radical perspectives (Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2007), 52-85. 31 Philip Crang and Sonia Ashmore, “The Transnational Spaces of Things: South Asian textiles in Britain and The Grammar of Ornament,” European Review of History: Revue Europeenne D'Histoire 16, no. 5 (2009): 655. 660

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connections and meanings in the geographies it maps.32 By following, unpicking and

reworking the threads of cotton cloth across empire my work identifies a zone which, like

Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic,” is both geographical and ideological. I suggest that, in

the materiality of cotton cloth and its representation, we see how the spaces of the

Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds are more interconnected than previous scholarship has,

perhaps, allowed for. 33

This dissertation draws on histories of the cotton trade in Britain and United States.34 I

have also found the work of Helen Bradley Foster, Steeve O. Buckridge, and Sandra Lee

Evanson important for understanding the uses of cloth in the lives of women and men in

32 Ibid. 661 33 These connections between visuality, networks of empire, labor and consumption across oceanic spaces have been explored more recently in the work of cultural geographers such as Felix Driver and Veronica della Dora. Their work provides useful models particularly in their analysis of concepts of symbolic geographies and their rethinking of concepts of space in different historical contexts. Veronica della Dora, “Putting The World Into a Box: A Geography of Nineteenth Century 'Travelling Landscapes',” Geografiska Annaler 89, no. 4, B (December 7, 2007): 287-308; Felix Driver and David Gilbert, eds., Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Crang and Ashmore, “The transnational spaces of things”; Felix Driver and Luciana Martins, eds., Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). See also John C Hawley, ed., India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Shanti Moorthy and Ashraf Jamal, eds., Indian Ocean Studies: Cultural, Social, and Political Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010) and Gauvin A Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542-1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 34 Linda Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America: The Colonial Williamsburg Collection (Yale University Press, 2002); Adrienne D Hood, The Weaver's Craft: Cloth, Commerce, and Industry in Early Pennsylvania, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Rosemary Crill, Chintz: Indian Textiles for the West (London: V & A Pub, 2008) and Beverly Lemire, Fashion's Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660-1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).

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African and the Black diapora.35 My work draws on the material and historical nuances

of these texts but extends their coverage by referencing broader networks of trade and art

historical representation within the Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds. Histories of

empire are of course central to this project. In particular the work of James Walvin,

Catherine Hall and Christopher Bayly provide fundamental imperial histories that flesh

out the interconnections of colony and metropole and networks that shaped colonial

spaces within the British Empire.36 Jennifer Morgan’s work on the centrality of black

women to networks of trade, movement and speculation has shaped my own thinking on

relationships of gender, labour and circulation.37 These cultural histories of slavery and

empire provide a geo-political framework for my own understanding of the circuits

connecting colonial spaces and the metropole within the British Empire.

35 See Helen Bradley Foster and Donald Clay Johnson, Dress Sense: The Emotional and Sensory Experience of Clothes (Berg Publishers, 2007); Helen Bradley Foster, New Raiments of Self: African American Clothing in the Antebellum South, Dress, body, culture (Oxford: Berg, 1997); Sandra Lee Evenson, “A history of Indian Madras Manufacture and Trade: Shifting Patterns of Exchange” (Unpublished Thesis, United States -- Minnesota: University of Minnesota, 1994) and Steeve O Buckridge, The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760-1890 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2004). 36 Walvin, Fruits of Empire; James Walvin, ed., Slavery and British Society, 1776-1846 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (University of Chicago Press, 2002); Christopher Alan Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Wiley-Blackwell, 2004); C. A Bayly and Brian Allen, eds., The Raj: India and the British, 1600-1947 (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 1990). 37 Jennifer Lyle Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

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Chapter Summaries

Introduction: Crazy For Cotton

I plan to begin with a discussion of Joshua Reynolds’ portrait Captain John Foote of the

Hon. East India Company, 1765, (York City Art Gallery) (Fig 1). Striking for its

depiction of a Company official in Indian style dress and chintz patterned cloth, I

consider its Orientalist style and evocation of Britishness in relation to the anti chintz

rhetoric in Britain at the time. The debates over Indian produced chintz arose because of

the threat imports of chintz presented to the production and consumption of British

woolen cloth.38 Chintz evoked both notions of otherness whilst also being sought after

for its associations with luxury and status. I attempt to show how the materiality of

chintz forms part of the visual register of the painting itself. In doing so I set forth some

of the key themes of this dissertation: the visual language of cotton cloth, the relationship

of trade to display and the ways in which cotton cloth brought into and concealed from

view bodies, labor and space.

Ch 1: The Twists of a Handkerchief or Patterns of Dress in the Atlantic and Indian

Ocean Worlds, 1780-1840.

“The head is bound round with a madras handkerchief”39

“They dread rain upon their bare heads almost as much as the native Africans; … They are fond of covering this part of their bodies at all times, twisting one or two handkerchiefs round it”40

38 Lemire, Fashion's Favourite. Crill, Chintz. 39Richard Bridgens, West India Scenery with Illustrations of Negro Character, the Process of Making Sugar, &c. from Sketches Taken During a Voyage to, and Residence of Seven Years in, the Island of Trinidad (London: R. Jennings, 1836).

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Italian artist Agostino Brunias (1730-1796) is best known for his ethnographic paintings

of free and enslaved men and women on the island of Dominica.41 In paintings such as

Free West Indian Creoles in Elegant Dress, 1780 (Yale Center For British Art) and The

Fruit Market at St Vincent 1765-68, (Michael Graham-Stewart Collection) (Fig 2,3)

Brunias renders the social and racial stratification of plantation life through a picturesque

mode of ‘observation.’ Later depictions of Caribbean society during and just after

emancipation also draw on Brunias’ stylistic concerns. Jamaican artist Isaac Mendes

Belisario (1795-1849) uses a picturesque ethnography in his lithographic observations of

the changing social conditions of Jamaica in Sketches of Character: In Illustration of the

Habits, Occupation, and Costume of the Negro Population, in the Island of Jamaica,

1837, (Yale Center for British Art) (Fig 4). I suggest that these images are significant

for their relationship to the complicated networks of display and exchange shaped by the

cotton trade. These networks are central to the way Brunias and Belisario translate the

transactional nature of a society shaped by slavery into aestheticized forms of encounter

and circulation.42 Here I pay close attention to the representation and meaning of pattern

40 Edward Long, The History of Jamaica Or, General Survey of the Ancient and Modern State of That Island: With Reflections on Its Situation, Settlements, Inhabitants, ... In Three Volumes. Illustrated with Copper Plates (London: printed for T. Lowndes, 1774), 413. 41 For the most indepth study of Agostino Brunias’ work see Amanda Michaela Bagneris, “Coloring the Caribbean : Agostino Brunias and the painting of race in the British West Indies, c.1765-1800” (Unpublished Thesis, Harvard University, 2009). See also Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1999). For the recent scholarship on Isaac Mendes Belisario see Barringer and Forrester, Art and Emancipation in Jamaica. 42 I read these images and their production alongside eighteenth and nineteenth century written accounts of Caribbean society, suggesting their depiction and description brings an important, added, layer to this visual analysis.

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– used to represent women in the Caribbean – and as a form of spatial connection within

the British Empire. I will examine samples of patterns and printed calico from the

Victoria and Albert Museum, The Museum of Science and Industry (Manchester) and the

Museum of Arts and Design, New York along with newspaper advertisements for

patterned calico and its uses. Printed cotton cloth worn by slaves in the Caribbean – and

the United States – was made in Britain, copied from Indian calico and manufactured in

Lancashire. In doing so I examine how cloth and pattern was used to locate particular

bodies within imperial geographies. I also argue that the production of pattern, and the

patterning of bodies through cotton cloth in these images visualize and evoke the

circulatory, rather than simply transactional, networks of colonial representation.43

Ch 2: The Texture of a Nation: Industry, Identity and Englishness,

In the Portrait of Samuel Oldknow, c.1790-2 (Leeds City Art Gallery) (Fig 5) the

industrialist is theatrically presented to his audience with the emblem of his industry, a

draped sheet of muslin, at his side. He stands within the sweep of a curtain that is

mirrored in the angle of his right arm and bent left knee. The momentum of these

repeated gestures provide a powerful backdrop to his elegant poise that literally rests on a

swathe of cotton cloth. Oldknow began the first muslin manufacturing business in

Britain (1787), at a time when muslin was still being imported from India and was a

highly valued cotton fabric. Wright’s portrait brings together class and commerce in the

43 I will be using the following written materials: The Book of English Trades, and Library of the Useful Arts, A new ed. enl. (London: Printed for G. and W.B. Whittaker, 1824); Long, The History of Jamaica Or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of That Island; Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 2nd ed. (London: Printed for J. Stockdale, 1794).

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presentation, and consolidation, of middle class identity. As a genre, portraiture is

concerned with the external display of a sitter’s interiority and, in this case situates an

individual within a broader spectrum of society.44 In light of this I suggest that the

evocative swathe of muslin included by Wright provides another register of visuality

within this portrait that connects cotton cloth and national identity. No longer ‘exotic,’

here muslin is tied to Englishness, and the changing texture of its production from ‘Indian

hand made’ to industrially manufactured in England. Its use however was complicated.45

I look at fashion plates from Ackermann’s Repository of The Arts, satirical fashion prints

by James Gillray (Fig 6) in the Lewis Walpole Library and Edward Baine’s 1835

mechanical illustrations (Fig 7).46 Here I suggest that the visual rhetoric surrounding

muslin and the bodies it encased was connected to its industrialization and accessibility, a

connection registered in the materiality and texture of the cloth itself. In considering how

this visual aesthetic connected interiority to display I also think about how these

depictions relate to the production of fustian in Lancashire. In particular I examine the

44 For more on British Art and Portraiture see Andrew Sean Graciano, Art, Science and Enlightenment Ideology: Joseph Wright and the Derby Philosophical Society (UMI Dissertation Services, n.d.); Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Genial Company: The Theme of Genius in Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture ([Nottingham: University of Nottingham Art Gallery, 1987); Marcia R Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 45 A parallel theme here could also be the use of muslin by Anglo Indians and its relationship to discourses of texture, finery and the body. This can be seen in diary and travel accounts of English travelers in India, hygiene tracts on cloth and the body such as James Johnson, The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions: Being a Treatise on the Principal Diseases Incidental to Europeans in the East and West Indies, Mediterranean, and coast of Africa (E. Duyckinck, G. Long, 1826). 46Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain with a Notice of Its Early History in the East, and in All the Quarters of the Globe (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1835).

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term ‘low grade’ and the symbolic use of fustian jackets by the working class be found in

the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. In doing so, I argue that cotton

cloth, industrialization and class were entwined with emerging concerns about design,

display and nationhood in early to mid nineteenth century Britain.47

Ch 3: Buying, Selling and Wearing: Negro Cloth and the Politics of Visibility

By 1851 the cotton production of the Southern United States provided seventy seven

percent of the raw material for Lancashire cotton factories.48 After leaving the factory,

cotton fabric was bought and sold in the Manchester Cotton Exchange; a commercial act

that relied on the visibility of cotton cloth but also on the elision of black labor. This

paradox of concealment and visibility connecting architecture and the cotton trade brings

to mind another space of exchange in which black labor was never more on view. In

Eyre Crowe’s Slave Market in Richmond, Virginia, 1853, (Heinz collection, Washington

DC) (Fig 8),49 a group of black slaves await their sale. Nestled in a semi-circle within the

47 A parallel theme here may also be a consideration of what ‘hand made’ meant for early 19th century British culture. The circulation, in Britain, of ethnographic prints of Indian craftspeople by artists such as Arthur William Devis (1762-1822) and Company paintings of Indian cotton weavers and spinners suggests that later visual representations and nostalgic views of India in light of British industrialization have an earlier history. 48 Queen Victoria’s official reception in the Manchester Cotton Exchange in 1851 thus underscored the centrality of cotton to the economic heart of the British Empire Edmund Walker (1823-1899) painted this event in the Visit of Queen Victoria to the Manchester Cotton Exchange, 1851, (Manchester Art Gallery) Beckert, Sven, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” The American Historical Review 109, no. 5 (December 2004): 1405-1438. 49 Eyre Crowe painted this during his trip to the United States accompanying the writer William Thackeray and wrote a diary entry describing his mixed feelings about watching and painting such a scene. His account of the discomfort of slave owners at the possibility of being ‘represented’ is particularly intriguing. Eyre Crowe, With Thackeray

19

curve of the room, their neatly arranged bodies belie the eerie transformation of bodies

into chattel that underpinned the transactions of the auction.50 I explore how this painting,

his later The Slave Auction, 1862, (Kennedy Galleries) (Fig 9), and its permutations in the

Illustrated London News (Fig 10), brought black bodies into view for audiences on both

sides of the Atlantic. Reading them alongside written accounts of slave auctions, I also

analyze the production and texture of ‘negro cloth’ through records and samples found in

the Lowell Area Historical Museum and the Baker Library, Harvard University.51 The

significance of this intertextual analysis lies in my exploration of how the material

conditions of the cotton trade became a visual register for bringing black bodies into view

across the Atlantic. Underpinning this register is, I argue, a connection between

in America (Cassell and co., 1893). Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990); Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). Patricia Hills, The Painters' America: Rural and Urban Life, 1810-1910 (New York: Praeger, 1974); David M Lubin, Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 50 See Saidiya V Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999). 51 I look at slave narratives such as Peter Randolph, Sketches of Slave Life, or, Illustrations of the 'peculiar Institution' (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Academic Affairs Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000). Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave. Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853, from a Cotton Plantation Near the Red River, in Louisiana (New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855); Randolph, Sketches of Slave Life, or, Illustrations of the 'peculiar Institution'; Harriet A Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Boston, 1861); Arthur L Eno, Cotton Was King: A History of Lowell, Massachusetts (Somersworth, N.H.: New Hampshire Pub. Co, 1976); Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (Random House, Inc., 2006). Robert B. Gordon and Patrick M. Malone, The Texture of Industry: An Archaeological View of the Industrialization of North America (Oxford University Press US, 1997). Martin H. Blatt and David R. Roediger, Meaning of Slavery in the North, 1st ed. (Routledge, 1999).

20

embodiment, sentimentality and commerce that requires further exploration. I want to

end with the ways this visuality shapes postbellum representations of the laboring body.

I suggest Winslow Homer’s The Cotton Pickers, 1876, (Los Angeles County Museum of

Art)52 (Fig 11) and Timothy O Sullivan’s photographs from the 1861 Port Royal

Experiment (Library of Congress) (Fig 12) – in which former slaves worked on

abandoned plantations in the Sea Islands as a kind of rehearsal for freedom – are

particularly significant in this discussion.53 I want to consider how their refiguring of the

free black body intersected with an aesthetics of nostalgia and (new) languages of

52 According to Mary Ann Calo Homer was noted during his lifetime for his extraordinary “facility for Negro characterization,” and for attending to a subject often neglected by his fellow nineteenth century artists. His paintings of African Americans during Reconstruction Visit From The Old Mistress (1876) (Smithsonian Institute) and Sunday Morning in Virginia were well received in 1880 at the National Academy of Design. His treatment and inclusion of black subjects in his oeuvre presents an intriguing artistic and historical view into art and social formation in Postbellum United States as well as stylistic concerns over realism and modernity in American art. His images of African Americans have also been explored in Peter H Wood and Karen C. C Dalton, eds., Winslow Homer's Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years (Houston, Tex: Menil Collection, 1988). 53 I have yet to find anything written that looks specifically at the photographic significance of Timothy O’Sullivan’s Port Royal Experiments, although there has been work done on his role in Civil War photography and histories of the Port Royal Experiment. See Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Oxford University Press, USA, 1976). Akiko Ochiai, “The Port Royal Experiment Revisited: Northern Visions of Reconstruction and the Land Question,” The New England Quarterly 74, no. 1 (March 2001): 94-117. Laura Wood Roper, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Port Royal Experiment,” The Journal of Southern History 31, no. 3 (August 1965): 272-284; Timothy H O'Sullivan, American Frontiers: The Photographs of Timothy H. O'Sullivan, 1867-1874 (Millerton, N.Y: Aperture, 1981); Theodore P Savas, Brady's Civil War Journal: Photographing the War 1861-65 (New York: Skyhorse Pub, 2008); James David Horan, Timothy O'Sullivan, America's Forgotten Photographer; the Life and Work of the Brilliant Photographer Whose Camera Recorded the American Scene from the Battlefields of the Civil War to the Frontiers of the West, 1st ed. (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1966).

21

commerce shaping the visual and economic landscapes of Manchester and the United

States.54

Chapter Four: Collecting for Trade: Museums, Commerce and Cloth

In 1866 John Forbes Watson began to create a ‘traveling museum’ of textile swatches,

now housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum. This collection was created with the

purpose of advancing both knowledge and trade. His organization brought together

samples, patterns and descriptions of their use in order to help promote trade between

Britain and India in the changing global markets of the cotton trade. At the same time

samples of cotton fabric, now housed in the British Museum and held at the Manchester

Museum of Science and Industry, were being collected and circulated to aid the

manufacture of printed cotton in Manchester for export to West Africa.55 Alongside

swatches of cloth and patterns, I look at written descriptions of them found in textile

manuals and advertisements. Also important to this examination is the actual layout of

54 The interest in black communities following the Civil War and their ‘transition’ to freedom suggests a discussion about new meanings of representation and ethnography could also be made here that brings together social realism, the ‘documentary’ and travel literature A parallel can also be made here, perhaps, with the growing interest by artists, journalists and middle classes in the lives of textile workers in Britain. The Lancashire Cotton Famine, brought on by the decline in importation of raw cotton from the Southern United States was heavily discussed and reported on. Following the end of the Civil War and the recovery of the British cotton industry, many interested observers ‘traveled’ to the north to witness the lives of cotton workers. It is in this context that Eyre Crowe’s painting The Dinner Hour, Wigan, 1874, (Manchester Art Gallery) might be an important inclusion in this chapter when considering the formal significance of labor, sentimentality and social change in American and British nineteenth century painting. 55 Swallow, Deborah, “The India Museum and the British-Indian Textile Trade in the Late Nineteenth Century.,” Textile History 30 (1999): 29-45; Sonia Ashmore and Felix Driver, “The Mobile Museum: Collecting and Circulating Indian Textiles in Victorian Britain,” Victorian Studies 52, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 353-385.

22

the collections, their arrangement and labeling. I ask what it meant for British

manufacturers to make and translate particular patterns for use elsewhere? Furthermore

how did cotton, through these practices, suggest both an image of another space and

create new opportunities for trade? Here I want to suggest that the process of assembling

cotton collections overlapped with practices of ethnographic display. Exploring these

intersections might extend our understanding of the relationship between display,

commerce and materiality in the later nineteenth century.56

Ch 5: New Patterns of Empire. New Images of Britishness

This chapter explores how cotton fabric, technologies of image making and new

representations – or critiques – of Britishness emerged in the late nineteenth and early

twentieth century.57 I explore the use of English produced African textiles and their

representation in ethnographic and studio photographs now housed at the British Museum

56 See Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (Routledge, 1995). I am drawing on Bennett’s use of the term ‘Exhibitionary Complex’ here as it pertains to the creation of cultures of display, regulation and knowledge production in Victorian England. Lara Kriegel extends Bennett’s theory in her discussion of the museum as an “imperial archive.” See Kriegel, Grand Designs. 57 In 1887 British artist Walter Crane created a cotton fabric design called The British Empire for Manchester textile company Messrs Edmund Potter and Co. Now at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the print depicts a series of female figures in classical dress representing different countries of the British Empire (including Australia, Canada, India and South Africa), each one carrying an attribute of her nation. A globe with the helmet of Britannia is shown in the upper section of the fabric. As awkward as this image is in relation to Crane’s Socialist commitments, it is nonetheless intriguing for the way in which cotton becomes the fabric on which labour, empire and new developments in design and art making come together. Crane’s cartography of empire tells us something about the ways in which empire was being seen – and used in radical politics – at ‘home.’ Felix Driver, “In Search of The Imperial Map: Walter Crane and the Image of Empire,” History Workshop Journal 69, no. 1 (March 1, 2010): 146-157.

23

(Fig 13).58 By considering the specificity of audience and photographer I ask what did

these textiles mean for their wearers in a bid to consider how image making, self-

representation and anti-colonial politics could be registered on and through cloth.59 In

relation to this I take up the threads of the madras cloth head-wrap discussed in Chapter

One and consider its use by free black women in the Caribbean and the United States,

using paintings from the Louisiana Historical Society in particular Marie Lavaeoux of

New Orleans, c.1840s, unknown artist60 and studio photographs from the National

Library of Jamaica (Fig 14,15). I suggest that in the visual formation of the head-wrap we

see how the consumption and use of cotton cloth as a form of anti colonial politics might

58John Picton, African Textiles: Looms, Weaving and Design (London: Published for the Trustees of the British Museum Publications, 1979); Carol Tulloch, ed., Black Style (London: V & A Publications, 2004); John Picton, The Art of African Textiles: Technology, Tradition, and Lurex (London: Barbican Art Gallery, 1995); Christopher B. Steiner, “Another Image of Africa: Toward an Ethnohistory of European Cloth Marketed in West Africa, 1873-1960,” Ethnohistory 32, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 91-110; Dale Idiens and Kenneth Ponting, eds., Textiles of Africa (Bath :: Pasold Research Fund, 1980). A useful comparison could be made here with ethnographic and studio photographs (by photographers such as Ramchandra Rao and Pratap Rao) taken in India of middle class Bengalis in traditional (cotton) garments in front of Victorian themed backgrounds. 59 A parallel could be made here with early twentieth century ethnographic and studio photographs (by photographers such as Ramchandra Rao and Pratap Rao) taken in India which depicted middle class Bengalis in traditional dress against Victorian themed backdrops. See Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs, Envisioning Asia (London: Reaktion Books, 1997); Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson, eds., Photography's Other Histories, Objects/histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Christopher Pinney, 'Photos of the Gods': The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (London: Reaktion, 2004); Partha Mitter, “Mechanical Reproduction and the World of the Colonial Artist,” in Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850-1922, by Sumathi Ramaswamy (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003), 1-32. 60 In the Louisiana State Museum and Historical New Orleans Museum I have found several other intriguing portraits of free black women painted by unknown or little known artists. While some appear to be in the mode of picturesque observations, others seem to be interested in the visual resonances of style, pattern and interiority exhibited on and by African American women.

24

be a form of image making too. I look specifically at the way in which the madras cloth

- produced in South India for use in West Africa - brings into view representational

processes of memory and reconstruction.61

Conclusion: From Headwrap to Headless: New Circuits of Cotton

Here I consider British artist Yinka Shonibare’s headless mannequins, and his re-

configurations of the circuits of empire, luxury and cloth. (Fig 16). I think particularly

about how pattern and textile have come to shape a black diasporic art practice. I end

with another circuit: that of the cotton textile ‘Sari George.’62 Its production in South

India for West African communities and sale in the markets of Brick Lane refigure spaces

of London into an emporium in which the intersections of the Indian and Atlantic Ocean

worlds continue to be woven in new ways.

61 Photographs in the Science and Society Picture Library show the white cotton clad Matatma Ghandi on his 1931 visit to London and Manchester. It may also be important to consider the inflections of cloth, colonialism and modernity in Ghandi’s representation. And to ask how, through the cloth of cotton, his self-presentation became a kind of reconstruction of imperial relationships shaped by the histories of colonial trade. 62 Evenson, “A History of Indian Madras Manufacture and Trade.”

25

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University Press, 1982.

Wood, Peter H, and Karen C. C Dalton, eds. Winslow Homer's Images of Blacks: The

Civil War and Reconstruction Years. Houston, Tex: Menil Collection, 1988.

Ziter, Edward. The Orient on the Victorian Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2003.

35

List of Archives To Be Used:

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute

Baker Library, Harvard University

Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Yale University

British Library

British Museum

Garthewin Additional Collection, Department of Archives and Manuscripts at the

University of Wales, Bangor

Leeds City Art Gallery

Lewis Walpole Library

Library of Congress

Los Angeles County Museum

Lowell Historical Museum

Louisiana State Museum

Louisiana Historical Society

Manchester Art Gallery

Museum of American Textile History

Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester

National Library of Jamaica

New York Museum of Design

New York Public Library

36

South Carolina Department of Archives

The American Museum in Britain

Victoria and Albert Museum

Wellcome Institute Library, London

Whitworth Gallery, Manchester

Yale Center For British Art

37

List of Figures

Fig 1. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Captain John Foote of the East of the Hon. East India

Company, (1761), oil on canvas, 101 x 123.19 cm, York City Art Gallery

38

Fig 2. Agostino Brunias, Free West Indian Creoles in Elegant Dress, 1780, oil on

canvas, 30.8 x 24.8 cm, Yale Center For British Art

39

Fig 3. Agostino Brunias, Fruit Market at St Vincent, 1788, stipple engraving, 35.8

x 46 cm, Michael Graham-Stewart Collection,

40

Fig 4. Isaac Mendes Belisario, Milkwoman, plate 10 from 'Sketches of Character:

in illustration of the habits, occupation, and costume of the Negro population, in the

island of Jamaica’’ 1838, colour lithograph, 37.5 x 26 cm, Yale Center for British Art

41

Figure 5. Joseph Wright of Derby, Portrait of Samuel Oldknow, 1790-2, oil on

canvas, 243.9 x 152.4 cm, Leeds Museum and Art Galleries

42

Fig 6. James Gillray, Advantages of Wearing Muslin Dresses! 1802, hand colored

etching, 25.2 x 35.4 cm, Lewis Walpole Library

43

Fig 7. Edward Baines, Mule Spinning in Swainson Birley Cotton Mill near

Preston, Lancashire, llustration from 'History of the cotton manufacture in Great Britain:

with a notice of its early history in the East, and in all the quarters of the globe,’ London:

H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1835. Engraving after a drawing by Thomas Allom

(1804-1872),

44

Fig 8. Eyre Crowe, Slave Auction in Richmond, Virginia, 1853, oil on canvas,

52.7 x 80 cm, Heinz Collection, DC.

45

Fig 9. Eyre Crowe, The Slave Auction, 1862, oil on canvas, 33 x 53.3 cm,

Kennedy Galleries

Fig 10. Eyre Crowe, Slave Auction at Richmond, Virginia, pen and ink sketch,

engraved and published in the Illustrated London News, 27 September, 1856

46

Fig 11. Winslow Homer, The Cotton Pickers, 1876, oil on canvas, 60.96 x 96.84

cm Los Angeles County Museum

47

Fig 12. Timothy O Sullivan, Port Royal Island, S.C. African Americans Preparing

Cotton for the Gin on Smith's Plantation, 1 negative, 2 plates, glass, stereograph, wet

collodion, 1861-62, Library of Congress

48

Fig 13. Photographer unknown, Portrait of a group of Kroo men, "Some of my

Kru-boys the labourers of Africa" [manuscript note on album paper].” black and white

photograph, 14.5 x 19.7 cm, British Museum

49

Fig 14. Artist Unknown, Marie Laveaux of New Orleans, c.1840s, oil on canvas,

dimensions unavailable, Louisiana Historical Society

50

Fig 15. Photographer Unknown, A Jamaica Lady (Also known as Jamaican

Market Woman With Basket), postcard from black and white photograph, dimensions

unknown, National Library of Jamaica

51

Fig 16. Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Gallantry and Criminal Conversation, 2002,

eleven life sized mannequins, metal and wood cases, Dutch wax printed cotton, leather,

wood, steel (dimensions variable), Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody, New York