The Texture of Change: Cloth, Commerce and History in Western Africa 1700-1850 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Benjamin, Jody A. 2016. The Texture of Change: Cloth, Commerce and History in Western Africa 1700-1850. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493374 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA The Texture of Change: Cloth Commerce and History in West Africa, 1700-1850 A dissertation presented by Jody A. Benjamin to The Department of African and African American Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of African and African American Studies Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2016 © 2016 Jody A. Benjamin All rights reserved. Dissertation Adviser: Professor Emmanuel Akyeampong Jody A. Benjamin The Texture of Change: Cloth Commerce and History in West Africa, 1700-1850 Abstract This study re-examines historical change in western Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the lens of cotton textiles; that is by focusing on the production, exchange and consumption of cotton cloth, including the evolution of clothing practices, through which the region interacted with other parts of the world. It advances a recent scholarly emphasis to re-assert the centrality of African societies to the history of the early modern trade diasporas that shaped developments around the Atlantic Ocean. However, this study argues that Atlantic exchanges in western Africa relied significantly upon Indian Ocean and trans-Saharan commercial networks as well. By analyzing a wide range of European travel accounts, commercial records and correspondence, visual images, maps, and oral narratives, this study breaks with well-rehearsed Atlantic conceptual frameworks for this period of African history to instead emphasize the global historical context in which Africans made decisions that impacted their communities and the larger world. The geographic focus of this study covers a large part of western Africa: from the Sahara desert in the north, northeast to the Niger bend, southeast to coastal Sierra Leone and west to the Senegal river valley and Atlantic coast. Its main findings emphasize the diversity of western African engagements with global commerce via textile production and consumption across time and space. In a comparison of two African-imposed trade embargoes on Europeans, it suggests that conflicts over slave trading did not extend to the arena of textile exchanges as African consumption of imported textiles grew throughout the period. The study suggests the importance of changing environmental and political alliances to patterns of consumption and has highlighted the centrality women’s indigo cloth dyeing as the iii face of local industry intersecting directly with Indian indigo cloth imported from the Atlantic in the 18th and early 19th centuries. iv Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................................. iii! Acknowledgments ................................................................................................................................. vii! Dedication ............................................................................................................................................... ix! List of Maps ..............................................................................................................................................x! List of Figures ........................................................................................................................................ xi! List of Charts ........................................................................................................................................ xii! Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1! Evidence and use of sources ....................................................................................................................7! Visual and Material sources ...................................................................................................................9! Historiography .......................................................................................................................................10! Chapter Outline .....................................................................................................................................19! Chapter One. ‘Which should be the staple commoditie [sic], to pitch the price upon?': Cotton and Cloth in Western Africa, 1700-1730 ...................................................................... 23! Introduction ...........................................................................................................................................23! The Carrying Trade to Western Africa ...............................................................................................34! Reading West African Consumption Patterns from Internal Regional Dynamics .........................58! Commercial agriculture for export ......................................................................................................69! Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................................74! Chapter Two. View from the Savannah (1740-1780) .............................................................. 76! Introduction ...........................................................................................................................................76! Kaarta, Segu and the Savannah polities ..............................................................................................82! ‘Twelve meters of new cloth' ................................................................................................................87! ‘A Magnificent Bubu' ............................................................................................................................93! Parsing silences and elision in Kouyate's narration ...........................................................................96! Political transformations and the reconfiguration of commercial patterns over the long duree ...98! French merchants seek to expand into the Faleme River ................................................................104! Niger river Valley and Sahara-oriented networks ...........................................................................110! Chapter three. Contextualizing Global Exchanges, Part 1: Cloth and Consumers in Northern Senegambia, 1776-1815 ............................................................................................ 114! Introduction .........................................................................................................................................114! Embargoes Compared: A Halt to Slave Caravans Across Futa Toro in the 1780s .......................120! Environmental factors .........................................................................................................................123! Guinee cloths ........................................................................................................................................129! Women's Indigo Cloth Dyeing Industry ............................................................................................131! Islamic reform movement of the late 18th century ..........................................................................137! Soldiers and Slaves ..............................................................................................................................163! Eur-African Habitants ........................................................................................................................168! Dressing Habitants ..............................................................................................................................171! Unraveling European discourses of ‘regeneration' and ‘civilization' in 18th century sources ....173! Chapter Conclusion .............................................................................................................................192! Chapter four. Contextualizing Global Exchanges Part 2: Cloth and Consumers in the Guinea riverine coast: Merchants, Migrants, Slaves and Speculators, 1780-1815. ............ 196! Introduction .........................................................................................................................................196! African merchants on the coast ..........................................................................................................219! The Market On One’s Own Terms: Rebel Slaves and Muslim reformers ....................................235! v Black settlers, Eur-Africans and Elite African consumption ..........................................................238! European speculators, visionaries and opportunists ........................................................................248!