THE TEXTURE OF CHANGE, dress, self-fashioning, and history in Western Africa, 1700-1850

253pp., b/w & colour illus., maps, paperback, Ohio University Press, Athens, 2024

ISBN: 9780821425473

Jody Benjamin examines historical change across western Africa by following the global cloth trade. Indigo-dyed and printed cotton, wool, linen, and silk cloths were major trade items that linked African producers and consumers to exchange networks, both regionally and with Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

"Jody Benjamin has crafted an engaging and deeply researched study that opens new vistas in African history. He deftly demonstrates the critical role that textile production and consumption played in expanding regional economies - western Africa - while also integrating Africa into global networks of trade that linked the continent to India, Europe, and the Americas. Chapters may focus on methodology, an event, or a social group, yet collectively they capture the multiple, and sometimes overlapping, processes that led the region to cohere: environmental crises, rise of new states, resistance to enslavement, the transatlantic slave trade, and the emergence of new social groups. Through analyses of dress and adornment in oral traditions, images, travel accounts, museum collections, and government reports, Benjamin provides a more granular perspective on how these changes shaped the lived experiences of elites, popular classes, and laborers in multiple occupations." Judith Byfield, Cornell University

"The Texture of Change is a striking social and cultural intervention focusing on a textile trade that, in tandem with the transatlantic slave trade, had a transformative effect on West Africa. Writing with fluidity, clarity, dexterity, and with analytical depth, Benjamin makes an original contribution to the study of the period’s global system of exchange." Michael Gomez, New York University

Jody Benjamin is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside.