Commodities of Empire annual workshop ‘Threads of Empire: Modes, Materials, and the Making of Textiles’

This year’s workshop of the British Academy research project Commodities of Empire examines historical textile production and trade from a Global South perspective. It will highlight new and emerging research that uses the production, movement, and use of textiles as a lens to examine economic, social, and cultural histories of empire, with a particular emphasis on the perspective of colonized populations. The range of papers will explore the materials, making, movement, and use of textiles within, across, and between colonial systems, and how this knowledge adds to our understanding of the relationship between empire and global commodity flows from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

The workshop is a closed event. On 8 September, 3-5 PM,  there will be a book launch event that is open to the public. Dr Sally Tucket (University of Glasgow) will present her new book Transatlantic Threads: Scottish Linen and Society, c.1707-1780, which will be discussed by Prof Andrew MacKillop (University of Glasgow). Dr Jelmer Vos (University of Glasgow) will present his recently published Coffee and Colonialism in Angola, 1820-1960, which will be discussed by Prof William Clarence-Smith (School of Oriental and African Studies, emeritus). If interested, please contact Jelmer.Vos@glasgow.ac.uk.

The workshop has received generous funding from the Economic History Society.