In this holistic approach to the study of textiles and their makers, Colleen Kriger charts the role cotton has played in commercial, community, and labor settings in West Africa. By paying close attention to the details of how people made, exchanged, and wore cotton cloth from before industrialization in Europe to the twentieth century, she is able to demonstrate some of the cultural effects of Africa's long involvement in trading contacts with Muslim societies and with Europe. Cloth in West African History thus offers a fresh perspective on the history of the region and on the local, regional, and global processes that shaped it. A variety of readers will find its account and insights into the African past and culture valuable, and will appreciate the connections made between the local concerns of small-scale weavers in African villages, the emergence of an indigenous textile industry, and its integration into international networks.

This book focuses on the significant role of West African consumers in the development of the global economy. It explores their demand for Indian cotton textiles and how their consumption shaped patterns of global trade, influencing economies and businesses from Western Europe to South Asia. In turn, the book examines how cotton textile production in southern India responded to this demand. Through this perspective of a south-south economic history, the study foregrounds African agency and considers the lasting impact on production and exports in South Asia. It also considers how European commercial and imperial expansion provided a complex web of networks, linking West African consumers and Indian weavers. Crucially, it demonstrates the emergence of the modern global economy.

In this book, Nina Sylvanus tells a captivating story of global trade and cross-cultural aesthetics in West Africa, showing how a group of Togolese women—through the making and circulation of wax cloth—became influential agents of taste and history. Traveling deep into the shifting terrain of textile manufacture, design, and trade, she follows wax cloth around the world and through time to unveil its critical role in colonial and postcolonial patterns of exchange and value production. Sylvanus brings wax cloth’s unique and complex history to light: born as a nineteenth-century Dutch colonial effort to copy Javanese batik cloth for Southeast Asian markets, it was reborn as a status marker that has dominated the visual economy of West African markets. Although most wax cloth is produced in China today, it continues to be central to the expression of West African women’s identity and power. As Sylvanus shows, wax cloth expresses more than this global motion of goods, capital, aesthetics, and labor—it is a form of archive where intimate and national memories are stored, always ready to be reanimated by human touch. By uncovering this crucial aspect of West African material culture, she enriches our understanding of global trade, the mutual negotiations that drive it, and the how these create different forms of agency and subjectivity.

This book is about the history of an African clothing material known as Kente cloth. All relevant cultural aspects of the cloth have been explained in details with several pictorial illustrations. The book traces Kente history and how it has been used since its invention, about four hundred years ago, by an Ashanti hunter. The two authors are Ashantis and traditionalists. The coauthor was born into the industry at Bonwire. He received a national award as Ghanas best Kente designer and weaver in 2008. His knowledge in the art of weaving and his lifetime exposure to Kente traditions makes it imperative for all those seeking knowledge about Kente, the genuine African fabric, to obtain a copy of this. The other important aspect this of book is the author. The book is the outcome of his intensive research on Kente cloth after his first publication (1993) of the book titled Kente Cloth: Introduction to History. This book is the history of Kente Cloth. It contains everything you need to know about this magnificent African cloth, which was created for special occasions only.

Traces a boy's journey across India as he searches for a sacred buffalo bell stolen from his tribe.

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 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 this book, Nina Sylvanus tells a captivating story of global trade and cross-cultural aesthetics in West Africa, showing how a group of Togolese women—through the making and circulation of wax cloth—became influential agents of taste and history. Traveling deep into the shifting terrain of textile manufacture, design, and trade, she follows wax cloth around the world and through time to unveil its critical role in colonial and postcolonial patterns of exchange and value production. Sylvanus brings wax cloth’s unique and complex history to light: born as a nineteenth-century Dutch colonial effort to copy Javanese batik cloth for Southeast Asian markets, it was reborn as a status marker that has dominated the visual economy of West African markets. Although most wax cloth is produced in China today, it continues to be central to the expression of West African women’s identity and power. As Sylvanus shows, wax cloth expresses more than this global motion of goods, capital, aesthetics, and labor—it is a form of archive where intimate and national memories are stored, always ready to be reanimated by human touch. By uncovering this crucial aspect of West African material culture, she enriches our understanding of global trade, the mutual negotiations that drive it, and the how these create different forms of agency and subjectivity.