The fabric of empire : material and literary cultures of the global Atlantic, 1650-1850

Introduction. The material (con)texts of global modernity -- I. The empire's new clothes: British publics and imperial politics, 1650-1720 -- Patterns for plantation: New World silk and the natural history of settler colonialism -- Indo-Atlantic modernity: the early cotton trade and the emergence of racial capitalism -- II. Revolutionary threads: new world publics and insurgent economies, 1750-1800 -- The republic of homespun: material economies of the American Revolution -- Materializing the Black Atlantic: African captives, Caribbean slaves, and Creole fashioning -- III. The fabric of American empire: imagined communities and new geographies, 1600-1865 -- Oriental America: silk geographies in the era of the early republic -- Empires in rags: hemispheric American material and literary texts -- Epilogue: weaving revolution in the global south.