The Cambridge Global History of Fashion: Volume 1
From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century

Explores how the long history of fashion from antiquity to c. 1800 created global networks and animated world communities.

Christopher Breward (Edited by), Beverly Lemire (Edited by), Giorgio Riello (Edited by)

9781108495561, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 August 2023

584 pages
23.6 x 16.1 x 3.9 cm, 1.32 kg

Volume I surveys the long history of fashion from the ancient world to c. 1800. The volume seeks to answer fundamental questions on the origins of fashion, challenging Eurocentric explanations that the emergence of fashion was a European phenomenon and shows instead that fashion found early expressions across the globe well before the age of European colonialism and imperialism. It sheds light on how fashion was experienced in a multitude of ways depending on class, gender, and race, and despite geographical distance, fashion connected populations across the globe. Fashions flowered and were reseeded, through entanglements of empire, forced and voluntary migration, evolving racial systems, burgeoning sea travel and transcontinental systems.

1. Global history in the history of fashion, Christopher Breward, Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello
Part I. Multiple Origins of Fashion: 2. Towards a history of fashion without origins, BuYun Chen
3. Fashion in the ancient world, Michael Scott
4. Fashion on the Silk Roads, 500–1300, Susan Whitfield
5. Distinguishing oneself: the European medieval wardrobe, Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli
6. The material regulation of fashion: sumptuary laws in the early modern world, Giorgio Riello
Part II. Early Modern Global Entanglements: 7. Magnificence at the royal courts in the Islamic world, Suraiya Faroqhi
8. Early modern fashion cities: Italy and Europe in a global context, Eugenia Paulicelli
9. Fashioning possibilities: early modern global ties and entangled histories, Beverly Lemire
10. Fashion beyond clothing: early modern visual culture of Eurasian dress, Peter McNeil
11. Fashion and the maritime empires, Meha Priyadarshini
12. Garments of servitude, fabrics of freedom: dress of enslaved and free diaspora African communities in the mid-Atlantic, c. 1700–1840, Steeve O. Buckridge
Part III. Many Worlds of Fashion: 13. 'Black cloth': status and identity in Islamic West Africa, c. 1500–1900, Colleen E. Kriger
14. Fashion and moral concern in early modern Japan, Timon Screech
15. Textiles and fashion in Southeast Asia, Ruth Barnes
16. Fashion in Ming and Qing China, Rachel Silberstein
17. Everyday fashion in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1600–1800, James Grehan
18. Imperialism and fashion: South Asia, c. 1500–1800, Jagjeet Lally
19. Fashion systems in the Indian Ocean World, from ancient times to c. 1850, Sarah Fee
20. Fashion and first peoples in European settler societies, c. 1700–1850, Melissa Bellanta.

Subject Areas: General & world history [HBG]