Commodifying Fibre and Flesh: Guinea Cloth and the Dutch Slave Trade
Written by Maggi Bresden, McGill University
Edited by Rebecca Bennett and Courtney Squires
Of the many visual elements that construct Albert Eckhout’s 1641 African Woman and Child (fig.1), the blue-and-white checked cotton garment tied around the subject’s midriff is not what immediately signifies her violent dehumanisation. It is, rather, the woman’s bare breasts, augmented by her erect posture, and the ear of corn that gestures towards her genitals, that seem to offer her body to the viewer for undisputed visual consumption. This cotton cloth functions beyond a mere bodily adornment or covering, visually reifying the woman’s status as an enslaved individual. I seek to evidence the ways in which cotton was used both materially and visually to mediate the commodification of Black life by the Dutch. Drawing on evidence from trading company documents and the visual culture of colonial actors in Dutch Brazil—including Albert Eckhout’s 1641 African Woman and Child and African Man (fig. 3) and Zacharias Wagner’s c.1641 Molber Negra (fig. 4), Omem Negro (fig. 5), and Slaves Carrying a Covered Hammock (fig. 6), from Thier-Buch— I will make visible the ways the Dutch approached the trade in both cloth and bodies with what art-historian and Black diasporic scholar Anna Arabindan-Kesson calls “speculative vision.” Through the semantic and visual conflation of fibre and flesh, the Dutch sought to legitimise the slave trade by reducing Black individuals to their productive potential, obfuscating the violence that characterised these practices in reality. I will demonstrate that when commodified by the Dutch, cotton became imbued with a social life of its own, ultimately becoming an active agent in the constitution of the “social death” of the enslaved individuals it both bought and clothed.
Fig. 1: Albert Eckhout, African Woman and Child, 1641. Oil on canvas, 282 x189 cm. National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen.
1624 marked the beginning of Dutch operations to overtake landholdings in Brazil in an effort to take control of the highly profitable sugar plantations along the Northeastern coast.[1] When the Dutch West India Company (WIC) secured its status as a major stakeholder in 1630, governance saw an exchange to Dutch jurisdiction, and the company set its eyes on maximising profit through sugar exports. As a result of the climate and labour conditions, plantation life in New Holland was incredibly harsh, and the Dutch quickly realised upkeep of operations would not be possible without imported chattel labour.[2] Following the 1637 takeover of the Portuguese-occupied Fort of Elmina, the WIC rapidly expanded their involvement in West Africa, monopolising trade in the region and trafficking individuals for forced exportation to New Holland. To facilitate this exchange, however, the Dutch required jurisdiction over a commodity that would allow for this purchasing of human life. Cotton cloth was perfect: highly desirable amongst local African populations, easily transportable, and in ample-supply. As a consequence of trade networks, tastes for internationally produced cloth were ripe in Africa, and the gifting and exchange of such materials on the Guinean coast became a prerequisite to trade with local communities. These textiles were procured in Asia by the East India company, returned to Europe for repackaging, and then loaded on ships to be traded in African markets. There, they were either gifted to those in high ranking social positions to establish amicable diplomatic ties, or used to purchase commodities for export. Cotton textiles, and guinea cloth in particular, became one of the first goods to be traded by the Dutch for human life, eventually becoming the largest commodity category used to make purchases along the West African coast in aggregate.[3]
Fig. 2: Page from Sample Book from Danish Guinea, 1727. The Danish National Archives, Vestindisk-Guineisk Kompagni, Direktionen, Breve og dokumenter fra Guinea, 1722-1731, (85-1).
“Guinea cloth,” an example of which appears in a 1727 sample book from Danish Guinea (fig. 2), refers to a specific category of cotton cloth produced in India, which could be solid coloured or patterned with checks or stripes. These patterned cloths were produced by loom weaving pre-dyed yarns, often dyed blue with Indigo, rather than piece dying plain fabrics. This type of cloth was explicitly categorised as a commodity for trade, etymologically tied to its eventual site of consumption rather than its site of production on the Coromandel Coast and in Sri Lanka.[4] Through their expansive trade networks, the Dutch facilitated the movement of Guinea cloth from Indian ports to West Africa, where it functioned as the currency of choice to facilitate the slave trade along the Guinean Coast.[5] Within this global system of exchange, cotton thus occupied an incredibly influential position, underpinning the entire system of exchange in which human bodies were traded as commodified goods. The Dutch approached both cotton and the trade of trafficked bodies with what Anna Arabindan-Kesson calls “speculative vision:” a logic of commodification predicated upon the extraction of potential profit.[6] Acknowledging the ways the Dutch mobilised this speculative approach makes visible the market processes at play in which both cotton and human life were framed as commodities through written, visual, and material means.[7]
This relationship between the commodification of cotton and bodies are evidenced throughout the many archival documents preserved from the West India Company’s records. One such example is a 1686 factuur document from the West India Company ship, Wapen van Amsterdam, which travelled from the southern region of contemporary Benin on the Gold Coast to Curacao, an island used primarily as a Dutch slave-trading post in the Caribbean throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The factuur document demonstrates the systems of trade classification mobilised by the Dutch trading companies. According to this document, the lives of eighty-five and a half enslaved people were valued at 684 platillas: a linen cloth produced in Europe and traded along the West African coast in Benin.[8] Although linen platillo cloth varies from the cotton guinea cloth produced in India, the material equation of cloth and bodies makes explicit the function of textiles as value measures for human life. In “From Textile to Text: Cloth, Slavery, and the Archive,” art-historian Carrie Anderson problematises the semantic conflation of fibre and flesh as fungible commodities by the Dutch. What goes unwritten in documents such as the aforementioned factuur, she argues, is any suggestion of the social significance of a particular textile type. “But while a factuur would naturally exclude any consideration of a textile’s social importance, it also draws attention to the state of latency that such documents proscribe, one in which an object’s social life is temporarily suspended, trumped by its commodity status.”[9]
Understanding cotton as currency reframes these textiles by demonstrating the active role they played in facilitating the purchasing of human life. Cloth was not only used as a means to purchase human bodies, but the descriptive parallels evident between textiles and enslaved individuals within trading company documents speak to the Dutch desire to commodify and transform human lives into fungible objects. Dutch officials capitalised upon the use of these empiric documentary modes, subjecting human life to inspection and itemisation, the same callous operations by which non-human goods were assessed and processed. East and West India Company documents followed highly systematic accounting practices that categorised fabrics according to visible attributes such as colour, fibre composition, size, pattern, and quality.[10] This classification system relied on the translation of visible and material properties into qualitative descriptors, echoing the modes of accounting applied to the trade in human flesh. When it came to slaves, values were similarly applied to quantifiable assets including age, sex, and physical strength, with no indication of any social or cultural markers such as belief systems, ancestral ties, or sociopolitical affiliations.[11] “Enslaved men and women of African origin were, effectively, subject to the same market disciplines that shaped the trade in cotton as a commodity,”[12] as both textiles and human bodies became distinguishable only through these observable, quantifiable values. The Dutch recorded only physical properties which affected the trafficked individuals’ labour potential, erasing social markers of identity in a homogenising and dehumanising gesture. When framed in such a manner it becomes evident that even cotton, the very currency used to facilitate this trade of flesh, was imbued with more agency than these violently uprooted individuals. “Textiles, then, shift[ed] easily between commodified and social states,” simultaneously reflecting the market status of enslaved individuals and facilitating their very purchase.[13]
Evidence of the mobilisation of cotton textiles as active social agents is ripe in the representations of enslaved individuals produced by colonial actors in Dutch Brazil. Cotton became imbued with use value, a tool for “bestowing moral and social qualities, of marking both high and low status.”[14] Outside of the African Gold Coast, guinea cloth became the material of choice to clothe displaced African individuals, and became synonymous with enslavement. As some of the earliest representations of Black individuals outside their geographic homelands by Dutch artists, Albert Eckhout’s 1641 African Woman and Child and African Man, and Zacharias Wagner’s Molber Negra, Omem Negro, and Slaves Carrying a Covered Hammock from his 1641 Thier-Buch serve as interesting points of departure from which to interrogate the relationship between guinea cloth and enslavement in Dutch visual culture. The primary subjects of Eckhout’s portraits have become somewhat iconic examples of colonial representations of enslaved individuals. Eckhout painted these monumentally-sized ethnographic images as part of a series designed to decorate the central ‘princely hall’ at West India Company Governor General Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen’s palace Vrijburg.[15] Included amongst the African subjects in the series are three other diptych pairs: Indigenous subjects titled “Tapuya,” “Brazilians” referring to those who were deemed successfully converted to Christianity, and two mixed-race individuals. The categorisation of these portraits as ethnographic images makes visible the coercive discursive work they perform. Unlike traditional portraits, predicated on encounters with real-life sitters, ethnographic portraits accentuate characteristics of an individual that are not their own, but rather elements of a larger, usually ethnic or religious group. In doing so, such images homogenise their human subjects, while simultaneously implying a factual basis for these often falsified ethnographic particularities. “But despite this specificity of detail, the figures in these works did not create these images—these representations were made for the visual consumption of someone else.”[16]
Fig. 3: Albert Eckhout, African Man, 1641. Oil on canvas, 273 x 167 xm. National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen.
Scholarship attending to the pair of African subjects has foregrounded the ways in which the paintings perform productive discursive work in framing the African individuals as naturally suited to lives of servitude. Eckhout pays careful attention to corporeal rendering in both portraits, precisely articulating the subjects’ individual muscles and tendons to emphasise their strength and physical virility. This attention proclaims these individuals’ capacity to perform physical labour, suggesting that they are the subjects most naturally suited to the toilsome realities of plantation life in New Holland. Contemporary scholarship on the African diptych however, reveals a more nuanced reality when it comes to the identities of the two primary subjects. While the female portrait legibly depicts an enslaved individual, inquiries into the geographic and iconographic programs of the male portrait suggest an alternative identity. The natural elements of the female portrait—the coastal landscape, ripe with wax palms and a papaya tree—are all indicative of her location within the new territory of Dutch Brazil. While the male subject similarly occupies a coastal landscape, the palm tree in his portrait is a date palm, a species local to areas where the Dutch had claimed territory in West Africa, not the Carribean.[17] This geographic dissonance is further underscored by the presence of an elephant tusk at his feet; although such materials could have been traded and transported across the Atlantic, there is little reason an entire tusk would appear alongside an enslaved individual in the context of the new colony.
The presence of weapons in the male portrait is yet another element indicative of these discontinuities. While colonial artists frequently depicted individuals of African origin with rudimentary artefacts or tools to foreground a perceived non-civility or temporal lag, the weapons in Eckhout’s portrait are far from elementary. The man’s sword, fastened to his waist upon the wrapped guinea cloth, sits within an elaborate holder, and is finished with a yellow-haired tassel. The sword is a ray skin scabbard, ornamented with a red oyster shell, a ceremonial sword type called Akan local to the Gold Coast of Guinea.[18] This type of weapon has been identified as congruent with one type of ceremonial sword present in Johan Maurits’ personal collection, suggesting this item may have been used as a model for the portrait.[19] Not only do these elements physically relocate the male subject to West Africa, but they are incongruent with the identity of someone with enslaved status. While the female subjects’ physical and reproductive potential are underscored through her association with bountiful fruits and the inclusion of her child, these tropes vary in the male portrait. His elaborate ceremonial sword is a highly exclusive weapon, possessed only by African men of high rank including noblemen and tribe leaders. Art-historian Rebecca Parker Brienen suggests that given the geographic location of the man and his obvious autonomy given the presence of weapons, “Eckhout surely meant this man to be identified as an African trader from the Gold Coast of Guinea.”[20] She similarly notes, however, that the simple cotton loin-cloth covering only his genitals is an incongruent element, as the costumes of such individuals on the Gold Coast would have been far more elaborate in reality.[21] These incongruencies are precisely what Zacharias Wagner attempted to resolve in the annotated copies of Eckhout’s paintings included in his 1641 Thier-Buch: a watercolour series recounting his personal natural-history of Brazil. For Wagner, African subjects in Brazil had to be slaves; he could not conceive of any other Black individuals in this new world environment.[22] Such a reality becomes visible in the artists’ accompanying annotations to the portraits. Here, Wagner states these subjects were brought to Brazil from Africa, where they were sold as slaves to the Portuguese, who he claims treated them very poorly and subjected them to incredible violence.[23] Accompanying this written description are multiple visual elements underscoring these individuals’ enslaved status.
Fig. 4: Zacharias Wagner, Molber Negra, plate 98 from Thier-Buch, 1641. Watercolour on paper. Private collection.
Fig. 5: Zacharias Wagner, Omem Negro, plate 97 from Thier-Buch, 1641. Watercolour on paper. Private collection.
Wagner manipulates the natural landscape of both images, eliminating the palm trees in the female portrait and replacing the lush papaya tree with a whittled stump. Similar strategies are enacted in the depiction of the male, where the artist has replaced the native African date palm with the Caribbean papaya tree from Eckhout’s female portrait. These alterations obscure any geographic indicators that hint to the man’s location on the Gold Coast. The artist also removes the elephant tusk at the man’s feet, replacing it with a shield in an effort to visually reify the male subject’s physical location in New Holland. These details, when read in partnership with Wagner’s annotation, all evidence the artist’s intention for these individuals to be read as enslaved. One gesture in particular, however, concretises this reading. Both Wagner’s African subjects bear evidence of ‘branding:’ a process of physically marking the bodies of enslaved individuals for purposes of identification in a permanent and irreversible manner. Just above the woman’s left breast appears a crowned ‘m’: the signature monogram of WIC governor general Johan Maurits.[24]
Although illegible in photographic reproductions of the image, the space above the male subject’s left pectoral similarly shows evidence of branding. This extremely painful process, a literal act of defacing the body, suggests the desire on the part of masters and colonisers to make the enslaved body legible in both reality and visual culture.
Fig. 6: Zacharias Wagner, Slaves Carrying a Covered Hammock, plate 104 from Thier-Buch, 1641. Watercolour on paper. Private collection.
The third image of enslaved individuals from Wagner’s Thier-Buch, Slaves Carrying a Covered Hammock, attends more precisely to the labour performed by these individuals than their physical characteristics. The group of four African individuals, two men and two women, are depicted transporting a wealthy European woman and baskets of foodstuffs across a lush landscape. Little attention is awarded to the articulation of these individuals’ physical features: their faces bear no signs of individuality or emotion and they all remain consistent in size and stature. While the woman they carry is pictured under an ornate, richly hued blue-and-orange fabric covering, and dons an elaborate dress and headpiece, the enslaved individuals wear minimal guinea cloth wrappings to cover their bodies. Despite the divergences between these sets of images by Eckhout and Wagner, the presence of blue-and-white checked guinea cloth as body coverings remains the defining visual continuity between the two. The presence of this material, not only in Wagner’s renditions of Eckhout’s images, but in the other depiction of slaves from his Their-Buch, suggests that the artist understood the capacity for this cloth to signal enslavement to viewers. Guinea cloth thus functioned beyond facilitating the material exchange of bodies, becoming a visual signifier of slavery: a marker of legibility that deemed the Black body a profitable site of extraction.
In his book, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonisation in the Atlantic World, 1650-1800, textile-historian Robert DuPlessis articulates the ways in which the process of redressing enslaved individuals was a violent and multi-consequential one. Clothing, he argues, not only fulfils utilitarian needs of protection and warmth, but affords diverse aesthetic and social satisfaction through its ability for expressive and symbolic projection.[25] As a mode of outward presentation, clothing both contributes to identity formation, and constitutes one of the major avenues through which a self-fashioning of individuality is made visible to others. Within the context of the transatlantic slave trade, this process of redressing began with the mandatory stripping of the enslaved individuals’ traditional garments. This process of disrobing, DuPlessis suggests, served both pragmatic and symbolic ends. The removal of clothing facilitated the inspection of individuals for infirmity and disease, ensured the absence of weapons that could be used for rebellion or suicide, and reduced the presence of vermin.[26] Figuratively, however, this coercive disrobing broke the individuals’ principal material connections to their communities, families, and local cultures.[27] During the transatlantic voyage, many of these individuals would be held on the ships naked, a gesture that made their bodies vulnerable to both the physical elements and sexual exploitation from colonial actors. For those who survived the passage, “redressing completed the process, materially integrating the enslaved into their new status while conspicuously manifesting proprietors’ acquisition and authority as well as bondspeoples' dispossession and subordination.”[28] While encoded sumptuary laws governing dress for enslaved individuals did not exist in New Holland, legislative provisioning codes widely affected the ways in which such individuals were forced to dress.[29] These regulations formalised a model costume predicated upon a degree of ‘nakedness’ that would have been deemed scandalous for European actors, yet attempted to legitimise the demarcation of such individuals as ‘savage’ and ‘subhuman’ in the colonial imagination.[30] Stripping and redressing, therefore, both constituted a “readable grammar of colonial difference,” and functioned as material and metaphorical acts of violence that facilitated the legitimisation of enslaved status in the eyes of colonial actors.[31]
This violent erasure of identity constitutes one element of how social death was imposed upon enslaved individuals. In his Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, sociologist and historian Orland Patterson articulates this framework of social death to describe the state of slavery, where trafficked individuals occupy a liminal state between physical life and cultural death. “The initial response,” Patterson argues, “in almost all slaveholding societies was to define the slave as a socially dead person.”[32] Desocialised and depersonalised, the slave is violently uprooted from their cultural milieu and forced to sever ties with familiar social life, their existence now entirely tied to their productivity and potential output. Patterson describes the multiple phases through which this process occurs, one of which is “the imposition of some visible mark of servitude.”[33] This legibility—achieved precisely through the process of stripping and redressing individuals in the guinea cloth wraps visible in Eckhout and Wagner’s images—thus constitutes one element of this process of rendering the enslaved socially dead.
This perspective becomes complicated, however, when one considers both the visual culture produced by artists such as Eckhout and Wager and the realities of cotton consumption back on the Dutch mainland. While guinea cloth became an identifiable, legible marker of enslaved status in visual culture, these same fabrics became desirable in the European imagination and consumed by individuals back on national soil. Printed cotton textiles, including guinea cloth, first penetrated European consumption through their introduction within domestic interior design as cushions, valances, bed hangings, and upholstery fabrics.[34] The homes of seventeenth-century Dutch merchants—“surely the social class most receptive to foreign and extra-European consumer influences—were increasingly dominated by such commodities, not just in bedrooms and bed-chambers but also in dining rooms, parlours, and drawing rooms” as the domestic interiors’ most public spaces.[35] The presence of such textiles within these spaces suggests their status as desirable commodities in the European imagination. This desirability is underscored by the relentless attempts to reproduce such fabrics for manufacture on European soil throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Within representations of enslaved individuals, therefore, such fabrics had a dichotomous existence: making visible the bonded and discriminated social position of the enslaved, and simultaneously serving as a site of desirable identification for European viewers. Partnered with the naked bodies of the enslaved subjects, the visibility of guinea cloth in these images not only participates in enacting the social death of the enslaved subjects, but speaks to the interplay between desire and repulsion that was foundational to the transatlantic slave trade as a whole.
Endnotes
[1] Julie Hochstrasser, “Commodities of the West India Company,” in Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 189.
[2] Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 136.
[3] Colleen E. Kriger, “‘Guinea Cloth’: Production and Consumption of Cotton Textiles in West Africa before and during the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200-1850, ed. Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 112.
[4] Om Prakash, “The Dutch and the Indian Ocean Textile Trade,” in The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200-1850, ed. Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 148.
[5] Colleen E. Kriger, “Guinea Cloth,” 106.
[6] Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 8.
[7] Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Black Bodies, White Gold, 17.
[8] Carrie Anderson, “Platillas,” The Dutch Textile Trade Project, ed. Carrie Anderson and Marsely Kehoe, https://dutchtextiletrade.org/textiles/platillas/.
[9] Carrie Anderson, “From Textile to Text: Cloth, Slavery, and the Archive in the Dutch Atlantic,” in Making Worlds: Global Invention in the Early Modern Period, ed. Angela Vanhaelen and Bronwen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 62.
[10] Carrie Anderson, “From Textile to Text,” 58.
[11] Carrie Anderson, “From Textile to Text,” 58.
[12] Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Black Bodies, White Gold, 17.
[13] Carrie Anderson, “From Textile to Text,” 65.
[14] Paul Machado, “Awash in a Sea of Cloth: Gujarat, Africa, and the Western Indian Ocean,” in The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200-1850, ed. Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 171.
[15] Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, 34.
[16] Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, 91.
[17] Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, 134.
[18] Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, 141.
[19] Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, 144.
[20] Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, 144.
[21] Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, 144.
[22] Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, 135
[23] Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, 135.
[24] Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, 135.
[25] Robert DuPlessis, “Sartorial Sorting in the Colonial Caribbean and North America,” in The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 4.
[26] Robert DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic, 130.
[27] Robert DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic, 130.
[28] Robert DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic, 130.
[29] Robert DuPlessis, “Sartorial Sorting,” 363.
[30] Robert DuPlessis, “Sartorial Sorting,” 365.
[31] Danielle C. Skeehan, “Indo-Atlantic Modernity: The Early Global Cotton Trade and the Emergence of Racial Capitalism,” in The Fabric of Empire: Material and Literary Cultures of the Global Atlantic, 1650-1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), 41.
[32] Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 38.
[33] Orland Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 52.
[34] Giorgio Riello, “The Globalisation of Cotton Textiles: Indian Cottons, Europe, and the Atlantic World, 1600–1850,” in The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200-1850, ed. Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 267.
[35] Giorgio Riello, “The Globalisation of Cotton Textiles,” 267-268.
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