Sewn, Mended, Printed: Textile History as Business History

As the Business History Conference meets in Providence in spring of 2024, a stone’s throw from Slater Mill and the industrial heritage of the Blackstone Valley, it feels an appropriate moment to reflect on the business history of textiles in the United States. This panel will explore three stories of textile commerce that have origins in New England, but stretch across regional lines, national markets, and indeed global trade. The panellists will together consider what we learn about textiles from studying their business history, but also what we learn about business practices—the scales, technologies, and morals of commerce—by focusing our lens on the making, distribution, and repair of textiles. Drawing on both archival and material records, we will also examine how textiles afforded the development of other industries. Emily Whitted considers how textiles powered the shipping that made the movement of people and goods in the Atlantic World possible, and how not only the making but also the repair of sailcloth, carried out both in ports and on shipboard, had important implications for this circulation. While numerous histories look to the history of plantation-grown cotton as a source of the nascent ready-to-wear clothing industry, Seth Rockman turns this trajectory on its head, instead asking us to consider how the domestic outwork of sewing undertaken by New England women was used to cloth the enslaved laborers of the plantation South, embedding this textile work within the plantation system. Moving into the 20th century, Marina Moskowitz explores where the lines between handicraft and mass production of household textiles were drawn, by exploring one textile design and printing collective in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Paula de la Cruz Fernandez will chair the panel, bringing her own expertise of the place of textiles in business history to lead a discussion with the audience.