Textiles can reveal a great deal about pivotal moments in history across time and place where the economic and social trajectory of the world changes. The focus on the agency or role of textiles is sometimes overlooked as textiles are so pervasive in our lives. They are intimate as clothing, necessary for warmth, useful for industry and pleasing to us as decorative spaces. They are also instruments of cruelty and bondage and it is this vein that I wish to examine, specifically, the use of cordage and fabric in the 1700’s in Colonial America. These two structures are largely unexplored for their role in the slave trade and slave economy as is the context of their production is also unexamined. The production of cordage or ropemaking was considered a physical and dangerous occupation although instrumental in the design of sailing vessels to trade goods for humans between New England, the West Indies, the African Gold Coast and ports in Great Britain in the 1700 and 1800's. Once the practice of slave trading diminished, New Englanders turned to the production of Negro cloth and supplied the plantations in the American South with inexpensive cotton-wool fabric for slave clothing. Behind the trading of goods for humans and the production of cordage and Negro cloth, acts of violence as in the kidnapping of African families and the forced practice of producing the tools of their capture sustained and promoted the actions of the slave traders and the owners of the textile mills who saw profit as a justifiable end through violent means. 

This work asks three questions: 

1. What was the role of the technology (the structural properties of textiles) that facilitated the access to Caribbean and African ports and enabled the transition of Rhode Islanders from slave traders to producers for the slave economy? 

2. What is the relation between the colonial trading practice and violence and when does the trading(economic environment) further violence?

3. What were the conditions of the political and economic environment in the American colonies during the 1700 and 1800’s that sustained the slave trade and economy? And what was the relation between those conditions and violence?