Novels, Needleworks, and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, Chloe Wigston Smith

In Novels, Needleworks, and Empire, cloth and story converge to draw a new map of the eighteenth-century Atlantic — one stitched through with needle and narrative rather than cannon and treaty. Instead of treating women’s domestic handiwork as an afterthought to the great political projects of empire, Chloe Wigston Smith places these acts of making — embroidery, sewing, samplers, beadwork — at the centre of a material history that is as much global as it is intimate. She shows how images from the Atlantic world, carried through prints, fiction and object, found their way into women’s hands and onto the fabric they stitched, thereby placing visions of empire “within arm’s reach”. This is not textile history alone, but an interdisciplinary entanglement of objects, texts and practices that captures how women — across social classes, including makers of colour and Indigenous women — used domestic craft to think about place, mobility, race and colonialism.

The narrative feels uncannily modern in its sensitivity to material culture: textile as archive, thread as metaphor, needlework as a global lexicon. Wigston Smith’s approach is as attentive to the grain of history as a fine embroidery sampler — exploring how the novel and the needle were both tools with which women made sense of a world in motion. For those drawn to the layered life of cloth — its shape, its patterns, its social and visual histories — the book offers texture, insight and a compelling argument about how the global and the domestic were interwoven in the long eighteenth century.

About the Author
Chloe Wigston Smith is a professor of eighteenth-century literature at the University of York (UK), where she teaches in the Department of English and the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Her scholarship explores intersections between literature, material culture and social history, especially focusing on clothing and domestic life in the eighteenth century. She is also the author of Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. As a scholar of novels and needlework alike, Wigston Smith brings a nuanced awareness of how objects and texts carry meaning across time and terrain.

Publication date: 2024
Publisher: Yale University Press
Pages: 312
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780300270785