Cloth And Conquest
The question I keep coming back to is a simple one, and I have never found a simple answer to it. The colonial project that covered the bodies of people across Polynesia, Africa, the Americas and Australia was described at the time, and has been described since, as a moral project—a civilising effort, a gift of decency to people who had been living without it.
What I find myself asking is how much of it was also a commercial one? Whether the missionaries and the mill-owners needed each other more than either would have cared to admit. Whether the shame that was exported with the cloth was partly a sales strategy.
This is not a question I can answer with any confidence. What I can do is lay the pieces I have found beside each other and notice what they suggest.
The first steam-driven textile mills appeared in Britain in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century, the industrial production of cloth had so far outrun domestic demand that British manufacturers needed new markets, and they needed them urgently. The factory system created, as one account I have read describes it, “the levels of mass production and cost efficiency that enabled British manufacturers to export inexpensive cloth and other items worldwide.” The cloth had been made. It needed buyers. And the buyers needed to need it—which meant, first, being persuaded that the bodies they were currently not covering required cover.
I am not proposing a conspiracy. I do not think mill-owners in Manchester sat down with missionaries from the London Missionary Society to divide the Pacific between them, the missionaries promising to generate the demand that the mills would then satisfy. What I notice is something more diffuse and therefore perhaps more durable: that the economic interests of the textile industry and the theological interests of the missionary project happened to align perfectly, and that the alignment was convenient enough to generate its own momentum. The missionary arrived in Samoa or Bechuanaland and told the people there that their bodies required covering. The trading vessels that arrived in the same harbours had the covering available. The transaction was presented as salvation. It was also, straightforwardly, a sale.
What I have read about Victorian health doctrine makes this stranger still. The prevailing medical opinion in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century held that wool worn next to the skin was the most healthful fabric for all climates, all year round. A health tract published in 1863 argued that wool prevented “coughs, colds, diarrheas, dysenteries and fevers” and “many sudden and premature deaths from croup, diphtheria and lung diseases.” This was the climate science of the period: wool kept the body’s natural heat from dissipating, and the dissipation of that heat was the mechanism of disease. The tract was written for northern European bodies, in a northern European climate, where the argument had a certain logic. It was applied everywhere regardless.
What I have read about the health consequences in the tropics is different. Documents on colonial clothing and tropical health makes clear that the heavy woollen and cotton garments imposed on equatorial populations, far from protecting them, created new disease vectors. Fabric that retained heat and moisture in humid climates became a breeding environment for skin conditions, fungal infections, and—critically—respiratory disease. The populations of the Pacific Islands, of sub-Saharan Africa, of the indigenous communities of the Americas and Australia, had developed over centuries their own relationships with heat and exposure. Body paint, oil, and minimal covering were functional adaptations to the climates they lived in. What was imposed in their place was clothing designed for Manchester winters, produced in factories that had no interest in the climates to which their output was being sent.
What I have found in reading about Canada’s indigenous residential schools touches on this from another angle. The children taken into those schools were dressed in uniforms—serge in winter, cotton in summer—and the records note that inadequate clothing for the specific conditions of a Canadian winter contributed to illness. But the inadequacy cut both ways: the uniforms were both climatically wrong for the winter and qualitatively alien to children whose traditional dress was adapted over generations to those same winters. The tuberculosis rates in the schools were catastrophic. The overcrowding, the poor ventilation, the unfamiliar clothing, the radical disruption of every bodily practice that had previously sustained health—these combined into conditions that medical historians now recognise as manufactured. The clothing was one element of a broader project of bodily reformation, and the bodily reformation had a death toll.
I sit with this material uneasily, because I am aware that the essay I am writing concerns the male body specifically, and the story I have just been describing is not primarily gendered in its horror—it happened to children of both sexes, to men and women of all ages, and the particular vulnerability I have been tracing in relation to the male body is a narrower thing than what colonial clothing imposed. Yet what the two things share is the assumption that the body in its natural condition required correction—that something was wrong with it that required an external intervention to remedy. The shame the colonial project imposed was not only a shame about bodies seen as insufficiently covered. It was a shame about bodies as such, as they had arrived in the world, as they had been lived in by the people who inhabited them.
I have met men who carried this in specific forms. Men whose fathers or grandfathers had had their bodies managed by colonial institutions—mission schools, residential schools, the whole apparatus of imposed reformation—and who arrived at my door with a quality of bodily estrangement that was different from the Augustinian residue I described elsewhere. That residue was shame about what the body desired, about its involuntary responses, about what its exposure might reveal. The colonial residue was something more fundamental: shame about what the body was. Not about what it did, but about what it looked like, where it came from, whose it had been before it became the object of someone else’s improvement project.
I notice I am speculating here beyond what I can strictly establish from what men said to me.
What I can be more certain about is the linguistic evidence. I have read that in several African languages, the words that now exist for “naked” or “exposed” in their contemporary sense of shameful exposure did not carry that weight before the missionary period. The concepts existed—languages have always distinguished between states of dress and undress—but the particular moral freight attached to the unclothed body, the linkage between bare skin and sin, was imported alongside the fabric itself. The new words arrived with the new clothes. The shame was not a discovery of something that had always been there but unfelt. It was a translation into the body of a value system for which the body’s own traditions had no prior equivalent.
I find myself returning to a detail from the Samoan encounter: the bark cloth ponchos that emerged from the meeting of missionary demand and indigenous material. What the scholarship describes is a synthetic object—neither the European garment the missionaries wanted nor the traditional Samoan pe’a that the missionaries could not accept as clothing—but a third thing, produced by the negotiation between two systems with different understandings of what a body required. What I notice about that synthesis is that it was made possible by the fact that the Samoans had materials, techniques, and a tradition of bodily decoration that they brought to the negotiation. The result was not pure imposition. It was also not pure continuity. It was something that neither party had intended and both parties could use.
I begin to wonder whether this pattern—the synthesis emerging from the collision of two systems, neither fully dominant—was more common in the colonial clothing encounter than the dominant narrative of pure imposition suggests. What I have read indicates that the adoption of European clothing was not always simply forced upon people but was also, in some cases, actively chosen, used as a marker of participation in the new economy, a way of acquiring the status that the colonial order distributed in part through dress. Men in some African contexts adopted the suit and collar not only because they were required to but because the suit and collar opened doors. The clothing was a technology of access as much as a vehicle of shame, and the two things were not always distinguishable in practice.
I do not say this to diminish what was lost. What I notice is the complexity of the transaction, which the simple account of imposition misses. People are not passive recipients of shame. They negotiated, they adapted, they used the new material against the grain of what it was intended to mean. And yet the structural result—that by the end of the colonial period, bodies that had moved through the world without the conventions of Northern European modesty were now subject to those conventions, legally, religiously, economically—that result was achieved. The mills kept running. The missionaries kept arriving. The bodies were covered.
What the cover produced, over generations, is still present in the bodies I worked with. Not always legibly—not all of it can be traced. But occasionally a man would arrive carrying something that seemed to come from further back than his own experience, a quality of estrangement from the body’s own ordinariness that had the texture of inheritance rather than biography.
I did not ask him about it. It was not something I could address with my hands, and it was not what he had come for. He had come to be in his body for an hour, in a room where no project of improvement was underway.
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