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Visualizing Textiles across the Dutch Empire

Dr. Marsely Kehoe

Independent Scholar, Grand Valley State University

Textiles were a major product traded across the Dutch empire, and have left their trace in trading company documents, surviving swatches and clothing, and visual representations. This presentation demonstrates the capabilities of the Dutch Textile Trade Project to expand our understanding of the ways textiles produced social meaning in the vast Dutch trading empire, by working creatively at the intersection of three types of information: cargo data, and material and visual culture. Starting with a close examination of a family portrait, I'll look at elite cross-cultural self-fashioning as well as what this painting and textile data can elucidate about the experience of the depicted enslaved individuals.

This lecture series is supported with the generous support of the late Alfred Bader (1924-2018).