I feel most at home sitting at a loom. Not necessarily because I’m thinking about practices of the past, but because I feel connected to my body and its abilities. Whose bodies make what objects, and for whom?

I spoke with Seth Rockman, a historian of the United States whose areas of interest include labor history. His latest book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery (2024), which focuses on makers and their material histories, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. Rockman is the George L. Littlefield Professor of American History at Brown University.

Stephanie Wong (SW): Probably not surprising to you is that my interest—my big, big interest—is in your process of going to what was then called the Marshfield School of Weaving and bringing a recipe for “negro cloth” and learning how to weave it.

Would you mind talking a little bit about how you came up with this idea? Why did you decide to do it and what was that experience like?

Seth Rockman (SR): As a labor historian very interested in work processes, I found that there seemed to be a large disconnect between my desk job and the 19th-century New England handloom weavers I was writing about. As someone who had virtually no textile experience since a home ec class in middle school, it seemed urgent that I should at least know a little bit about what it might have felt like, or what it might have sounded like or smelled like, any of the kinds of tactile or sensory experiences of making cloth. The paper archive for textiles is intricate and rich: letters from Southern merchants calling for narrower fabrics; from slaveholders arguing about twill weaves versus plain weaves; from New England weavers complaining about having their pay docked because the weight of the finished cloth didn’t add up to the weight of the yarn that they were issued. All of this was utterly mystifying to me as a non-weaver.

So I went to the then Marshfield School of Weaving in Vermont (subsequently, it split into the Newbury School of Weaving and the Weaver’s Croft) and brought the paper records to them. They were very enthusiastic about the possibility of working on this reconstruction. But because I knew nothing about weaving, everything had to be explained to me, down to the most basic tacit knowledge: things that an eight-year-old girl in 1828 would have known, because when she was not winding yarn around a quill to help her mother, she was working on the family’s loom herself. So my teachers had to say, Look, here’s a warping board. This is what you do now. Have you never made a cat’s cradle? No, oh my. What were you doing in elementary school? What are you? What was wrong with you?

The great challenge of our work as scholars—at least, those who are interested in historical reconstruction or the histories of any craft tradition—is that almost none of what we want to know is written down—because it didn’t have to be and it didn’t need to be articulated. So to be in a situation where expert weavers had to talk to me like I was a child was one of the best things that happened to me in the course of my research for this book.

SW: Nice. That’s a great explanation. Also, like, completely, I completely understand. Even as a craftsperson myself, when faced with a loom from the 1800s, I have no idea what this is supposed to do, it’s as big as a room. And now I’m supposed to put my body in it and do the work?

SR: I wasn’t sure that many people who are six feet tall had spent time in the loom that I was using, which was a late 18th-, early 19th-century loom. And so, when you cram yourself in there, you think, I’m wearing this contraption, I’m in this thing. I can’t get out of it.

And that experience of being boxed in led to other kinds of learning. For example: When do you choose to get up? When one of your warp yarns has broken, is it worth going around to the back of the loom to tie it back on; or do you think, I don’t know, no one’s going to notice. It’s going to be 50 yards of cloth going to slaves who I don’t really care about. No one is going to unroll this and say that there needs to be a deduction for this error. I don’t know, maybe I’ll fix it when I need to get up to use the bathroom or when I need to get up to turn the crank to advance a few yards. Maybe then I’ll tie it back, but no urgency.

Just thinking through the trade-offs of quality and quantity wouldn’t have been visible to me at all, because no one ever spoke of it. And until I was sitting in a loom looking down at 1,000 warp ends coming at me, it never would have registered what decisions a weaver had to make.

SW: Could you tell me about the cloth? Both the cloth in the archive that you’re studying—that probably doesn’t exist today—and also the cloth that you yourself made?

SR: The weavers at Marshfield (as it was then called) were more experienced in reproducing very fine fabrics. Rarely were they approached by someone saying, Let’s make something really low grade that’s not very good, as opposed to, Let’s make a beautiful fabric that will be used on the dining room chairs of an elite Boston merchant or a wealthy Virginia planter. But I had found a set of instructions in the archives of one of New England’s leading manufacturers of low-end woolen cloth for enslaved wearers. Technically, it was a contract between the company and a subcontractor, who would hire various local families in southern Rhode Island to make this cloth. They were very specific about what they wanted: the number of warp ends per inch; a warp that would not have doubled yarn (that is to say, yarn that was already two strands twisted together), but two separate single strands pulled through each heddle. In fact, this variety of low-grade cloth was the company’s proprietary innovation, so much so that they took it to the US Patent Office and received a patent for their Double Jersey, as it was called (double, referring to two strands of singles yarn through each heddle).

The instructions also included the weight of the warp yarn. And it was a challenge finding wool yarn that would have the same texture and perhaps low quality as they were using in the 1820s.

The global supply chain for wool in the early 19th century is surprising. There’s a domestic wool market, and American sheep herders in New York State and western Massachusetts are raising enormous flocks. Thomas Jefferson has been experimenting with Merino rams, and American sheep are producing very good wool in terms of the length of the fiber. And, as such, this wool costs more than the market for slave clothing can bear. And so as American manufacturers have to look for supplies of lower-grade wool, they turn to the eastern Mediterranean, to Smyrna in the Ottoman Empire, and they turn to Buenos Aires in the Spanish Empire. These varieties of wool have no other market than low-grade clothing and can be imported cheaply. At least until the United States government seeks to impose tariffs on these imports in the 1820s. But what’s interesting is that manufacturers argue that low-grade wool should come duty-free because there is no competing American wool. No American farmer is raising wool this bad, which tells you something.

So actually, finding yarn today that would meet this low standard was a bit of a challenge, especially when you remember that much of this fiber might have come from goats and other four-legged animals all thrown together and quite dirty. But we found something that we thought would at least approximate the texture of such wool. And then, over the space of a week, we produced about two yards of this cloth; which, of course, a talented weaver in the early 19th century could have made in under an hour. In fact, it took me a couple of days just to figure out the rhythm. Weaving is all about the set-up, and I spent more time dressing the loom than throwing the shuttle.

In designing the fabric, we also looked at a few surviving textile samples that are still affixed to mercantile correspondence in the archival collections of the Rhode Island Historical Society and the Baker Library of Harvard Business School. These samples were two-inch-by-two-inch textile squares, appended to letters asking, Can you make me 500 yards of this? Can you make me 1,000 yards of this? Because this will have the right feel or the right color scheme, or the right weave structure for the slaveholders here in Louisiana or here in South Carolina or here in Mississippi.

All of this was quite exciting for me, because I’m not an experienced maker. But it is for this exact reason that I have some hesitancy about my weaving as an accurate historical reconstruction. Perhaps I could say this fabric approximates its 19th-century inspiration. I learned a great deal at the loom, but I’d hesitate to draw conclusions from the resulting fabric. If I made a suit, a pair of pants, or a coat out of it, would it give us a sense of what it felt like to be enslaved person wearing it? The answer is, of course, no.

Isn’t everyone, in one way or another, complicit in systems of exploitation that sometimes they choose not to see, and that sometimes they can’t see?

SW: It is difficult to understand the true experience of the folks whose labor you study. As historians, I feel like many of us are trying to think about that experience. And how do you think future historians, or perhaps you in the future, might go about doing that?

SR: There are so many problems with transcending our subjectivities; so many difficulties when encountering the violence that structured a past that can’t and shouldn’t be reproduced or approximated. And that creates a real barrier.

But at the same time, as historians, we are committed to inhabiting other bodies and living in other times and making sense of universes that don’t make sense in our own. Our craft requires imagining ourselves across differences of cosmology and spirituality, of material conditions, of the day-to-day experiences of survival. But this gets ever more difficult when our subjects lived on the margins of the societies whose structures of exploitation and exclusion endure to the present day.

That’s why I’ve been thinking about experiential research as a method for identifying questions that you didn’t know to ask, rather than providing answers that you wouldn’t have had otherwise. For example, I’ve been doing some dyeing projects with my undergraduates in a class called “A Textile History of Atlantic Slavery,” and what we stress in that class is, No, you are not pretending to be a West African woman in 1774. No, you’re not pretending to be an enslaved woman on a South Carolina plantation in 1854. You are yourself, you are now, and you’re up to your elbows in a pot of really cold water. When students are toting buckets of water to rinse their fabrics, they realize that water is very heavy. And the questions then follow: How did people in the past move water? How did their backs and bodies experience this work? Who was doing this kind of work? We are then prompted to ask questions about infrastructure, about bodily experience, about the gendered division of labor.

Once we’re asking these kinds of questions, then we can go searching for the answers. An archival record might not prompt us to pose these questions. An experiential research method allows us to envision more things that we want to know about the past.

SW: Can you tell me a little bit more about that class?

SR: I offer this as a seminar for first-year college students interested in history as a disciplinary mode of exploring the past, as well as in textiles and material culture as a particular entry into the past. We start by studying enslaved peoples’ strategies of sartorial resistance throughout the Atlantic world, interrogating the different kinds of evidence—whether visual or textual—that tell us what enslaved people looked like and what they wore. But then we pivot to harder questions about historical methodology and epistemology: about how we know what we know, and about how we deal with the silence and the violence of a slaveholders’ archive that doesn’t often give us what we want, and in fact, may be completely incapable of doing so and often leads us astray.

At that point in the semester, we’re very much looking into the void, right into the abyss. Is there anything we can say with any certainty in light of the inadequacies of the archive? And at that point, we begin to think about different kinds of methods for getting ourselves on slightly solider ground. This is when we begin our experiential research through wax-resist dyeing. I issue the students kits with fabric, candles, tools, and matches, and then set up some dye vats in my yard. They keep notebooks about what they’re doing, and then they write papers about their takeaways from this method of research. Ideally, they grasp that the emphasis is not on the answers that you’ve found by dyeing on an October afternoon in Providence, but rather on the questions you’re now wise enough to ask.

The last third of the class is about the global linkages of textiles: the economic systems that tied India, West Africa, Europe, and the Americas together over several centuries through the textile trade. We finish the class reading Tiya Miles’s book All That She Carried (2022). This is the reward for having spent a whole semester thinking about these issues: they get to see how an incredibly talented scholar puts it all together in a way that is evocative, analytical, and just beautiful.

SW: I feel like this style of teaching history really set students up for being inquisitive in different ways.

SR: Teaching curiosity is perhaps what we really need to be doing at this moment in time, more than anything else. Of course, the students in my textile history class are largely self-selecting, already interested by virtue of designing all the costumes for their high school drama department or coming from a family that collects quilts and goes antiquing every weekend. Students have brought an incredible array of textile skill to this class: sewing, knitting, embroidery.

The students are special. Funny story: On the first day in the fall of 2023, we had to do an obligatory name game. Figuring that they were tired of favorite ice cream flavors or pet names, I asked them to suggest something. Kid raises his hand: Favorite fiber! We go around the room, and each of them is talking about their favorite fiber. They’ve gotten about two-thirds of the way around the classroom, and you can see this one student practically vibrating: Please, please don’t anyone say it. Please don’t. And no one has. So when she says Silk, it is a totally mic-drop moment.

SW: That’s a fever dream. That’s really awesome. You’ve taught this class now for two semesters. What have you learned from your students?

SR: Their expertise as makers has clued me into historical experiences most scholars have glossed right over. A 1930s Federal Writers Project interview with a formerly enslaved octogenarian might reference a grandmother’s sewing prowess, but then a student will say, No, you can’t just skim over by that! Do you know how many hand stitches it takes to do the seam of a dress? If you’ve never handsewn a skirt (and I haven’t), you might need to be reminded of the labor involved. One student reproduced a 19th-century skirt as her final project, and it was all about the stitches. Their reading of primary sources picked up on things that I missed.

And this took me in new directions in my own research. You might remember a discussion of sewing labor in the final chapter of Plantation Goods and the implication of a cloth’s width for a woman’s work routine. If you know how to cut the pieces for a shirt from a 32-inch-wide piece of fabric, it is going to mess everything up when you’re given a bolt of 28-inch-wide cloth. I had seen letters from slaveholders in the 1830s and 1840s complaining about the narrowness of the cloth and how enslaved women didn’t “understand” these fabrics. This wasn’t transparent to me as a historian. Only with students talking about the expertise involved in cutting cloth into the components of a garment did I realize what a difference it made when, say, a New England weaver was haphazard and turned out fabric four inches narrower than the usual variety. That error would reverberate in the lives of people 1,000 miles away who might face extreme forms of violence because they couldn’t meet their daily production quotas. Or they might experience other kinds of privation—a lack of rags for postpartum women, for example—because a wider fabric left scraps while a narrower one did not.

SW: When I read that section of your book, I thought, whoa, it really does make sense. And nowadays, people like cutters for fashion houses in Europe, these people are the ones who make the most money: because it takes so much skill, takes so much savvy, to understand how fabric works, how to use it least wastefully.

Is there anything else you want to talk about?

SR: There is a question that often comes up: What do you want us to do with this history? You’ve told us a story about some fairly nondescript artifacts that move from point A to point B, tracing them from the communities in New England where they’re made to the communities in the plantation South where they’re used. And you make a convincing case that in each of these settings—and all the stops along the middle— they create different possibilities and vulnerabilities for the Americans who encounter them. And you explain the politics of the antebellum United States simply by following these goods. But really, what do you want readers to take away?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this in recent months, perhaps prompted by university endowment divestment debates: What does moral complicity mean? What would it mean to have clean hands? I’ve been dwelling on the fact that these are very old questions. Those of us living today in the era of carbon footprints, fair trade coffee, and sweatshop-free clothing are not the first to confront the moral dilemmas posed by our economic entanglements. The relationships of producers and consumers across great distances are constitutive of capitalist modernity, with centuries of people struggling to make sense of what it means to be entangled with people who they don’t know and can’t see, but whose lives and livelihoods make possible their lives and livelihoods. I want people to recognize that there is a history to what too many of us think is a novel dimension of recent “globalization.” Looking at how people in the past navigated these relationships and dilemmas could be useful for reaching the kind of future we might desire.

But there’s a corollary to this. Some people might think this book offers a smoking gun of complicity: Aha, those sanctimonious New Englanders were just as tied to slavery as the Southerners! But complicity seems too easy. Isn’t everyone, in one way or another, complicit in systems of exploitation that sometimes they choose not to see, and that sometimes they can’t see? What’s interesting then, is not complicity or non-complicity. I suggest we take complicity as a given and then look for the ways in which it is lived at a given moment by specific historical actors. I hope that readers come to see that our own moment doesn’t give us a cut-and-dry option regarding complicity in structures of economic and ecological exploitation. We should start with the premise that it may be very difficult to find ourselves with clean hands under the configuration of the world that we presently inhabit—and then figure out what we want to do about it. 

Featured image: Photograph of Seth Rockman © David DelPoio