The best books about the first consumer revolution

I’ll bet that you, like me, wear cotton clothes all the time. Before the eighteenth century, we could not have done so, or only on special occasions. You or I might have owned a bright calico skirt or fancy vest, but maybe not. Garments like those were expensive and hard to get, because they had to be imported from India, where they were woven and dyed by hand.

In this beautifully illustrated, prize-winning book, the Italian-British historian Giorgio Riello explains with remarkable clarity the multiple innovations from consumer choices to new technology that transformed cotton textiles from yesterday’s luxury into today’s necessity.

Of all the recent books on cotton and consumption, this is by far the best.

When we think of fashion, we tend to envisage attention-getting, usually very expensive clothing. And because many of those pieces have been carefully preserved, most historical works also focus on costly luxury apparel.

But as John Styles, one of today’s most imaginative historians, demonstrates in this gorgeous book, fashion is not just a matter of big-name designers who show in Milan, Paris, or New York. Having discovered a wealth of new sources—fabric swatches pinned onto orphan records are just one of them—Styles reconstructs the ways in which ordinary Britons created apparel styles during the first “Consumer Revolution.”

Across the globe, silks have been the most prized textiles for a very long time. They are also among the most expensive, owing to the difficulties and skills involved in cultivating silkworms, unreeling and spinning raw silk, and then weaving it into cloth.

Despite the complications involved, silk’s desirability led settlers throughout the colonial Americas to try time and again to establish silkworm-raising and silk-making enterprises. Their ambitions were just as repeatedly frustrated.

Ben Marsh’s beautifully written, deeply researched study tells why they kept trying and why they kept failing. When I first encountered this book, I wondered whether a study of flop after flop could possibly be interesting. I wonder no longer. Failure turns out to make for a fascinating story.

Luxury is not usually associated with slavery. But in the colonial Americas, it could be. Sometimes, because some enslaved men and women were tailors and seamstresses, and some of the clothing they created was costly. More often, however, because some enslaved people got their hands on expensive, fashionable clothing.

Historians have begun to tell this story, and few do it better than the young scholar Tamara Walker. In this superb study, Walker tracks down all sorts of sources, written and pictorial, to describe the many ways that enslaved individuals acquired fine clothing in Lima, Peru, a Spanish-American colonial capital renowned for its residents’ opulent apparel.

Exquisite Slaves adds a fresh dimension to the exciting scholarship that is revealing how marginalized groups have obtained goods usually forbidden to them.

I like a good wine (though Madeira isn’t one of my favorites). I like even more a book that tells me about wine—and about many other things that I had not previously connected to wine. That’s what Oceans of Wine does and does magnificently.

David Hancock is a pioneering scholar who has taught us to understand the Atlantic Ocean “world” as an interconnected space of exchanges that remade all the individuals and societies surrounding it. In this book, he shows how merchants in Britain, Portugal, and British North America transformed Madeira from a rather ordinary wine into a transatlantic bestseller.

Like most of my favorite historians, Hancock has dug up a treasure trove of unexplored sources to write a big story in a wholly new way.