84 books like Oceans of Wine

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’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.

Mises was often referred to as the “godfather of Austrian Economics” for his voluminous contributions to economic science. This book is his most well-known and hefty treatise. 

Mises expertly walks the reader through his explanation of economics being a branch of praxeology, the study of the implications of human action. With a passionate writing style, Mises pulls no punches on his critics while providing the reader with a graduate-level economic education without the often-confusing technical jargon academic courses often impose on students.

Mises uses explanatory language rather than mathematical equations and graphs to make his points. The book is not light reading, however, and should not be attempted without first gaining some understanding of the Austrian School of Economics. And weighing in at nearly 900 pages, expect to set aside some time to get through it. But it will be time well spent.

Mangan’s work completely changed the way that I thought about the colonial mining industry and the complexities of Andean gender systems. Through careful case studies and historical scholarship, Mangan gives voice and texture to the lives of Andean market women, artisans, and ordinary miners who filled the streets of Potosí and its surrounding communities. Trading Roles translates global histories of credit, market capitalization, and urbanization into intimate details of family and community life, and in so doing makes it clear that gender was – and is – a central part of Andean mining history. Readers interested in the interactions of gender, commerce, and Indigenous politics in urban spaces will be well-served by Mangan’s work.

This book examines the exotics imported into China during the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-907) and depicts their influence on Chinese life. During the three centuries of Tang came into the land the natives of almost every nation of Asia, all bringing exotic wares either as gifts or as goods to be sold. Ivory, rare woods, drugs, diamonds, magicians, dancing girls—the author covers all classes of unusual imports, their places of origin, their lore, their effect on fashion, dwellings, diet, painting, sculpture, music, and poetry.

This book is for students of Tang culture and laymen interested in the same topic. Its author Edward Schafer was an eminent American sinologist.

In The Confusions of Pleasure Timothy Brook captures the consternation of a local official as he witnesses the cultural and economic changes wrought by the rise of private wealth in the late Ming, (c. 1600). Unable to raise adequate revenue or to adapt the conservative agrarian foundations of its legitimacy to changing times, the Ming eventually collapses from within, unable to protect itself from marauding bands led by a disgruntled former government post station worker and subsequent invasion by a foreign force. Yet, those who are able to adapt to changing times survive. The resonances for our own day are multiple and apt. 

Colleen Kriger illuminates the commercial exchanges between European and Africans in the Upper Guinea Coast, a region covering present-day Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, between 1680 and 1715.

Explaining how these economic exchanges relied on existing West African trading routes, Kriger examines the role of England’s Royal African Company which lead the trade of enslaved Africans in the region.

West African commodity currencies such as bar iron, cloth, and cowry shells were carefully organized in bundles that became unities of measure and exchange in the Upper Guinea trade external trade in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

She underscores the cultural norms underlying economic exchanges. For example, exchanging gifts to start and continue the trade was a central protocol. Kriger’s book ultimately shows that the trade in people was shaped by the creation and exchange of things.

Covo investigates long-neglected economic aspects of the Haitian Revolution. Beginning in the pre-revolutionary period, when the French called the colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) the “Pearl of the Caribbean,” this deeply researched book spotlights the role Haiti played as a commodities hub during the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions. I find this book particularly important because it shows how imperial trade and racial capitalism defined the age of commercial republicanism.