Crossroads Research

Lecture Series: Global Trade, Local Fashion: Textile Circulations and National Identities in the Spanish Empire, by Meha Priyadarshini

December 16,2022, 15:00 CET, via Zoom

Global Trade, Local Fashion: Textile Circulations and National Identities in the Spanish Empire

This paper will consider the circulation of textiles in the Spanish Empire and think about how foreign textiles introduced to places such as Manila, Mexico City and Madrid were incorporated into local traditions and customs to eventually become national symbols. The paper will explore what fashion history can offer to studies of the Spanish Empire through specific case studies of textiles and accessories such as the rebozo, the piña kerchief, the paliacate and the mantón de Manila.

Meha Priyadarshini is Lecturer in Early Modern History at University of Edinburgh and currently the Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Global History. Her research covers the areas of global history, material culture studies, colonial Latin American history, and the emerging new field of global Asian studies. She is particularly interested in how we think about the connections between people, places and things in the early modern period. Meha’s first book Chinese Porcelain in Colonial Mexico: The Material Worlds of an Early Modern Trade takes a local approach to a popular export product to explore the broader history of transpacific trade during the early modern period. More recently she has co-edited the book Transpacific Engagements: Trade, Translation and Visual Culture of Entangled Empires.

To register for the talk, please send us an e-mail.

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