The Right to Dress Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c.1200–1800

This is the first global history of dress regulation and its place in broader debates around how human life and societies should be visualised and materialised. Sumptuary laws were a tool on the part of states to regulate not only manufacturing systems and moral economies via the medium of expenditure and consumption of clothing but also banquets, festivities and funerals. Leading scholars on Asian, Latin American, Ottoman and European history shed new light on how and why items of dress became key aspirational goods across society, how they were lobbied for and marketed, and whether or not sumptuary laws were implemented by cities, states and empires to restrict or channel trade and consumption. Their findings reveal the significance of sumptuary laws in medieval and early modern societies as a site of contestation between individuals and states and how dress as an expression of identity developed as a modern 'human right'.

List of illustrations; List of figures; List of maps; List of tables; List of contributors; Acknowledgements; The Right to Dress: The World of Sumptuary Laws, c.1200–1800 Ulinka Rublack and Giorgio Riello; Part I. Sumptuary Laws in Medieval and early modern Europe: 1. The right to dress: sartorial politics in Germany, c.1300–1750 Ulinka Rublack; 2. Playing by the rules? Dressing without sumptuary laws in the low countries from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century Isis Sturtewagen and Bruno Blondé; 3. 'Outlandish superfluities': luxury and clothing in Scottish and English sumptuary law, fourteenth to the seventeenth century Maria Hayward; 4. Regulating sumptuousness: changing configurations of morals, politics, and economics in Swiss cities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries André Holenstein; 5. Dangerous fashion in Swedish sumptuary law Eva I. Andersson; Part II. Enacting Sumptuary Laws in Italy: 6. Sumptuary laws in Italy financial resource and instrument of rule Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli; 7. Defending the right to dress: two sumptuary law protests in sixteenth-century Milan Catherine Kovesi; 8. Against the sumptuary regime: sumptuary prosecutions in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Padova Luca Molà and Giorgio Riello; Part III. The European Maritime Powers and their Empires: 9. Luxury, novelty, and nationality: sumptuary legislation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain Amanda Wunder; 10. Sumptuary laws in Portugal and its empire from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century Francisco Bethencourt; 11. 'Splendour and magnificence': diplomacy and sumptuary codes in Early Modern Batavia Adam Clulow; 12. Race, clothing and identity: sumptuary laws in colonial Spanish America Rebecca Earle; 13. Sartorial sorting in the colonial Caribbean and North America Robert DuPlessis; Part IV. Early Modern World Empires: 14. 'Grandeur and show': clothing, commerce, and the Capital in early modern Russia Matthew P. Romaniello; 15. Women, minorities, and the changing politics of dress in the Ottoman Empire, 1650–1830 Madeline Zilfi; 16. Wearing the hat of loyalty: imperial power and dress reform in Ming Dynasty China BuYun Chen; 17. Regulating excess: the cultural politics of consumption in Tokugawa Japan Katsuya Hirano; 18. Sumptuary laws in precolonial West Africa: the examples of Benin and Dahomey Toby Green; Select bibliography; Index.

Giorgio Riello is Professor of Global History and Culture at the University of Warwick and Chair of the Pasold Research Fund. He is the author of four books, including Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge, 2013) which won the World History Association Book Prize 2014. In 2016 he received the Iris Foundation Award for his contribution to the Decorative Arts and Material Culture.
Ulinka Rublack, FBA is Professor of early modern European history at the University of Cambridge, and is a Fellow of St John's College. Her previous books include Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Early Modern Europe (2011), which won the Bainton Prize. She is co-editor, with Maria Hayward, of The First Book of Fashion (2015).