Record 228 from 2022

This record provides information on sumptuary laws in Saint-Domingue in the 18th century.

In colonial Saint-Domingue in particular, sumptuary laws restricted the types of clothing, fabric and adornments that people of colour could wear in public. Such laws were also passed in the Dutch West Indies and in Spanish Louisiana, where a similar “handkerchief clause” was written into colonial legislation by Governor Esteban Miró as part of his proclamation of good government (bando de buen gobierno) in 1786. This bando decreed that women of colour be “prohibited […] from wearing feathers or jewels in their hair” and forced them to “cover their hair with handkerchiefs as was formerly the custom.”Footnote14 In this way, symbolic racial hierarchies that had been rendered increasingly liminal could be resurrected. As Virginia Meacham Gould notes, “the intent of Miró's sumptuary law was to return […] free women of color, visibly and symbolically, to the subordinate and inferior status associated with slavery.'

Source: Nicole Willson (2022) Sartorial insurgencies: Rebel women, headwraps and the revolutionary Black Atlantic, Atlantic Studies, 19:1, 86-106, DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2021.1908790