European settlers in the Atlantic colonies brought dress regimes with them, and they retained commercial, political, cultural, and personal links with their homelands that could serve to perpetuate styles, habits, even garments. Yet in the colonies they encountered diverse geoclimatic conditions and socioeconomic ecologies, disposed of dissimilar resources, and developed novel ambitions and identifications. How they adapted sartorially to their new environments is the subject of the next two chapters. Employing sources concerned particularly with Jamaica, Saint-Domingue, and Salvador da Bahia, Chapter 5 investigates free settler dress regimes in tropical Atlantic colonies. It begins with contemporary accounts that identified but disparately evaluated a cluster of issues defining torrid-zone free settler dress, then establishes the general sartorial profile of the three colonies, before focusing on the role of some specific social groups in promoting or resisting sartorial change.

“Colonial livery” in the eyes of contemporaries

As the excerpts from the French missionary and botanist Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre and the Anglo-Jamaican planter Edward Long indicate, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century commentators often remarked on the allegedly ostentatious dress of settlers in tropical American colonies. By some accounts, virtually all colonists indulged a taste for luxury, even to excess.