Starting with the premise that clothing is political and that analysing clothing can enhance understanding of political style, this collection explores the relationships among political theory, dress, and self-presentation during a period in which imperial and colonial empires assumed their modern form. Organised under three thematic clusters, the volume's chapters range from an analysis of the uniforms worn by West India regiments stationed in the Caribbean to the smock frock donned by rural agricultural labourers, and from the self-presentations of members of parliament, political thinkers, and imperial administrators to the dress of characters and caricatures in novels, paintings, and political cartoon. With its interdisciplinary approach, the book will appeal to nineteenth-century cultural and social historians and literary critics as well as advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students whose research and teaching interests include gender, politics, material culture, and imperialism.

Introduction: Jim Crow's tuxedo - Kevin A. Morrison

Part I: Between metaphor and materiality
1 Smock frock farmer or smock frock radical? Political interpretations of one garment in nineteenth-century England - Alison Toplis
2 A delicate balance of power: Victorian tailors and their gentleman clients - Chris Kent
3 Second-hand clothes, second-hand politics: sartorial exchange, social reform, and the work of the novel in Walter Besant's Children of Gibeon -Peter Katz

Part II: Reading appearances
4 'If you want to get ahead, get a hat': manliness, power, and politics via the top hat - Ariel Beaujot
5 Dressing for disinterestedness: Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, and John Morley - Kevin A. Morrison
6 Sartorial subversion and the House of Commons: political identities, meanings and the responses to MPs' dress, c. 1850-1914 - Marcus Morris
7 Dressing for the vote in Ford Madox Brown's Work- Janice Carlisle

Part III: Global connections and entanglements
8 Spectacles of grandeur and fabrics for the brave: West India regiments' dress through 1900 - Steeve O. Buckridge
9 'The philosophy of clothes': politics and dress in Melbourne Punch, 1860s-70s - Shu-chuan Yan
10 Gertrude Bell, femme impériale - Elizabeth Bishop

Index

Editor

Kevin A. Morrison is Provincial Chair Professor, University Distinguished Professor, and Professor of British Literature in the School of Foreign Languages at Henan University