Presents a global history of dress regulation and debates around how human life and societies should be visualised and materialised.

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.