By the 1780s in the city of Barcelona alone, more than 150 factories shipped calicoes to every major city in Spain and across the Atlantic, from Veracruz to Montevideo. Catalan, Basque and Castilian families sent relatives throughout the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish America, hoping to enrich themselves from the trade in calicoes. Clothing the Spanish Empire narrates the lives of families on both sides of the Atlantic who profited from the craze for calicoes, and in doing so helped the Spanish empire to flourish in the eighteenth century.