The Power Of Objects In Eighteenth Century British America

Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- List of Illustrations -- Introduction -- Chapter 1: Imprinting the Civil -- Chapter 2: The Power of Paint -- Chapter 3: Portraits in Stone -- Chapter 4: Masquerading as Colonists -- Chapter 5: The Art of Concealment -- Chapter 6: Crafting Citizens -- Epilogue -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- V -- W

Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America investigates these diverse artifacts—from portraits and city views to gravestones, dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices—to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key players in the formation of Anglo-American communities and eventually of American citizenship. Deftly interweaving analysis of images with furniture, architecture, clothing, and literary works, Van Horn reconstructs the networks of goods that bound together consumers in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston. Moving beyond emulation and the desire for social status as the primary motivators for consumption, Van Horn shows that Anglo-Americans' material choices were intimately bound up with their efforts to distance themselves from Native Americans and African Americans. She also traces women's contested place in forging provincial culture. As encountered through a woman's application of makeup at her dressing table or an amputee's donning of a wooden leg after the Revolutionary War, material artifacts were far from passive markers of rank or political identification. They made Anglo-American society.

An interdisciplinary study of visual representations of British colonial power in the eighteenth century.

White women who inhabited the West Indies in the eighteenth century fascinated metropolitan observers. In popular prints, novels, and serial publications, these women appeared to stray from "proper" British societal norms. Although many women who lived in the Caribbean island of Jamaica might have fit the model, extant writings from Ann Brodbelt, Sarah Dwarris, Margaret and Mary Cowper, Lady Maria Nugent, and Ann Appleton Storrow show a longing to remain connected with metropolitan society and their loved ones separated by the Atlantic. Sensibility and awareness of metropolitan material culture masked a lack of empathy towards subordinates and opened the white women in these islands to censure. Novels and popular publications portrayed white women in the Caribbean as prone to overconsumption, but these women seem to prize items not for their inherent value. They treasured items most when they came from beloved connections. This colonial interchange forged and preserved bonds with loved ones and comforted the women in the West Indies during their residence in these sugar plantation islands. This book seeks to complicate the stereotype of insensibility and overconsumption that characterized the perception of white women who inhabited the British West Indies in the long eighteenth century. This book will appeal to students and researchers alike who are interested in the social and cultural history of British Jamacia and the British West Indies more generally.

Edges of Transatlantic Commerce in the Long Eighteenth Century examines and challenges the boundaries of the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, with a particular focus on commerce. Commerce as a keyword encompasses a wide range of documented and undocumented encounters that invoke topics such as shared or conflicting ideas of value, affective experiences of the emerging global system, and development of national economies, as well as their opponents. By investigating what gets exchanged, created, or obscured on the peripheries of transatlantic commercial relations and geography in the eighteenth century, the chapters in this collection reimagine the edge as a liminal space with a potential for an alternative historical and aesthetic knowledge. To ground this inquiry in a more material dimension, the chapters engage specifically with what is being exchanged, sold, or communicated across the Atlantic by exploring ideas that are being shaped, concealed, undermined, or exploited through intricate exchanges. With its contributions from multiple contexts and disciplinary perspectives, Edges of Transatlantic Commerce offers insights into relatively neglected aspects of the transatlantic world to cultivate the value that the edges allow us to conceive.

The eighteenth century has been hailed for its revolution in consumer culture, but Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain repositions Britain as a nation of makers. It brings new attention to eighteenth-century craftswomen and men with its focus on the material knowledge possessed not only by professional artisans and amateur makers, but also by skilled consumers. This edited collection gathers together a group of interdisciplinary scholars working in the fields of art history, history, literature, and museum studies to unearth the tactile and tacit knowledge that underpinned fashion, tailoring, and textile production. It invites us into the workshops, drawing rooms, and backrooms of a broad range of creators, and uncovers how production and tacit knowledge extended beyond the factories and machines which dominate industrial histories. This book illuminates, for the first time, the material literacies learnt, enacted, and understood by British producers and consumers. The skills required for sewing, embroidering, and the textile arts were possessed by a large proportion of the British population: men, women and children, professional and amateur alike. Building on previous studies of shoppers and consumption in the period, as well as narratives of manufacture, these essays document the multiplicity of small producers behind Britain's consumer revolution, reshaping our understanding of the dynamics between making and objects, consumption and production. It demonstrates how material knowledge formed an essential part of daily life for eighteenth-century Britons. Craft technique, practice, and production, the contributors show, constituted forms of tactile languages that joined makers together, whether they produced objects for profit or pleasure.

The eighteenth-century home, in terms of its structure, design, function, and furnishing, was a site of transformation – of spaces, identities, and practices. Home has myriad meanings, and although the eighteenth century in the common imagination is often associated with taking tea on polished mahogany tables, a far wider world of experience remains to be introduced. At Home in the Eighteenth Century brings together factual and fictive texts and spaces to explore aspects of the typical Georgian home that we think we know from Jane Austen novels and extant country houses while also engaging with uncharacteristic and underappreciated aspects of the home. At the core of the volume is the claim that exploring eighteenth-century domesticity from a range of disciplinary vantage points can yield original and interesting questions, as well as reveal new answers. Contributions from the fields of literature, history, archaeology, art history, heritage studies, and material culture brings the home more sharply into focus. In this way At Home in the Eighteenth Century reveals a more nuanced and fluid concept of the eighteenth-century home and becomes a steppingstone to greater understanding of domestic space for undergraduate level and beyond.

At the outset of the eighteenth century, many British Americans accepted the notion that virtuous sociable feelings occurred primarily among the genteel, while sinful and selfish passions remained the reflexive emotions of the masses, from lower-class whites to Indians to enslaved Africans. Yet by 1776 radicals would propose a new universal model of human nature that attributed the same feelings and passions to all humankind and made common emotions the basis of natural rights. In Passion Is the Gale, Nicole Eustace describes the promise and the problems of this crucial social and political transition by charting changes in emotional expression among countless ordinary men and women of British America. From Pennsylvania newspapers, pamphlets, sermons, correspondence, commonplace books, and literary texts, Eustace identifies the explicit vocabulary of emotion as a medium of human exchange. Alternating between explorations of particular emotions in daily social interactions and assessments of emotional rhetoric's functions in specific moments of historical crisis (from the Seven Years War to the rise of the patriot movement), she makes a convincing case for the pivotal role of emotion in reshaping power relations and reordering society in the critical decades leading up to the Revolution. As Eustace demonstrates, passion was the gale that impelled Anglo-Americans forward to declare their independence--collectively at first, and then, finally, as individuals.

This Element presents new cultural, social, and economic perspectives on the eighteenth-century London masquerade through an in-depth analysis of the classic domino costume. Constructing the object biography of the domino through material, visual, and written sources will bring together various experiences of the masquerade and expand the existing geographical, chronological, and socio-economic scope of the entertainment beyond the masquerade event itself. This Element will examine the domino's physical and figurative movements from the masquerade warehouse, through eighteenth-century fashionable society, and into print and visual culture. It will draw upon masquerade warehouse records, newspapers, manuscripts, prints, and physical objects to establish a comprehensive understanding of the domino and how it reflected contemporary experiences of the real and imagined masquerade. Analysing the domino through interdisciplinary methodologies illustrates the impact material and visual sources can have on reshaping existing scholarship.