Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830

Edited by John Styles and Amanda Vickery

Essays by Bernard L. Herman, John Styles, Robert Blair St. George, Karen Lipsedge, Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, Claire Walsh, Ann Smart Martin, Amanda Vickery, Linzy Brekke, Jonathan White, Amy H. Henderson, Hanna Greig, and Kate Retford

Published by the Yale Center for British Art and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in association with Yale University Press

368 pages, 10 x 7 inches, 84 illustrations, cloth, ISBN 978-0-300-11659-5

Publication date: February 28, 2007

Description

Between 1700 and 1830, men and women in the English-speaking territories framing the Atlantic gained unprecedented access to material things. The British Atlantic was an empire of goods, held together not just by political authority and a common language but by a shared material culture nourished by constant flows of commodities. Diets expanded to include exotic luxuries such as tea and sugar, the fruits of mercantile and colonial expansion. Homes were furnished with novel goods such as clocks and earthenware teapots, the products of British industrial ingenuity. This groundbreaking book compares these developments in Britain and North America, bringing together a multidisciplinary group of scholars to consider basic questions about women, men, and objects in these regions. In asking who did the shopping, how things were used, and why they became the subject of political dispute, the essays show the profound significance of everyday objects in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.