“Men of the World”: British Mariners, Consumer Practice, and Material Culture in an Era of Global Trade, c. 1660–1800

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beverly Lemire
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Global Trade ◽  
The World ◽  
Material Practice ◽  
Transnational Exchange ◽  
Rhetorical Authority ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

AbstractGrowing numbers of sailors powered British fleets during the long eighteenth century. By exploring mariners' habits, dress, and material practice when in port, this article uncovers their roles as agents of cultural change. These men complicated material hierarchies, with a broad impact on developing western consumer societies, devising a distinctive material practice. They shaped important systems of transnational exchange and redefined networks of plebeian material culture. Mariners were also endowed with a growing rhetorical authority over the long eighteenth century, embodying new plebeian cosmopolitanism, while expressing facets of a dawning imperial masculinity. Marcus Rediker described eighteenth-century Anglo-American mariners as plain dealers, wageworkers, and pirates, as well as “men of the world.” This international contingent mediated between world communities, while demonstrating new tastes and new fashions. They also personified the manly traits celebrated in Britain's burgeoning imperial age.

Merry and contented slaves and other island myths: representing Africans and Afro-Creoles in the Anglo-American world

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mia L. Bagneris
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Colonial Culture ◽  
Colonial Art ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Reality ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

The chapter analyses the depiction – or lack thereof – of Africans and Afro-Creoles in British colonial art of the West Indies. It places Brunias within the context of other European painters in the British Caribbean during the long eighteenth century, particularly George Robertson and Isaac Mendes Belisario. James Pope-Hennessy and others have dismissed Brunias’s compositions as typical plantocratic propaganda designed to deny the brutal reality of plantation slavery. However, a deeper examination reveals the artist as standing apart from his peers in his attention to the human reality of the black presence in the islands. Brunias is unique in highlighting the African past of his black figures and the continuing influence of this past on the development of a vibrant Afro-Creole colonial culture that exists apart from the world of the planters.

scholarly journals Merging the Human and the Nonhuman: The Object Narrator in The Adventures of a Black Coat

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 148-159
Author(s):  
Ivana Dragoș ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Commodity Fetishism ◽  
The World ◽  
Pedagogical Function

Rooted in the tradition of eighteenth-century circulation novels recounted by an object narrator, The Adventures of a Black Coat (1760) epitomizes the features of this experimental novelistic subgenre by foregrounding a coat which, acting as a homodiegetic narrator, lambastes the world of commodities prompted by the rise of early capitalism. As an object endowed with moral conscience, the coat epistemologically proves to be a reliable narrator that is able to render authentic experience and feelings by getting empirically involved in the world it describes. Worn by a few owners, the coat becomes a sharp observer of society and, most importantly, it foreshadows what Karl Marx has termed “commodity fetishism.” According to Marx, commodities and humans become part of a process that is economically endorsed by exchange. Read in this light, I argue that the text reveals the Marxist process of reification whereby social relations between humans turn into social relations between things. Despite being an object narrator, the coat fulfils a typically eighteenth-century pedagogical function, in that it warns the reader against the degrading morals of a society addicted to material culture.

scholarly journals Inns And Elite Mobility In Late Georgian Britain*

2020 ◽  
Vol 247 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-76
Author(s):  
Daniel Maudlin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
British Isles ◽  
National Network ◽  
Building Technology ◽  
Interior Spaces ◽  
Good Taste ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Everyday Reality

Abstract This paper considers the significance of the spaces and material culture of the ‘principal inn’ as the centre of a distinct world of elite mobility in eighteenth-century Britain. Inns were central to the expansion and improvement of the travel network that brought the British Isles closer together through the long eighteenth century. The turnpike system introduced improved surfaces to old and new roads while new coach-building technology allowed faster movement on those roads. However, it was the national network of inns, regularly and reliably punctuating Britain's roads, that made fast and efficient travel a practical, everyday reality from London to York, Bristol to Holyhead, Edinburgh to Inverness. On arrival the inn provided food and accommodation for travellers, hay and stables for horses and grease for carriage axles. From cross-country travel to crossing the inn-yard, finding a table in the parlour or climbing the stairs to bed, the inn served the traveller across different scales of space and mobility. Moreover, for the elite traveller, inns were not simply blank containers for travel-related activities; they were material constructs that gave those activities form and meaning. Within the principal inn refined interior spaces and well-made, fashionable things placed the elite traveller in a reassuringly familiar cultural space, a bubble of comfort, luxury and good taste which they did not leave from one inn to the next.

CULTURAL CHANGE IN PROVINCIAL SCOTTISH TOWNS, c. 1700–1820

2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
BOB HARRIS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
Urban Change ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
British Isles ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

ABSTRACTIn the decades which immediately followed the union of 1707, most Scottish towns saw limited economic and cultural change. The middle of the eighteenth century, however, marked the beginnings of a new provincial urban dynamism in Scotland, which, from the 1780s or so onwards, was accompanied by far-reaching and rapid cultural change. This article seeks first to establish the scope, nature, and geography of this cultural transformation before discussing its wider historical significance, not only for our view of modern Scottish urbanization but in terms of patterns of urban change within the British Isles in the long eighteenth century. It is a story in part of convergence on Anglo-British cultural norms, but more saliently of the emergence of an increasingly British cultural synthesis, albeit one with distinctively Scottish elements. Another underlying purpose of the article is to re-direct views of Scottish urbanization away from Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen and on to a group of towns which hitherto have barely featured in discussions of British urbanization in this period.

Vanity Fair and the Celestial City

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
Religious Books ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Looking Back

In John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the pilgrims cannot reach the Celestial City without passing through Vanity Fair, where everything is bought and sold. In recent years there has been much analysis of commerce and consumption in Britain during the long eighteenth century, and of the dramatic expansion of popular publishing. Similarly, much has been written on the extraordinary effects of the evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century in Britain, Europe, and North America. But how did popular religious culture and the world of print interact? What religious books were read, and how? Who chose them? How did they get into people’s hands? This study attempts to answer these questions in detail. It explores the works written, edited, abridged, and promoted by Protestant dissenters, Methodists both Arminian and Calvinist, and Church of England evangelicals in the period 1720 to 1800, while also looking back to seventeenth-century and earlier sources and forward to republication and dissemination up to the nineteenth century. Part I is concerned with the publishing and distribution of religious books by commercial booksellers and religious societies, and the means by which readers obtained them and how they responded to what they read. Part II shows that some of the most important publications were new versions of earlier nonconformist, episcopalian, Roman Catholic, and North American works. Part III explores the main literary kinds, including annotated Bibles, devotional guides, exemplary lives, and hymns. The book discusses c.200 writers and provides detailed case studies of popular and influential works.

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