Building the British Atlantic World: Spaces, Places, and Material Culture, 1600–1850 ed. by Daniel Maudlin, Bernard L. Herman

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS BUILDING THE BritishAtlantic WORLD Buildingthe BritishAtlantic World:Spaces,Places,and Material Culture, 1600-1850, edited by Daniel Maudlin and Bernard L. Herman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. ISBN: 978-1-4696-2682-6 Paperback: 352 pages Since I started teaching a survey of early American art five years ago, I have been on the prowl for a book that narrates the architectural history of the Atlantic world in a compelling way,that challenges standard tales of top-down cultural transmission , and that explores the diversity of experiences and geographic centers of the long eighteenth century. My wait is over. Building the British Atlantic World: Spaces, Places,and Material Culture, 1600-1850, edited by Daniel Maudlin and Bernard L. Herman, tackles the creation of transatlantic cultural identities through the built environment. The breadth of the book's scope and the depth of its individual essays ensured its immediate relocation from my bedside table to my students' reading list. Despite its humble claims to incompleteness, the book's thirteen highly readable essays offer a remarkably inclusive re-evaluation of the British worlds built on both sides of the Atlantic from the seventeenth century through the early nineteenth . Representing anthropology, literature, and the histories of architecture, material culture, art, and the early modern period, its authors unite around a methodological approach that treats the material world as a primary document. Rooted in the now generation-old field ofvernacular architecture studies, the essays employ deep and original research. The book also engages postcolonial theories of cultural hybridity and transatlantic models of exchange developed in other disciplines. Organized into thematic categories-government, religion, commerce, and domestic-the chapters operate as case studies of specific built environments, building types, or demographic groups. Some essays are tightly focused, while others cast a wide geographic or temporal net. Anna 0. Marley targets Thomas Jefferson's dining room picture hang, for example, while Peter 48 Benes aggregates data for more than two thousand meetinghouses over 150 years. Many take a comparative approach to understand how ideas and ways of making migrated or persisted across various networks. Stephen Hague and Carl Lounsbury compare buildings in England and the colonies. Daniel Maudlin looks to the homes people made in Nova Scotia, New England, and the Scottish Highlands. Building the British Atlantic World untangles the web of identities formed in the British Atlantic at the same time it respects the interdependence of the threads. The book is as much about the formation and dissemination of a coherent transatlantic identity as about its subversion or dissolution-conscious or not. It trades long-repeated apocryphal tales ofrude coloniststranslating English pattern books for the simultaneous cultural exchanges betweenhigh-styleand vernacularforms. PeterGuillecyinterrogates the methods by which English artisans transported ways of making from dock to dock, while Bernard L. Herman repositions London itself as a "borderland" after the Great Fire of 1666. Styleremains a concern for many ofthe authors-and rightly so. It was a way to proclaim one's belonging and taste and to manufacture a sense offamiliarity far from one's homeland. But the essays acknowledge that the exterior sameness of classical design often smoothed over differences in structure and meaning determined by the persistence of local traditions or the particulars of site. Lee Morrissey, for example, repositions the idealized classicism of Drayton Hall (the ultimate pre-Jefferson example of Palladian architecture in America for every survey student) in its context as a slave-built structure. The essays wrestle with problems of meaning and attack head on the intention of the producer and perception of the consumer of a place-and sometimes the tension between the two. Emily Mann argues that the early fortifications ofVirginia, Bermuda, and Barbados served both the practical considerations of protecting colonists and the psychological need to reassure them of a settlement's safety and permanence. Alison Stanley chronicles "Praying Towns" as a means for Native Americans to convince Puritan missionaries of their fitness and willingness to accept Christianity and as a public relations ploy by the New England Company for investors back home. Whether personal or imperial, politics lurk in the background behind every choice. Building theBritishAtlantic World introduces new subjects as well as...