Furniture Design and Colonialism: Negotiating Relationships between Britain and Australia, 1880–1901

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines the transformation of the sociocultural meanings of manufactured goods in the production and consumption relationship between Britain and Australia. A survey of methodological approaches to material culture shows how the dominant research focus on the visible features of design, such as form and style, have obscured less visible feature of production and consumption such as class, labor, and economics. Using the discourse of trade and consumer choice in Britain and Australia, case-study material on furniture highlights the dynamic relationship between the style, form, cost, and the labor of production, and issues of class and national identity. The objects under consideration are suites of domestic furniture designed for colonial Australians in the late nineteenth century. Moreover, at this point in history, furniture was designed, made, and marketed to variously reinforce and challenge social and economic relationships between Britain and Australia. The analysis of this case-study material has wider implications for the study of historic and contemporary material culture in local and global contexts, particularly where substantial political and economic co-dependencies exist between producers and consumers.