Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and America, 1700–1830 , and: Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic , and: Feast or Famine: Food and Drink in American Westward Expansion (review)

Abstract

Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and America, 1 7001830. Edited by John Styles and Amanda Vickery. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. viii, 358. Cloth, $65.00.)Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic. By Dell Upton. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). Pp. x, 395. Cloth, $45.00.)Feast or Famine: Food and Drink in American Westward Expansion. By Reginald Horsman. (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2008. Pp. viii, 356. Cloth, $39.95.)Reviewed by Michelle Craig McDonaldThe objects people selected, purchased, and used have become an important part of how historians interpret American whether in scholarship on metropolitan societies and their emulating colonies, or the relationship between moral economy and political action. This attention to specific goods and the who acquired them, however, is relatively recent. As late as the middle of the twentieth century, consumer studies were largely subsumed within analyses of trade patterns or specific commodity industries. When were considered, they were usually from society's upper classes with the means to acquire quantities and qualities of goods that those below them could envy and only occasionally imitate.As the three books compared in this essay demonstrate, historians have begun to turn the tide. Each volume examines consumption from a different perspective, but together they span two centuries and cross the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and America, 1700-1830 traces the impact of consumers' choices on trans-Atlantic trade and lifestyle in the eighteenth century. Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic explores the forces behind urban development, predominantly on the East Coast, during the early republic. And Feast or Famine: Food and Drink in American Westward Expansion argues that diet influenced migration in the American West throughout the nineteenth century. The edited collection and two monographs share an understanding that the decisions people make about their cities, their homes, their tables, and themselves reveals as much about value systems and national or regional identity as about personal taste. More importantly, these works challenge ideas about commodities and consumption, and break down traditional producer-distributor-consumer patterns by offering more multidirectional models in which demands and preferences are as likely to influence production decisions as producer initiatives are to encourage buyer behavior.Economic history as understood today is little more than a century old. Most nineteenth-century historians were interested in political developments, but by the early 1 880s, they began looking for relationships among technology, state policy, and patterns in prices and wages to explain the complex, industrial societies growing around them in Western Europe. Their work depended on the business of numbers, such as production values and import and export statistics. Ralph Davis, for example, acknowledged that his pioneering comparative study The Rise of Atlantic Economies, like nearly all economic history, was grounded in statistics; for it is usually concerned with the behavior of very large numbers of people, who cannot be treated as individuals (Ithaca, NY, 1973, p. xiii).Yet it is precisely the social, personal, and cultural connections between objects and their users that preoccupy consumer historians today. If the geographic parameters of an Anglo-Atlantic world seem somewhat traditional in Gender, Taste, and Material Culture, the cohorts studied in these English-speaking regions are quite different from those analyzed a generation ago and suggest a range of ways gender shaped buyer behavior and lifestyle in eighteenth-century Britain and North America. Ann Smart Martin, for example, argues that Virginia shopkeepers' accounts filled with men's names mask married women's important contributions in selecting home furnishings. …