The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America

Abstract

Over the course of the eighteenth century, Anglo-Americans purchased an unprecedented number and array of goods. This book investigates these diverse artifacts—from portraits and city views to gravestones, dressing furniture, and prosthetic devices—to explore how elite American consumers assembled objects to form a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. In this interdisciplinary transatlantic study, artifacts emerge as key players in the formation of Anglo-American communities and, eventually, of American citizenship. Interweaving analysis of paintings and prints with furniture, architecture, textiles, and literary works, the book reconstructs the networks of goods that bound together consumers in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Charleston, S.C. Moving beyond emulation and the desire for social status as the primary motivators for consumption, this work illuminates that Anglo-Americans’ material choices were intimately bound up with their efforts to institute civility and to distance themselves from native Americans and African Americans. It also traces colonial women’s contested place in forging provincial culture in British America. As encountered through a woman’s application of makeup at her dressing table or an amputee’s donning of a wooden leg after the Revolutionary War, material artifacts were far from passive markers of rank or political identification. Instead, they actively participated in making Anglo-American society.