Eighteenth Century Period Research Articles

The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country, 1730–1865 by M. Scott Heerman

Reviewed by: The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country, 1730–1865 by M. Scott Heerman David Roediger (bio) The Alchemy of Slavery: Human Bondage and Emancipation in the Illinois Country, 1730–1865. By M. Scott Heerman. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 248. Cloth, $45.00.) This brisk and elegant book charts what its author calls the "entangled history of human bondage in one region that foregrounds how different iterations of enslavement mutually played out simultaneously" (7–8). The region is the Illinois Country and later the state of Illinois, often especially its southern third. The entanglements are with indigenous presence; transatlantic and internal slave trades; the empires of France, Britain, and the United States; and the bordering empire of Spain for a time. As such, The Alchemy of Slavery is important as a local study of slavery and emancipation and at the same time a significant contribution to transimperial and even borderlands history. Heerman also offers critical reflections on law and social relations, showing how statutes and litigation did not simply shape practice but became a terrain of struggle between enslaved and enslavers. Paired with Tiya Miles's prizewinning The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits (2017), The Alchemy of Slavery announces a new moment in grounding studies of the interpenetrations of slavery with settler colonialism. Heerman begins with an introduction setting forth the plot, but above all the variety of sorely oppressed and remarkably resistant characters, of his study. He situates them amid histories of slavery, particularly those paying close attention to change over time and across space. In this he follows closely the example of his great mentor, the late and missed Ira Berlin. The Alchemy of Slavery then moves to the period of French colonization of Illinois. During that long eighteenth-century period, enslaved people came into bondage variously, with the fundamental distinction being between those coming through a trade in American Indian captives, often women, and those coming as a result of trade in African slaves. The former exchanges often cemented relations with Indian tribes, who vastly outnumbered French settlers, but also carried risks of war when members of tribes were swept into slavery. The Catholic Church baptized the variously enslaved energetically, and in some cases intermarriage with settler men occurred. However, especially given the expansion of corn and meat production using slave labor, the emphasis remained on the continuation [End Page 105] of slavery, not its mitigation. The ruling elite was a slaveholding one, setting a pattern lasting through the period of British control and well into the U.S. one. With the coming of British rule after the Seven Years' War, the legal codes governing slavery changed, but not elite commitment to the system. Indeed, British imperial control began with a new infusion of enslaved African workers. With nominal control over Missouri falling to Spain, Illinois was a borderland in another way, creating new possibilities for planter control and for resistance from below. Most significantly, Heerman shows how changing demographics moved toward African labor and set the stage for collapsing complicated patterns of enslavement into a single "French Negro" category. Heerman then turns to the post-Revolution period, identifying it, as it must have been experienced by settlers and indigenous people in Illinois, as a third regime of imperial control. Indeed, there was briefly a 2.5 stage in which claims of Virginia to Illinois were enough honored to give it a measure of authority. The new U.S. empire developed the "French Negro" category as it "turned many slaveries into one" (3). The victory over Britain brought to Illinois the seemingly firm antislavery language of legislation organizing the Northwest Territory and new influxes of enslaved people, enslavers, and proslavery commitment. The very rich last three chapters of The Alchemy of Slavery describe the balance of forces that determined the course of gradual emancipation in a state that lacked any legislation setting a firm end date for slavery and that arrived at a clear position that children of "French Negroes" were free only through protracted struggle and litigation. Heerman resolutely insists that Illinois remained a slave society, run...

Perfume

This article provides an insight into my final-year project, Perfume, created as part of the Costume with Textiles course at the University of Huddersfield, comprising the design and construction of a costume for a theatre adaptation of Patrick Süskind’s novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Initially, the analysis of the underlying literature, i.e. the script and its key themes, including the motives of identity and scent, built the foundation for the project Perfume. Additional literature research into cultural, historical and artistic influences, as well as practical experiments, influenced the design, textile and making process of a costume that uniquely unites both eighteenth-century period construction and interactive technology. Ultimately, the costume construction reaches completion in its final disintegration. This article explores this alleged contradiction and, as a result, the modifications necessary to make my project work in a practical theatre context. Despite these conflicts, the project succeeds in combining traditional and new craftsmanship, bridging the fields of costume, art and technology in an innovative way.

The Past Ubiquity and Environment of the Lost Earth Buildings of Scotland

This paper investigates the once ubiquitous vernacular earth-built structures of Scotland and how perceptions of such buildings were shaped and developed through periods of intense cultural and environmental change. We focus upon the past exploitation of traditional resources to construct vernacular architectures and on changes in the perception of the resultant buildings. Historic earth-built structures are today deeply hidden within the landscapes of Scotland, although they were once a common feature of both urban and rural settlements. Whilst the eighteenth and nineteenth century period of Improvement – during which many of these structures were destroyed, repurposed, or left to decay – has received extensive attention by historians, there exists no previous serious study of the human and environmental dimensions. Through analysis of the material aspects of landscape resource use and analysis of the historical perceptions of such use, we emphasize the national significance of this undervalued aspect of Scotland’s built and cultural heritage, increasingly at risk of being lost completely, highlighting the prior ubiquity of mudwall structures.

Costume, Period Rooms, and Donors: Dangerous Liaisons in the Art Museum

C ostume and period rooms are notoriously difficult to present in art museums. They are no less worthy of attention than anything else in an art museum's holdings, but their frequent association with commercial sponsors and donors can lead to the exposure of the seamy rather than the noble side of the institutions concerned. Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century was an exhibition organized by Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the museum's Wrightsman Galleries between April 29 and August 8, 2004. It was sponsored by Asprey, London, with additional support from Conde Nast. Its conceit was simple. Each of the eighteenth-century period rooms became the setting of a dramatic tableau comprising costumed mannequins. Each of the ten scenes was given a coy title-The Levee: 'The Assiduous Admirer,' Card Game: 'Cheating at Hearts,' and so on-and was loosely inspired by the mannered eroticism of Pierre-Ambroise-Francois Choderlos de Laclos's novel, les Liaisons dangereuses (1782). The book itself was incorporated into the scenario, for the Chaperone in Music Lesson: 'A Window of Opportunity,' set in the Viennese Paar Room, is said in the accompanying pamphlet to be reading it while her charge, the Student-a young woman at a harp in a French ivory silk

The Politics of Immigration to Eighteenth-Century Brazil: Azorean Migrants to Santa Catarina

Our knowledge of colonial Brazilian demography is appallingly low. European migration to Brazil remains a particularly neglected topic. It is no small irony that the migration of African slaves to Portuguese America is better documented than free white immigration. Surprisingly, reliable information is perhaps scarcest for the eighteenth-century gold-rush period when immigration to Brazil preoccupied Crown and treasure seekers alike. The manner of social and physical conditions which pushed individuals and families from their homes, the numerical ebb and flow of settlement patterns, even the simple mechanics of transport to the colony, remain caught inside a nebulous swirl of mythology, conjecture, and impressionistic conclusions. After two and a half centuries historians have scarcely gone beyond Antonil's oft quoted comment that ‘lured by the insatiable thirst for gold, a large quantity of Portuguese and foreigners arrive each year on the fleet heading to the mines […] the mixture is of every condition of people: men and women, young and old, poor and rich, nobles and plebeians, laymen and clerics, and friars from various orders, many of whom possess neither house nor convent in Brazil’.

Heat and Style: Eighteenth-Century House Warming by Stoves

SELDOM considered in the restoration of eighteenthcentury period furnishings is the role of heating.1 Most restorers do not realize that fireplaces alone were frequently inadequate in the northern climates and that stoves were in very common use, even in elegant parlors. American stoves were of decorated cast-iron plates; our knowledge of them is meager owing to their disappearance with the development of central heating in the nineteenth century. Actually, the heating of buildings was little understood until the eighteenth century. Draft chimneys did not even appear in Europe until the late middle ages. But from mediaeval times, at least in Germany and Scandinavia, simple heating stoves of tile or later iron plates were well known. By the Rococo period the big tile Ofen in German and Austrian interiors was a familiar piece of decorative furniture, its shape even enhancing the ornate architecture.