Search

This paper examines how and why information moved or failed to move within transatlantic botanical networks in the late eighteenth century. It addresses the problem of how practitioners created relationships of trust, and the difficulties they faced in transferring reputations between national contexts. Eighteenth-century botany was characteristically cross-cultural, cosmopolitan and socially diverse, yet in the 1770s and 1780s the American Revolutionary Wars placed these attributes under strain. The paper analyses the British and French networks that surrounded the Philadelphian plant hunter William Young (1742–1785), to show how botanists and plant collectors created and maintained connections with each other, especially when separated by geographical and cultural distance. It highlights in particular the role played by commercial plant traders, and demonstrates how practitioners used objects to transmit social as well as scholarly information. The transnational circulation of information and knowledge in the Enlightenment was determined by culturally specific judgements about trust, confidence, communication and risk. Despite the prominent role played by material culture within these networks, scholars continued to place high value on face-to-face contact as a means of judging the trustworthiness and cooperation of their agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper, two gunflint assemblages from well-dated Scandinavian shipwrecks in Scottish waters are characterized and discussed. This attribute analysis has two main aims, namely to discuss the gunflints themselves and extract information relevant to the understanding of the historical period during which they were produced, used, and deposited, and to develop a methodology for the characterization, identification, comparison and discussion of gunflint assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the cultural significance of "ambulatory maps" in the Atlantic world between 1700 and 1800. Comparing stationary and portable maps, the essay in particular explores the emergent genre of the commercial pocket map. As "things-in- motion," pocket maps occupied a unique place in American material life. Used for mapping people's transits while at the same time being objects in transit, pocket maps constituted a unique visual and literary experience that affected early American engagements with space and spatial ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1723, following an opera production in Florence, two sets of medals were made there in honour of the singer Faustina Bordoni. Among the reactions to these medals in Bologna were satirical poetry and a set of ceramic chamber pots that carried depictions of the medals and a scathing Latin text. The article analyses these artefacts, the various descriptions and drawings of them and reports about them for what they can tell us about the intertwined issues of celebrity, the status of (female) singers, the circulation of information and the interaction between objects and words in early eighteenth-century Italy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gift-giving was an important feature of cross-cultural diplomacy in the complex political landscape of the early modern Gold and Slave coasts. The article examines gift-giving practices that European trading companies used toward African rulers and elites, relating them to European courtly diplomacy. Tracing the repertoire of gift objects, it argues that the very function ascribed to gifts required learning about another's rules, values, habits, or tastes. In consequence, a repertoire of gifts peculiar to the contact zone was established, consisting not least of objects adapted into local practices and production. These processes of adaptation were influenced by the materiality of the objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reexamines the literature and prints of the Paxton Boys' 1764 pamphlet war using material culture as its lens. Specifically, by detailing how writers and illustrators narrated or depicted the physical appearance of those involved in this crisis--including how they dressed, the props they carried, and the things they pursued--this essay analyzes how objects became a visual shorthand with which to embody the ethnic or racial identities of various Pennsylvanians, to critique political opponents, and to persuade audiences. The "pamphlet war" was thus not just a war of words, images, or politics, but also one of material representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eighteenth-century men and women in British North America loved a bargain, but how did they know what a bargain was? Where did they get information about comparative prices and how did they judge those prices? The link between the price of an object and its value was a significant cultural problem in the eighteenth century, and one that both political economists and lawmakers grappled with. For most residents, it was at local auctions--estate auctions, sheriffs' sales, and discount vendues--that bidders, sellers, and observers created a body of knowledge that established a link between price and value. Auctions embodied the social construction of prices, but the processes of gathering and advertising stock, previewing and bidding on goods, and judging the fairness of the outcome, created an understanding that prices could be tested against principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional cultural constructions of French Canadians hold that they were dressed in homespun clothing. Analyzing advertisements from Quebec's three leading newspapers, as well as a vast number of depositions from the rich criminal court records of this colony, this article argues that French Canadian inhabitants were steadily incorporated into British trading and consumption networks. This was not simply an urban phenomenon; by 1800 a large proportion of rural inhabitants actively consumed imported manufactured goods. In turn, as this article demonstrates, their increasing desire to acquire British ready-made clothing became part of a broader assimilative process at work in the colony following the British Conquest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Post-Medieval Archaeology is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

For observant members of the Society of Friends in greater London and Philadelphia during the eighteenth century, navigating the Quaker plainness testimony involved material culture choices that might be viewed by non-Quakers as concealing motives of frugality or blurring class lines or as violating standards of decency and propriety. This was particularly true of coffins, which were carried through the streets from home to burial ground followed by family and friends. On this public stage, Quaker coffin choices satisfied the requirements for plainness while at the same time they demonstrated family values and fulfilled societal expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tradition has it that the Shugborough dinner service was presented to Commodore Anson (1697-1762) by the European merchants of Canton in gratitude for his crew's part in extinguishing a fire that threatened the city in 1743, and the service has come to symbolise the ultimate triumph of this courageous and determined commodore over dithering and obstructive Chinese mandarins. This article argues that the link between the dinner service and the fire is actually a twentieth-century invention, and that its story, as currently presented to us, distorts our understanding both of Canton in 1743 and of mid-eighteenth-century Sino-British relations more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the period between George Anson's circumnavigation in the 1740s and the joint British seizure of the Spanish cities of Manila and Havana in 1762, this article argues that the taking and making of objects in motion provided an important point of intersection between the British prosecution of empire in the Atlantic and in the Pacific in the eighteenth century. It has two central aims: first, to highlight the interconnectedness of the Atlantic to wider global contexts and, second, to emphasize the key role of military conflict and other processes beyond commerce in the generation and circulation of objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]