10 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Cultivating the world: English country house gardens, 'exotic' plants and elite women collectors, c.1690-1800
Global goods were central to the material culture of eighteenth-century country houses. Across Europe, mahogany furniture, Chinese wallpapers and Indian textiles formed the backdrop to genteel practices of drinking sweetened coffee, tea and chocolate from Chinese porcelain. They tied these houses and their wealthy owners into global systems of supply and the processes of colonialism and empire.
Global Goods and the Country House builds on these narratives, and then challenges them by decentring our perspective. It offers a comparative framework that explores the definition, ownership and meaning of global goods outside the usual context of European imperial powers. What were global goods and what did they mean for wealthy landowners in places at the ‘periphery’ of Europe (Sweden and Wallachia), in the British colonies of North America and the Caribbean, or in the extra-colonial context (Japan or Rajasthan)? By addressing these questions, this volume offers fresh insights into the multi-directional flow of goods and cultures that enmeshed the eighteenth-century world. And by placing these goods in their specific material context - from the English country house to the princely palaces of Rajasthan - we gain a better understanding of their use and meaning, and of their role in linking the global and the local
Recommended from our members
Whose Heritage? Slavery, Country Houses, and the “Culture Wars” in England
Recommended from our members
Blood Legacy: Reckoning with a Family’s History of Slavery Alex Renton, Edinburgh, Canongate, 2021, ix, 388 pp, £16.99, ISBN 978-1-78689-886-9
Recommended from our members
The bonds of family: Slavery, commerce and culture in the British Atlantic
Moving between Britain and Jamaica this book reconstructs the world of commerce, consumption and cultivation sustained through an extended engagement with the business of slavery. Transatlantic slavery was both shaping of and shaped by the dynamic networks of family that established Britain's Caribbean empire. Tracing the activities of a single extended family - the Hibberts - this book explores how slavery impacted on the social, cultural, economic and political landscape of Britain. It is a history of trade, colonisation, enrichment and the tangled web of relations that gave meaning to the transatlantic world. The Hibberts's trans-generational story imbricates the personal and the political, the private and the public, the local and the global. It is both the intimate narrative of a family and an analytical frame through which to explore Britain's history and legacies of slavery
Recommended from our members
Relics of empire: Colonialism and culture wars
While the British Empire is long gone, it survives as a recurring flashpoint in heated debates about the present and future of Britain and the nations over which Britain once ruled. Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain turns a critical eye to the widely-held notion that the long shadow of the imperial past has much to answer for, and asks to what extent should the residual after-effects of Britain's colonial empire be taken at face value?
From the 'Rhodes must fall' controversy and contested anniversaries to immigration scares and the question of what Britishness is in a post-imperial world, an eclectic mix of expert researchers, writers and commentators consider the legacy of the British empire in the battle over Brexit. As the United Kingdom haggles its way out of the European Union and casts about for an alternative future, this volume shows how the memory of the empire is still as potent a political force as ever
Recommended from our members
Transforming capital: slavery, family, commerce and the making of the Hibbert family
This chapter presents a case study that demonstrates the potential for the deployment of both our empirical data and integrative conceptual frameworks to explore the original accumulation and subsequent continuity of wealth and status from slavery. The Hibbert family story charts the trans-generational transformation of capital from property in commodities, to property in people, and finally investment in land and cultural capital. From mercantile beginnings in cotton, slaves, sugar and credit, through to colonial plantation and finally metropolitan land and country house ownership, the narrative charts the transformation of capital from the instability of merchant venture into investment in traditional forms of metropolitan property, thus securing for the Hibberts a lasting position – that is still maintained today – within Britain’s aristocratic elite through marriage into the Holland family
Recommended from our members
Introduction
The Introduction to this volume (Britain’s History and Memory of Transatlantic Slavery) sets out the current context of scholarship on the history of Britain’s involvement in transatlantic slavery and the slave trade and its abolition, and work around the memory of this history. This chapter considers what is ultimately at stake through configuring, reconfiguring and contesting the place of slavery and the slave trade in British national identity narratives, how this has changed in the last thirty years and why examining such relationships through a ‘local’ lens is important for interrogating the relationship between history, memory and identity. The Introduction sets out the structure of the book in its two parts and gives brief overviews of the following chapters