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A Taste for Luxury in Early Modern Europe
Jon Stobart and Johanna Ilmakunnas bring together a range of scholars from across mainland Europe and the UK to examine luxury and taste in early modern Europe. In the 18th century, debates raged about the economic, social and moral impacts of luxury, whilst taste was viewed as a refining influence and a marker of rank and status. This book takes a fresh, comparative approach to these ideas, drawing together new scholarship to examine three related areas in a wide variety of European contexts. Firstly, the deployment of luxury goods in displays of status and how these practices varied across space and time. Secondly, the processes of communicating and acquiring taste and luxury: how did peop...
Daily Lives and Daily Routines in the Long Eighteenth Century
This book explores the ways in which the lives and routines of a wide range of people across different parts of Europe and the wider world were structured and played out through everyday practices. It focuses on the detail of individual lives and how these were shaped by spaces and places, by movement and material culture – both the buildings they occupied and the objects they used in their everyday lives. Drawing on original research by a range of established and emerging scholars, each chapter peers into the lives of people from various social groups as they went about their daily lives, from citizens on the streets to aristocrats at home in their country houses, and from the urban elite at leisure to seamen on board ships bound for the East Indies. For all these people, daily routines were important in structuring their lives, giving them a rhythm that was knowable and meaningful in its temporal regularity, be that daily, weekly, or seasonal. So too were their everyday encounters and relationships with other people, within and beyond the home; these shaped their practices, movements, and identities and thus served to mould society in a broader sense.
Innovation and Creativity in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Cities
Late medieval and early modern cities are often depicted as cradles of artistic creativity and hotbeds of new material culture. Cities in renaissance Italy and in seventeenth and eighteenth-century northwestern Europe are the most obvious cases in point. But, how did this come about? Why did cities rather than rural environments produce new artistic genres, new products and new techniques? How did pre-industrial cities evolve into centres of innovation and creativity? As the most urbanized regions of continental Europe in this period, Italy and the Low Countries provide a rich source of case studies, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate. They set out to examine the relationship between institutional arrangements and regulatory mechanisms such as citizenship and guild rules and innovation and creativity in late medieval and early modern cities. They analyze whether, in what context and why regulation or deregulation influenced innovation and creativity, and what the impact was of long-term changes in the political and economic sphere.
Earth, Cosmos and Culture
This book traces the development of diverse British cultures of outer space, utilizing key geographical concepts such as landscape, place, and national identity. It examines the early visionary ideas of writers H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, the ambitious British space programme of the 1960s, and narrations of British cultural identity that accompanied the space missions of Helen Sharman, Beagle 2 and Tim Peake. The exploration of British cultures of outer space throughout the book helps understand the emergence of the British Interplanetary Society. It also explains its significance in pre-war and post-war periods through an analysis of the roles of influential figures such as Arthur C. Cl...
Shopping and the Senses, 1800-1970
This book demonstrates the primacy of touch, smell, taste, sight and sound within the retail landscape. It shows that histories of the senses, body, and emotions were inextricably intertwined with processes and practices of retail and consumption. Shops are sensory feasts. From the rustle of silk to the tempting aroma of coffee, the multi-sensory appeal of goods has long been at the heart of how we shop. This book delves into and beyond this seductive idyl of consumer sensuality. Shopping was a sensory activity for consumers and retailers alike, but this experience was not always positive. This book is inhabited by tired feet and weary workers, as well as eager shoppers. It considers embodied sensory experiences and practices, and it represents both a celebration and interrogation of the integration of sensory histories into the study of retail and consumption. Crucially, this book places breathing, feeling human bodies back into the retail space.
Comfort in the Eighteenth-Century Country House
Country houses were grand statements of power and status, but they were also places where people lived. This book traces the changes in layout, the new technologies, and the innovations in furniture that made them more convenient and comfortable. It argues that these material changes were just one aspect of comfort in the country house: feeling comfortable was just as important as being comfortable. Achieving this involved the comfort and solace to be found in daily routines, religious faith and, above all, relationships with family and friends. Such emotional comforts, and the attachment to things and places that embodied and memorialized them, made country houses into homes.
Empire, Gender, and Bio-geography
This book explores the relationships between empire, natural history, and gender in the production of geographical knowledge and its translation between colonial Burma and Britain. Focusing on the work of the plant collector, botanical illustrator, and naturalist, Charlotte Wheeler-Cuffe, this book illustrates how natural history was practised and produced by a woman working in the tropics from 1897 to 1921. Drawing on the extensive and under-studied archive of private and official correspondence, diaries, sketchbooks, photographs, paintings, and plant lists of Wheeler-Cuffe, this book advances our conceptual understanding of the 'invisible’ historical geographies underpinning scientific k...
Captives, Colonists and Craftspeople
Over the course of four centuries, the island of Malta underwent several significant political transformations, including its roles as a Catholic bastion under the Knights of St. John between 1530 and 1798, and as a British maritime hub in the nineteenth century. This innovative study draws on both archival evidence and archeological findings to compare slavery and coerced labor, resource control, globalization, and other historical phenomena in Malta under the two regimes: one feudal, the other colonial. Spanning conventional divides between the early and late modern eras, Russell Palmer offers here a rich analysis of a Mediterranean island against a background of immense European and global change.
Cities and Creativity from the Renaissance to the Present
This volume critically challenges the current creative city debate from a historical perspective. In the last two decades, urban studies has been engulfed by a creative city narrative in which concepts like the creative economy, the creative class or creative industries proclaim the status of the city as the primary site of human creativity and innovation. So far, however, nobody has challenged the core premise underlying this narrative, asking why we automatically have to look at cities as being the agents of change and innovation. What processes have been at work historically before the predominance of cities in nurturing creativity and innovation was established? In order to tackle this q...
Histories of Trade as Histories of Civilisation
This edited collection explores the histories of trade, a peculiar literary genre that emerged in the context of the historiographical and cultural changes promoted by the histoire philosophique movement. It marked a discontinuity with erudition and antiquarianism, and interacted critically with universal history. By comparing and linking the histories of individual peoples within a common historical process, this genre enriched the reflection on civilisation that emerged during the long eighteenth century. Those who looked to the past wanted to understand the political constitutions and manners most appropriate to commerce, and grasp the recurring mechanisms underlying economic development....
