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.
Table of Content
List of figures
List of tables
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: contexts and departures
Jon Stobart
Part 1: Consuming global goods
1 Mahogany, sugar and porcelain: global goods for a Swedish aristocratic family in the eighteenth century
Gudrun Andersson and Göran Ulväng
2 Global goods and Imperial Knights: assemblages in country houses in southwestern Germany, 1700–1820
Daniel Menning, Anne Sophie Overkamp and Julietta Schulze
3 The global Samurai: imports and daily life in isolated Japan
Martha Chaiklin
4 ‘We are starving for want of Tea’: Asian objects, domestic slavery, and Caribbean sociability
Christine Walker
Object lessons 1: Traded goods
I Statuette of captain Jacob Beckmann
Mikkel Venborg Pedersen
II Osnaburg: a study in global textile production and exploitation
Laura Johnson
III Suite of ebony furniture inlaid with ivory, Charlecote Park
Annabelle Gilmore and Jon Stobart
IV Newspaper advertisement for The English Depot. E. Grant & Comp., Bucharest
Nicoleta Roman
V Histoire des deux Indes by Guillaume Raynal, 1780
Eleanor Matthews
Part 2: The global in the local
5 Power, friendship and delightfulness:global goods in the residencies of an aristocratic family in the Kingdom of Naples
Gaia Bruno
6 Luxury, international trade and consumption in three eighteenth-century Danish homes
Mikkel Venborg Pedersen
7 Interiors as a visiting card: decoration, consumption and material culture in a mid-nineteenth century Romanian country house
Nicoleta Roman
8 An ‘American bearskin merchant’ in the ‘wilds of Pennsylvania’: trade and the British country house in North America
Stephen G. Hague
Object lessons 2: Crafting global goods
VI Model of a Chinese pagoda by Elizabeth Ratcliffe, 1767
Emile de Bruijn
VII The Barbados Monkey Jar
Kevin Farmer and Tara Inniss
VIII Japanese red wool jinbaori (Surcoat) – East meets West
Martha Chaiklin
IX Shellwork shadowbox grottoes as global goods
Laura C. Keim
X Tobacco rolls, Württemberg
Daniel Menning
Part 3: Domesticating the global
9 Second-hand empire? Global goods in English provincial auctions, c.1760-1840 Jon Stobart
10 Global houses of the Efik
Louis P. Nelson
11 Negotiating cosmopolitan taste with local culture: porcelain rooms in Indian (Rajput) forts and palaces
Esther Schmidt
Object lessons 3: Symbols and symbolism
XI The new worlds’ gate
Gaia Bruno
XII Two clubs, two perspectives: Haudenosaunee material culture at Audley End
Michael Galban (Wašiw & Kutzadika’a) and Peter Moore
XIII Design for pinery built for Sir Joseph Banks, 1807
Kate Donington
XIV Grosser Atlas über Die Gantze Welt, by Johann Baptist Homann (1663-1724)
Mrinalini Venkateswaran
XV Frans Post’s View of Itamaracá Island. Rethinking a colonial past
Yme Kuiper
Part 4: Imperial houses
12 Cartography, collecting and the construction of empire at Dyrham Park
Rupert Goulding and Louis P. Nelson
13 Cultivating the world: English country house gardens, ‘exotic’ plants and elite women collectors, c.1690-1800
Katie Donington
14 Colonial power and global gifts: the governorship of Johan Maurits, Count of Nassau-Siegen in Dutch Brazil (1637-44)
Yme Kuiper
Conclusions
Jon Stobart
Index
About the author
Jon Stobart is Professor of Social History at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research explores various aspects of retailing and consumption, mostly in eighteenth and early nineteenth century England. Recent work has focused on the country house as a site of consumption and on the ways in which it increasingly became a place of material and emotional comfort. This work has been published as Consumption and the Country House (2016) and Comfort in the Eighteenth-Century Country House (2022). He is currently researching the morality and materiality of consumption by Church of England clergy.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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