Download or read book Credit Fashion Sex written by Clare Haru Crowston and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-23 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Old Regime France credit was both a central part of economic exchange and a crucial concept for explaining dynamics of influence and power in all spheres of life. Contemporaries used the term credit to describe reputation and the currency it provided in court politics, literary production, religion, and commerce. Moving beyond Pierre Bourdieu's theorization of capital, this book establishes credit as a key matrix through which French men and women perceived their world. As Clare Haru Crowston demonstrates, credit unveils the personal character of market transactions, the unequal yet reciprocal ties binding society, and the hidden mechanisms of political power. Credit economies constituted "economies of regard" in which reputation depended on embodied performances of credibility. Crowston explores the role of fashionable appearances and sexual desire in leveraging credit and reconstructs women's vigorous participation in its gray markets. The scandalous relationship between Queen Marie Antoinette and fashion merchant Rose Bertin epitomizes the vertical loyalties and deep social divides of the credit regime and its increasingly urgent political stakes.
Download or read book The Consumer Revolution 1650 1800 written by Michael Kwass and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-03 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The production, acquisition, and use of consumer goods defines our daily lives, and yet consumerism is seen as increasingly controversial. Movements for sustainable and ethical consumerism are gaining momentum alongside an awareness of how our choices in the marketplace can affect public issues. How did we get here? This volume advances a bold new interpretation of the 'consumer revolution' of the eighteenth century, when European elites, middling classes, and even certain labourers purchased unprecedented quantities of clothing, household goods, and colonial products. Michael Kwass adopts a global perspective that incorporates the expansion of European empires, the development of world trade, and the rise of plantation slavery in the Americas. Kwass analyses the emergence of Enlightenment material cultures, contentious philosophical debates on the morality of consumption, and new forms of consumer activism to offer a fresh interpretation of the politics of consumption in the age of abolitionism and the Atlantic Revolutions.
Download or read book The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience written by Deborah Simonton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-02-03 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging current perspectives of urbanisation, The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience explores how our towns and cities have shaped and been shaped by cultural, spatial and gendered influences. This volume discusses gender in an urban context in European, North American and colonial towns from the fourteenth to the twentieth century, casting new light on the development of medieval and modern settlements across the globe. Organised into six thematic parts covering economy, space, civic identity, material culture, emotions and the colonial world, this book comprises 36 chapters by key scholars in the field. It covers a wide range of topics, from women and citizenship in medieval York to gender and tradition in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South African cities, reframing our understanding of the role of gender in constructing the spaces and places that form our urban environment. Interdisciplinary and transnational in scope, this volume analyses the individual dynamics of each case study while also examining the complex relationships and exchanges between urban cultures. It is a valuable resource for all researchers and students interested in gender, urban history and their intersection and interaction throughout the past five centuries.
Download or read book Historical Style written by Timothy Campbell and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historical Style connects the birth of eighteenth-century British consumer society to the rise of historical self-consciousness. Prior to the eighteenth century, British style was slow to change and followed the cultural and economic imperatives of monarchical regimes. By the 1750s, however, a growing fashion press extolled, in writing and illustration, the new phenomenon of periodized fashion trends. As fashion fads came in and out of style, and as fashion texts circulated and obsolesced, Britons were forced to confront the material persistence of out-of-date fashions. Timothy Campbell argues that these fashion texts and objects shaped British perception of time and history by producing new curiosity about the very recent past, as well as a new self-consciousness about the means by which the past could be understood. In a panoptic sweep, Historical Style brings together art history, philosophy, and literary history to portray an era increasingly aware of itself. Burgeoning consumer society, Campbell contends, highlighted the distinction between the past and the present, created an expectation of continual change, and forged a sense of history as something that could be tracked through material objects. Campbell assembles a wide range of writings, images, and objects to render this eighteenth-century landscape: commercial dress displays and David Hume's ideas of novelty as historical form; popular illustrations of recent fashion trends and Sir Joshua Reynolds's aesthetic precepts; fashion periodicals and Sir Walter Scott's costume-saturated historical fiction. In foregrounding fashion to trace eighteenth-century historicism, Historical Style draws upon the interdisciplinary, multimedia archival impressions that fashionable dress has left behind, as well as the historical and conceptual resources within the field of fashion studies that literary and cultural historians of eighteenth-century and Romantic Britain have often neglected.
Download or read book A Companion to Textile Culture written by Jennifer Harris and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-08-17 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively and innovative collection of new and recent writings on the cultural contexts of textiles The study of textile culture is a dynamic field of scholarship which spans disciplines and crosses traditional academic boundaries. A Companion to Textile Culture is an expertly curated compendium of new scholarship on both the historical and contemporary cultural dimensions of textiles, bringing together the work of an interdisciplinary team of recognized experts in the field. The Companion provides an expansive examination of textiles within the broader area of visual and material culture, and addresses key issues central to the contemporary study of the subject. A wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the subject are explored—technological, anthropological, philosophical, and psychoanalytical, amongst others—and developments that have influenced academic writing about textiles over the past decade are discussed in detail. Uniquely, the text embraces archaeological textiles from the first millennium AD as well as contemporary art and performance work that is still ongoing. This authoritative volume: Offers a balanced presentation of writings from academics, artists, and curators Presents writings from disciplines including histories of art and design, world history, anthropology, archaeology, and literary studies Covers an exceptionally broad chronological and geographical range Provides diverse global, transnational, and narrative perspectives Included numerous images throughout the text to illustrate key concepts A Companion to Textile Culture is an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, instructors, and researchers of textile history, contemporary textiles, art and design, visual and material culture, textile crafts, and museology.
Download or read book The Formal and Informal Politics of British Rule in Post Conquest Quebec 1760 1837 written by Nancy Christie and published by . This book was released on 2020-02-06 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nancy Christie innovatively and significantly transforms the writing of Quebec history between 1763 and 1837 by locating Quebec within new British practices of imperial governance asserted in the wake of the Seven Years War. Breaking with the conventional master-narrative of the era as one ofgradual integration between French- and English-speaking communities, accompanied by incremental political and social liberalization, Nancy Christie presents the six decades following the Conquest as a period of assertive British strategies for assimilating Quebec's French and Catholic majority, andrefurbished authoritarianism deployed to arrest the spread of revolution in the Atlantic world. Brilliantly advanced, this new narrative of post-Conquest Quebec builds upon entirely new research meticulously gleaned from over 20,000 cases from the criminal and civil judicial archives and a sustainedexamination of both official and unofficial political and social discourses.This study charts both the British practices of colonial rule, which sought the assimilation of non-British "others" through both formal modes of law and governance, and the consumption of British manufactured goods, and the contestation of these through the daily resistance of ordinary men andwomen. In so doing, Christie identifies Quebec as a case study with which to open a new trajectory in the wider study of the British Empire. Her striking conclusion urges a shift in historical focus from the interaction between European colonizers and racialized others, to the centrality ofpractices of rule designed to govern European subaltern peoples.
Download or read book Bankrupts and Usurers of Imperial Russia written by Sergei Antonov and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-10 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As readers of classic Russian literature know, the nineteenth century was a time of pervasive financial anxiety. With incomes erratic and banks inadequate, Russians of all social castes were deeply enmeshed in networks of credit and debt. The necessity of borrowing and lending shaped perceptions of material and moral worth, as well as notions of social respectability and personal responsibility. Credit and debt were defining features of imperial Russia’s culture of property ownership. Sergei Antonov recreates this vanished world of borrowers, bankrupts, lenders, and loan sharks in imperial Russia from the reign of Nicholas I to the period of great social and political reforms of the 1860s. Poring over a trove of previously unexamined records, Antonov gleans insights into the experiences of ordinary Russians, rich and poor, and shows how Russia’s informal but sprawling credit system helped cement connections among property owners across socioeconomic lines. Individuals of varying rank and wealth commonly borrowed from one another. Without a firm legal basis for formalizing debt relationships, obtaining a loan often hinged on subjective perceptions of trustworthiness and reputation. Even after joint-stock banks appeared in Russia in the 1860s, credit continued to operate through vast networks linked by word of mouth, as well as ties of kinship and community. Disputes over debt were common, and Bankrupts and Usurers of Imperial Russia offers close readings of legal cases to argue that Russian courts—usually thought to be underdeveloped in this era—provided an effective forum for defining and protecting private property interests.
Download or read book A Delicate Matter written by Oliver Wunsch and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2024-02-22 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighteenth-century France witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of materially unstable art, from oil paintings that cracked within years of their creation to enormous pastel portraits vulnerable to the slightest touch or vibration. In A Delicate Matter, Oliver Wunsch traces these artistic practices to the economic and social conditions that enabled them: an ascendant class of art collectors who embraced fragile objects as a means of showcasing their disposable wealth. While studies of Rococo art have traditionally focused on style and subject matter, this book reveals how the physical construction of paintings and sculptures was central to the period’s reconceptualization of art. Drawing on sources ranging from eighteenth-century artists’ writings to twenty-first-century laboratory analyses, Wunsch demonstrates how the technical practices of eighteenth-century painters and sculptors provoked a broad transformation in the relationship between art, time, and money. Delicacy, which began the eighteenth century as a commodified extension of courtly sociability, was by century’s end reimagined as the irreducible essence of art’s autonomous value. Innovative and original, A Delicate Matter is an important intervention in the growing body of scholarship on durability and conservation in eighteenth-century French art. It challenges the art historical tendency to see decay as little more than an impediment to research, instead showing how physical instability played a critical role in establishing art’s meaning and purpose.
Download or read book A Velvet Empire written by David Todd and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How France's elites used soft power to pursue their imperial ambitions in the nineteenth century After Napoleon's downfall in 1815, France embraced a mostly informal style of empire, one that emphasized economic and cultural influence rather than military conquest. A Velvet Empire is a global history of French imperialism in the nineteenth century, providing new insights into the mechanisms of imperial collaboration that extended France's power from the Middle East to Latin America and ushered in the modern age of globalization. David Todd shows how French elites pursued a cunning strategy of imperial expansion in which conspicuous commodities such as champagne and silk textiles, together with loans to client states, contributed to a global campaign of seduction. French imperialism was no less brutal than that of the British. But while Britain widened its imperial reach through settler colonialism and the acquisition of far-flung territories, France built a "velvet" empire backed by frequent military interventions and a broadening extraterritorial jurisdiction. Todd demonstrates how France drew vast benefits from these asymmetric, imperial-like relations until a succession of setbacks around the world brought about their unravelling in the 1870s. A Velvet Empire sheds light on France's neglected contribution to the conservative reinvention of modernity and offers a new interpretation of the resurgence of French colonialism on a global scale after 1880. This panoramic book also highlights the crucial role of collaboration among European empires during this period—including archrivals Britain and France—and cooperation with indigenous elites in facilitating imperial expansion and the globalization of capitalism.
Download or read book The Stakes of Regulation written by Steven L. Kaplan and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2015-08-15 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars have long regarded ‘Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV’ (1976) as marking an important moment in the study of the social, political and cultural history of eighteenth-century France. ‘The Stakes of Regulation’ is the companion volume to a new edition of this landmark study, revealing how Kaplan’s thinking has evolved in reaction both to the changing intellectual, epistemological, historiographical and socio-political environment, and to the significant scholarship that has been accomplished during the past forty years. Kaplan remains faithful to his original premise: that the subsistence question is at the core of eighteenth century history, and that the issues joined by the struggle over liberalization continue to shape our destiny today through the bristling tension between liberty and equality, and the debate over the necessity, legitimacy and character of regulation.
Download or read book Bankruptcy and Debt Collection in Liberal Capitalism written by Mischa Suter and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2021-06-02 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on perspectives from anthropology and social theory, this book explores the quotidian routines of debt collection in nineteenth-century capitalism. It focuses on Switzerland, an exemplary case of liberal rule. Debt collection and bankruptcy relied on received practices until they were standardized in a Swiss federal law in 1889. The vast array of these practices was summarized by the idiomatic Swiss legal term “Rechtstrieb” (literally, “law drive”). Analyzing these forms of summary justice opens a window to the makeshift economies and the contested political imaginaries of nineteenth-century everyday life. Ultimately, the book advances an empirically grounded and theoretically informed history of quotidian legal practices in the everyday economy; it is an argument for studying capitalism from the bottom up.
Download or read book What is Early Modern History written by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-01-20 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is Early Modern History? offers a concise guide to investigations of the era from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries and an entry-point to larger questions about how we divide and organize the past and how the discipline of history has evolved. Merry Wiesner-Hanks showcases the new research and innovative methods that have altered our understanding of this fascinating period. She examines various subfields and approaches in early modern history, and the marks of modernity that scholars have highlighted in these, from individualism to the Little Ice Age. Moving beyond Europe, she surveys the growth of the Atlantic World and global history, exploring key topics such as the Columbian Exchange, the slave trade, cultural interactions and blending, and the environment. She also considers popular and public representations of the early modern period, which are often how students – and others – first become curious. Elegantly written and passionately argued, What is Early Modern History? provides an essential invitation to the field for both students and scholars.
Download or read book Material Literacy in 18th Century Britain written by Serena Dyer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eighteenth century has been hailed for its revolution in consumer culture, but Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain repositions Britain as a nation of makers. It brings new attention to eighteenth-century craftswomen and men with its focus on the material knowledge possessed not only by professional artisans and amateur makers, but also by skilled consumers. This edited collection gathers together a group of interdisciplinary scholars working in the fields of art history, history, literature, and museum studies to unearth the tactile and tacit knowledge that underpinned fashion, tailoring, and textile production. It invites us into the workshops, drawing rooms, and backrooms of a broad range of creators, and uncovers how production and tacit knowledge extended beyond the factories and machines which dominate industrial histories. This book illuminates, for the first time, the material literacies learnt, enacted, and understood by British producers and consumers. The skills required for sewing, embroidering, and the textile arts were possessed by a large proportion of the British population: men, women and children, professional and amateur alike. Building on previous studies of shoppers and consumption in the period, as well as narratives of manufacture, these essays document the multiplicity of small producers behind Britain's consumer revolution, reshaping our understanding of the dynamics between making and objects, consumption and production. It demonstrates how material knowledge formed an essential part of daily life for eighteenth-century Britons. Craft technique, practice, and production, the contributors show, constituted forms of tactile languages that joined makers together, whether they produced objects for profit or pleasure.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Shopping in the Age of Enlightenment written by Ilja Van Damme and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-02 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Cultural History of Shopping was a Library Journal Best in Reference selection for 2022. The 'consumer revolution' of the 18th century has been the subject of much debate among historians but it seems clear there was also a 'retail revolution': a period of unprecedented growth in material goods was accompanied by a proliferation of retail spaces and techniques which brought new fashions and imported commodities to the homes of consumers. Governments responded to a growing culture of polite and civilized behavior across society by stimulating urban renewal for leisure and shopping: new pavements, street lighting, green promenades, theatres, coffee houses, and adjacent shopping streets were laid-out everywhere in Europe. As the 18th century drew to its close, 'shopping' had become a publicly accepted and celebrated leisure pursuit, gaining its proper meaning in multiple languages. A Cultural History of Shopping in the Age of Enlightenment presents an overview of the period with themes addressing practices and processes; spaces and places; shoppers and identities; luxury and everyday; home and family; visual and literary representations; reputation, trust and credit; and governance, regulation and the state.
Download or read book The Architecture of Percier and Fontaine and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Revolutionary France written by Iris Moon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-11-25 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the official architects of Napoleon, Charles Percier (1764–1838) and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762–1853) designed interiors that responded to the radical ideologies and collective forms of destruction that took place during the French Revolution. The architects visualized new forms of imperial sovereignty by inverting the symbols of monarchy and revolution, constructing meeting rooms resembling military encampments and gilded thrones that replaced the Bourbon lily with Napoleonic bees. Yet in the wake of political struggle, each foundation stone that the architects laid for the new imperial regime was accompanied by an awareness of the contingent nature of sovereign power. Contributing fresh perspectives on the architecture, decorative arts, and visual culture of revolutionary France, this book explores how Percier and Fontaine’s desire to build structures of permanence and their inadvertent reliance upon temporary architectural forms shaped a new awareness of time, memory, and modern political identity in France.
Download or read book Ingenious Trade written by Laura Gowing and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-16 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ingenious Trade recovers the intricate stories of the young women who came to London in the late seventeenth century to earn their own living, most often with the needle, and the mistresses who set up shops and supervised their apprenticeships. Tracking women through city archives, it reveals the extent and complexity of their contracts, training and skills, from adolescence to old age. In contrast to the informal, unstructured and marginalised aspects of women's work, this book uses legal records and guild archives to reconstruct women's negotiations with city regulations and bureaucracy. It shows single women, wives and widows establishing themselves in guilds both alongside and separate to men, in a network that extended from elites to paupers and around the country. Through an intensive and creative archival reconstruction, Laura Gowing recovers the significance of apprenticeship in the lives of girls and women, and puts women's work at the heart of the revolution in worldly goods.
Download or read book On the Word of a Jew written by Nina Caputo and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-14 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fourteen essays examining the dynamics of trust and mistrust in Jewish history from biblical times to today. What, if anything, does religion have to do with how reliable we perceive one another to be? When and how did religious difference matter in the past when it came to trusting the word of another? In today’s world, we take for granted that being Jewish should not matter when it comes to acting or engaging in the public realm, but this was not always the case. The essays in this volume look at how and when Jews were recognized as reliable and trustworthy in the areas of jurisprudence, medicine, politics, academia, culture, business, and finance. As they explore issues of trust and mistrust, the authors reveal how caricatures of Jews move through religious, political, and legal systems. While the volume is framed as an exploration of Jewish and Christian relations, it grapples with perceptions of Jews and Jewishness from the biblical period to today, from the Middle East to North America, and in Ashkenazi and Sephardi traditions. Taken together these essays reflect on the mechanics of trust, and sometimes mistrust, in everyday interactions involving Jews. “Highly readable and compelling, this volume marks a broadly significant contribution to Jewish studies through the underexplored dynamic of trust.” —Rebekah Klein-Pejšová, author of Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia “An exemplary compendium on how to engage with a major concept—trust—while providing load of gripping new information, new theorization of otherwise well-covered material, and meticulous attention to textual and sociological sources.” —Gil Anidjar, author of Blood: A Critique of Christianity
