Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World
Zara Anishanslin
Abstract
Through the story of a portrait of a woman in a silk dress, this book embarks on a fascinating journey, exploring and refining debates about the cultural history of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. While most scholarship on commodities focuses either on labor and production or on consumption and use, this book unifies both, examining the worlds of four identifiable people who produced, wore, and represented this object: a London weaver, one of early modern Britain's few women silk designers, a Philadelphia merchant's wife, and a New England painter. Blending macro and micro histo ... More
Through the story of a portrait of a woman in a silk dress, this book embarks on a fascinating journey, exploring and refining debates about the cultural history of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. While most scholarship on commodities focuses either on labor and production or on consumption and use, this book unifies both, examining the worlds of four identifiable people who produced, wore, and represented this object: a London weaver, one of early modern Britain's few women silk designers, a Philadelphia merchant's wife, and a New England painter. Blending macro and micro history with nuanced gender analysis, the book shows how making, buying, and using goods in the British Atlantic created an object-based community that tied its inhabitants together, while also allowing for different views of the Empire. Investigating a range of subjects including self-fashioning, identity, natural history, politics, and trade, the book makes major contributions both to the study of material culture and to our ongoing conversation about how to write history.
Keywords:
silk dress,
cultural history,
commodities,
silk designer,
British Atlantic,
material culture,
eighteenth century,
early modern Britain,
gender analysis
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2016 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780300197051 |
| Published to Yale Scholarship Online: January 2017 |
DOI:10.12987/yale/9780300197051.001.0001 |
