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History 231 : Researching 18th Century Consumption (HC)
Reference Sources:
1. Encyclopedias provide basic overviews of topics as well as quick identifications of people, places, and events. Subject encyclopedias and handbooks, like the ones listed below, are written and compiled by scholars who are experts in the field. Most of the articles and essays in the titles below have the added bonus of a list of recommended books and journal articles for further reading. This is a valuable starting point for your research.
Encyclopedia of clothing and fashion
Publisher: Farmington Hills, MI : Charles Scribner's Sons : c2005.
Oxford art online
Includes full-text articles on every aspect of the visual arts throughout history. Contains images and provides links to related sites.
2. Finding Books Use the Tripod Catalog to look for relevant books owned by Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Swarthmore.
The following subject searches are a sampling of possibilities. To find materials on a topic, try doing a keyword search in the Tripod Catalog to find relevant materials and then using the subject headings assigned to those titles to find more material.
books And reading europe history [Subject Search]recreation england [Subject Search]
luxur* 18th [keyword search]
Tripod - For locating books, journals, and other materials held in the Tri-College libraries. Deliveries within the Trico usually arrive in one or two days. Use the "Request" button. You can mark and then email or print records for multiple items.
WorldCat - An important place to look for many materials not owned by the Tri-College Libraries. This combined library catalog contains more than 62 million records describing items owned by libraries around the world. Many of these items are available to you though interlibrary loan.
3. Finding Journal Articles Journal articles and other periodical publications provide scholarly information on specific aspects of 18th century history. Since articles are generally published on a shorter schedule than books, they can be more-up-to-date. The following indexes are the best ways for you to identify journal articles.
Historical abstracts
Provider: EBSCO
Provides abstracts of journal articles, books, book reviews and dissertations that cover world history from 1450 to the present (excluding the U.S. and Canada which are covered in "America: History and Life"). Includes publications from 1953-present.
ProQuest Research Library
Provider: ProQuest
Provides citations and full-text magazine and journal articles in a wide variety of disciplines, both scholarly and popular in scope. Covers 1971-present.
Primary Sources:
TEXTS
ARTFL project
Provides full-text access to classical French writings. Includes literary works, political tracts, philosophical writings and technical treatises. Coverage varies.
Eighteenth Century collections online.
Offers full-text access to English-language titles and editions published between 1701 and 1800 including books, pamphlets, and treatises.
Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences
Publisher: Geneve : Pellet, 1777-79.
Diderot's encyclopedia summarizes knowledge in all branches of study and provides important contextualization for your topics.
This record is for a printed edition in the Philips Wing. It can be used in the Library but not checked out. See also the following versions:
ARTFL text in French
University of Michigan collaborative English translation (in progress)
Encyclopedie of Diderot and D'Alembert: Selected Articles in English translation
Plates from the Encyclopedie
This record is for a printed edition in the Philips Wing. It can be used in the Library but not checked out. See also the following versions:
ARTFL text in French
University of Michigan collaborative English translation (in progress)
Encyclopedie of Diderot and D'Alembert: Selected Articles in English translation
Plates from the Encyclopedie
IMAGES
The art of domestic life
Publisher: New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press, c2006.
"This book is the first to explore English family portraiture in the eighteenth century, a varied category ranging from small-scale conversation pieces to grandiose, full-length images.
Encyclopedie Plates
Detailed full page illustrations from Diderot's encyclopedia reproduced and grouped by topic.
Detailed full page illustrations from Diderot's encyclopedia reproduced and grouped by topic.
The English print 1688-1802
Publisher: New Haven [Conn.] : Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, c1997.
French art.
Publisher: Paris ; Flammarion, 1996.
The third volume of Andre Chastel's sweeping history of French art explores the extraordinary painting, sculpture, and architecture that emerged during the reigns of Louis XIII, Louis XIV, and Louis XV.
Purchasing power
Publisher: Aldershot, Hants, England ; Ashgate, c2004.
"Prostitution was central to popular print depictions of London in the eighteenth century. Whether deployed as incidental colour in street scenes or providing the sole subject matter for prints, the figure of the prostitute lay at the very heart of the project to depict the fabric and character of the emerging metropolis."
The satirical gaze
Publisher: Oxford : Clarendon Press ; c2004.
"These prints both reflected and sought to shape contemporary debate about the role of women in society."
The spectacle of difference
Publisher: New Haven [Conn.] : Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, c1999.
"In this original book, Mark Hallett offers a new perspective on English satirical prints of the first half of the eighteenth century, recovering their dual status as ambitious works of graphic art and as eloquent pictorial commentaries on urban culture and politics. "
Books on Reserve:
TO DO
1. CONSUMPTION IN GENERAL
Consumption and the world of goods
Publisher: London ; Routledge, 1993.
"Under the direction of Professor John Brewer, the Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies and the Clark Library at UCLA have created an ambitious international programme to analyse the material culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through its patterns of consumption. Focus on this period allows consideration of a world in which economic and political connections are becoming global, in which an unprecedented range of goods and services are on offer, and in which the old political structures are first subverted and then radically modified. The Age of Enlightenment is transmuted into the first Age of Consumption." "The present volume, the first of three, is the result of a unique collaboration between twenty-six leading subject specialists from Europe and North America. The outcome is a new interpretation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one that shapes a new historical landscape based on the consumption of goods and services."--BOOK JACKET.
The consumption of culture, 1600-1800
Publisher: New York : Routledge, 1995.
The mapping of the consumption of culture reveals a complex cultural organization of economic transactions, social institutions and ideological apparatuses that continually redrew the boundaries between social classes, between public and private life, between high art and low, and between men and women. As an inquiry into the consumption rather than the production of culture, the present volume looks upon the history of aesthetic artifacts as a history of their diverse receptions. Questions about artistic or authorial intentionality and technique give way to questions about utility and meaning. As the essays show, audiences do not exist prior to cultural production, they are its effect. Culture does not become 'culture' until it is consumed. The twenty-six contributors come from a wide range of historically oriented fields (historians of society, politics, ideas, science, literature and the arts). In many cases their research suggests the new proximity of interests and methods that, under the rubric of 'cultural history', has cut across areas of specialization and traditional disciplinary boundaries. While widely different in their emphases and methodologies, all the authors share an interest in challenging our ideas of culture, canon, period, gender, class, public, private, production, and, of course, consumption.
2. EXOTICISM AND GLOBAL EXPANSION
Elephant slaves and pampered parrots
Publisher: Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
"In 1775 a visitor to Laurent Spinacuta's Grande Menagerie at the annual winter fair in Paris would have seen two tigers, several kinds of monkeys, an armadillo, an ocelot, and a condor - in all, forty-two live animals. In Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots, Louise E. Robbins explains that exotic animals from around the world were common in eighteenth-century Paris. In the streets of the city, residents and visitors could observe performing elephants and a fighting polar bear. Those looking for unusual pets could purchase parrots, flying squirrels, and capuchin monkeys. The royal menagerie at Versailles displayed lions, cranes, an elephant, a rhinoceros, and a zebra, which in 1760 became a major court attraction."--BOOK JACKET.
Food
Publisher: New York : Columbia University Press, c1999.
See especially Chapter 29 "Colonial Beverages and the Consumption of Sugar" by Alain Huetz de Lemps.
Reading the splendid body
Publisher: Newark : University of Delaware Press ; c1998.
This book surveys an underlying discourse on female and oriental consumerism in nearly four centuries of British colonialist narratives on India. It examines some of the significant ways in which the subaltern and female body was constructed by Western ethnographers within early modern British colonialist discourses. The book offers a genealogy of colonialist spectatorship, and examines the ideologies originating within both public and private colonial spheres. Through a comparison of the discourses about and by women one can see the continuation of patriarchal injunctions within Western protofeminist discourses. Economic, ethical, colonial, patriarchal, and protofeminist polemics thus reached to and shaped one another, and this book is a record of the complex ways in which gender discourses and colonialist discourses intersected to create a colonialist spectatorship that constituted non-Western and female subjects as spectacular and needing discipline. The insights on Western protofeminists and their crisis of self-representation as subjects versus objects of discourse also further the examination of women's history in the colonial arena.
Savoring the past
Publisher: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983.
Use the subject index to find pages on chocolate, coffee, and tea.
The social life of coffee
Publisher: New Haven [Conn.] : Yale University Press, c2005.
"Brian Cowan provides the definitive account of the origins of coffee drinking and coffeehouse society, and in so doing he reshapes our understanding of the commercial and consumer revolutions in Britain during the long Stuart century."--BOOK JACKET.
The true history of chocolate
Publisher: New York : Thames and Hudson, c1996.
Theobroma cacao...chocolate...'the food of the gods'. Delicious indulgence or cause of migraines? Aphrodisiac or medicinal tonic? Religious symbol or Mesoamerican currency? This delightful tale of one of the world's favorite foods draws upon botany, archaeology, socioeconomics and culinary history to present for the first time a complete and accurate history of chocolate. The story begins some three thousand years ago in the jungles of lowland Mexico and Central America with the tree Theobroma cacao and the complex processes necessary to transform its bitter seeds into what is now known as chocolate. This was centuries before chocolate was consumed in generally unsweetened liquid form and used as currency by the sophisticated Maya, and the Aztecs after them. The Spanish conquest of Central America introduced chocolate to Europe, where it became first the stimulating drink of kings and aristocrats and then was popularized in coffee-houses. Industrialization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made chocolate a food for the masses - until its revival in our own time as a luxury item. The True History of Chocolate is the first book to present the real facts of the pre-Spanish history of chocolate - and it does so with great authority, since the authors share an unrivalled knowledge of the history of Pre-Columbian civilizations and their cuisine. We discover how chocolate got its name, how it was used as a medicine, and find that the Spanish learned of chocolate through the Maya, not the Aztecs. From Maya hieroglyphs to kingdom of the Hershey Bar, this is a fascinating history, beautifully told, and enhanced with quotations, illustrations and old recipes - a book for chocolate-lovers everywhere.
3. FASHION
The art of dress
Publisher: New Haven : Yale University Press, c1995.
Dress is the most fleeting of the arts, subject to the arbitrary dictates of fashion. It is also, however, the art that relates most closely to our lives, both as a reflection of our self-image and, in the words of Louis XIV, as 'the mirror of history'. This handsome book examines English and French fashion from 1750 to 1820 by studying the art of the period, and it shows how changes in dress reflected social, political and cultural developments in the two countries. Closely analysing a wide range of visual sources - including portraits and history painting, sculpture, drawings, caricatures and fashion plates, by such artists as Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, David and Ingres - Aileen Ribeiro describes the development of fashion during this period.
The culture of clothing
Publisher: Cambridge ; Cambridge University Press, 1994.
"This book, the English translation of La Culture des Apparences by Daniel Roche, is a study of dress in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries." "Roche discusses general approaches to the history of dress, locates the subject within current French historiography and uses a large sample of inventories to explore the differences between the various social classes in the amount they spent on clothes and the kind of clothes they wore. It is his belief that the choice of clothes, the trade in clothes and the perception of the function of clothing tells us more about the values of a society than the study of any other single commodity. For clothes have different uses according to who is wearing them, and in the period under discussion several discrete markets in clothing had already emerged. Roche's essential argument is that there was a 'vestimentary revolution' in the later eighteenth century as all sections of the population became caught up in the world of fashion and fast-moving consumption. This was an age of sumptuous fashion gravures and of a new press for ladies of leisure which provided their readers with a stimulating mixture of fashion and public affairs. He demonstrates that this was a period of revolutionary change in the ways in which Parisians thought of dress, for men as well as for women. There was a new concern for decency and respectability as well as a desire to impress." "Taken as a whole, this book is easily the most thorough and wide-ranging study of clothing and its social meaning that has been written to date."--BOOK JACKET.
Dangerous liaisons
Publisher: New York : Metropolitan Museum of Art ; c2006.
"The beautifully photographed and handsomely reproduced images on the following pages bring amorous adventures to life. The vignettes, staged for the widely praised exhibition "Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century," held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2004, feature eighteenth-century costumes in the Museum's spectacular French period rooms, The Wrightsman Galleries. The artfully composed scenes include: a woman sitting for her portrait while her husband flirts with her friend; a man being granted an audience with a woman in a peignoir who is having her hair dressed; a vendor embracing the wife of an old man, his back turned, examining a table for sale; a girl receiving more than a harp lesson from her teacher, while her oblivious chaperone reads an erotic novel; a woman giving up her garter as a memento of a very private dinner. The entertaining and knowledgeable texts set the scenes perfectly."--BOOK JACKET.
Dress, culture, and commerce
Publisher: New York, N.Y. : St. Martin's Press, 1997.
The clothing trades examined in this volume covered the backs of sailors and soldiers, provided shirts for labouring men and skirts for working women, employed legions of needlewomen and supplied retailers with new consumer wares. Garments, once bought, returned again to the marketplace, circulating like currency and bolstering demand. These clothing trades were at the cusp of formal and informal markets. The agents in these trades spanned the social spectrum, from military contractors for clothing, to female outworkers. Within the second-hand trade there were many of the same players as in the new - tailors, shopkeepers, salesmen and saleswomen, menders and makers of clothes. Their activities were supplemented by those of petty and professional thieves, receivers, pawnbrokers and all classes of sellers and recyclers of apparel, each affected by a changing demand for new-styled 'luxuries' and necessities in apparel.
Market à la mode
Publisher: Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
In Market a la Mode, Erin Mackie examines the role that two periodicals played in the growth of fashion and how they influenced their readers. She traces the commercial context in which The Tatler and The Spectator operated, focusing on the processes of commodification, fetishization, and revisions of gender identity. By championing "natural" fashion against the hoop-petticoat, domesticated women against the sophisticated woman of the world, the polite and aestheticised imagination against the illusions of fancy and enthusiasm, and the decency of bourgeois against the depravity of aristocratic taste, The Tatler and The Spectator advanced modern standards of British culture. Mackie's study makes clear that fashion publications, far from being commentaries on passing trends, assumed a leading role in defining women's legitimate sphere of activities as well as in the development of commerce as recreation.
4. FURNITURE
Dangerous liaisons
Publisher: New York : Metropolitan Museum of Art ; c2006.
"The beautifully photographed and handsomely reproduced images on the following pages bring amorous adventures to life. The vignettes, staged for the widely praised exhibition "Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century," held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2004, feature eighteenth-century costumes in the Museum's spectacular French period rooms, The Wrightsman Galleries. The artfully composed scenes include: a woman sitting for her portrait while her husband flirts with her friend; a man being granted an audience with a woman in a peignoir who is having her hair dressed; a vendor embracing the wife of an old man, his back turned, examining a table for sale; a girl receiving more than a harp lesson from her teacher, while her oblivious chaperone reads an erotic novel; a woman giving up her garter as a memento of a very private dinner. The entertaining and knowledgeable texts set the scenes perfectly."--BOOK JACKET.
French furniture of the eighteenth century
Publisher: Charlottesville : University Press of Virginia, 1991.
The rococo interior
Publisher: New Haven : Yale University Press, c1995.
This handsome book offers a comprehensive and stimulating account of the forms and functions of interior decoration in Parisian domestic architecture during the first half of the eighteenth century - the period generally known as the rococo. It charts the rapid and sometimes dramatic changes in both the style and the imagery of the art of that time, and explores in illuminating detail the relationship between social status and the consumption and display of decoration in public and private interiors.
Taste and power
Publisher: Berkeley : University of California Press, c1996.
Enlivened and enriched by Auslander's experiences as a cabinetmaker, this pathbreaking work demonstrates that in post-Revolutionary France, furniture and consumer goods became newly important means of constituting selves, social class, and, perhaps most significantly, the economy and society of the nation itself. The very style of the goods reflected these preoccupations: nineteenth-century bourgeois style was dominated by gendered versions of Old Regime-style furniture, while the working class was offered new furniture designed specifically for its needs. Tastemaking took on a sudden urgency, reflected in the creation of new schools, museums, expositions, libraries, magazines, and books designed to "improve" the taste of producers and consumers alike. As these institutions competed with furniture sellers, a fierce competition sprang up among government bureaucrats, private philanthropists, and distributors to control workers' and consumers' taste. Auslander melds the history of high politics - the formation of the state - with the history of the mundane - furniture - in order to examine how power was consolidated, reproduced, and even resisted in the small objects and gestures of everyday life in France.
5. GENDER
6. LUXURY
Luxury and pleasure in eighteenth-century Britain
Publisher: Oxford ; Oxford University Press, 2005.
"Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain explores the invention, making, and buying of new, semi-luxury, and fashionable consumer goods during the eighteenth century. It follows the progress of china tea ware, cutlery, candlesticks, buckles, and buttons, as they were made, shopped for, and then displayed in the homes of Britain's urban middling classes." "Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain is cultural history at its best, built on fresh evidence drawn directly from customs accounts, advertising material, company papers, and contemporary correspondence. Maxine Berg tells the stories and analyses the developments that led from a global trade in Eastern luxuries beginning in the sixteenth century to the new global trade in British-made consumer goods by the end of the eighteenth century."--BOOK JACKET.
Luxury in the eighteenth century
Publisher: Basingstoke, Hampshire ; Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
"This volume explores the political, economic and moral effects of the production and consumption of luxury goods, tying the concept to contemporary discourse on taste, civility and sensibility, aesthetics and literary genres. This cultural history provides a broadly-based focus on luxury in a series of tightly linked sections addressing key themes of economic debate, material culture, aesthetic principles, luxury as a female vice and the exotic."--BOOK JACKET.
Merchants and luxury markets
Publisher: Malibu, CA : Victoria and Albert Museum in association with the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1996.
Through a detailed examination of inventories and other previously unpublished records, Carolyn Sargentson offers a new perspective on the history of consumption, and she paints a fascinating picture of the luxury market during the decades that preceded the French Revolution. Her text raises important questions about the life-cycle of objects and the way that they were valued, the trading options of merchants who operated within narrow margins of credit and cashflow, and the relationship between the different groups who were jostling for position and advantage in a competitive environment. The chapters cover the range of the merciers' operations and are based on detailed case studies of families or aspects of trade in specialist markets. Subjects covered include the corporation of the merciers and their business practice, their role in design, imported goods and European imitations, novelty and innovation, the merciers' shops and the magasins anglais.
Pleasure in the eighteenth century
Publisher: Washington Square, N.Y. : New York University Press, 1996.
7. PRINT CULTURE
The cultural uses of print in early modern France
Publisher: Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c1987.
The culture of power and the power of culture
"In this new account of Old Regime Europe, T. C. W. Blanning explores the cultural revolution which transformed eighteenth-century Europe. During this period the court culture exemplified by Louis XIV's Versailles was pushed from the centre to the margins by the emergence of a new kind of space - the public sphere. The author shows how many of the world's most important cultural institutions developed in this space: the periodical, the newspaper, the novel, the lending library, the coffee house, the voluntary association, the journalist, and the critic. It was here that public opinion staked its claim to be the ultimate arbiter of culture and politics. For the established order this new force was to prove both a challenge and an opportunity and the author's comparative study of power and culture shows how regimes sought to keep their balance as the ground moved beneath their feet. In the process he explains, among other things, why Britain won the 'Second Hundred Years War' against France, how Prussia rose to become the dominant power in German-speaking Europe, and why the French monarchy collapsed."--BOOK JACKET.
Feminine and opposition journalism in old regime France
Publisher: Berkeley : University of California Press, c1986.
Market à la mode
Publisher: Baltimore, Md. : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
In Market a la Mode, Erin Mackie examines the role that two periodicals played in the growth of fashion and how they influenced their readers. She traces the commercial context in which The Tatler and The Spectator operated, focusing on the processes of commodification, fetishization, and revisions of gender identity. By championing "natural" fashion against the hoop-petticoat, domesticated women against the sophisticated woman of the world, the polite and aestheticised imagination against the illusions of fancy and enthusiasm, and the decency of bourgeois against the depravity of aristocratic taste, The Tatler and The Spectator advanced modern standards of British culture. Mackie's study makes clear that fashion publications, far from being commentaries on passing trends, assumed a leading role in defining women's legitimate sphere of activities as well as in the development of commerce as recreation.