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Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century

Art, Mobility, and Change

Wendy Bellion Kristel Smentek

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Paperback

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English
Bloomsbury Visual Arts
06 February 2025
From porcelain to betel leaves, Chumash hats to natural history cabinets, this book examines how objects embody imperialism, knowledge, and resistance in various ways. While every era witnesses change, the eighteenth century experienced artistic, economic, and demographic transformations that exerted unique pressures on material cultures around the world. Featuring ten essays from leading historians of British, Spanish, and West African art, this global survey brings a fresh approach to the study of eighteenth century material culture, foregrounding cultural connections, translation, and movement over static and rooted perspectives.

Each chapter takes a diverse scholarly approach, identifying a specific historical example of early modern transnationalism, and engages with a number of dynamic fields of enquiry and practice, ranging from material culture and ecocriticism, through to global history and decolonization. Underpinned by case studies which feature objects and practices that span Asia, Europe, Australasia Africa and North America, the book expands beyond Eurocentric perspectives to discover the mobile, transcultural nature of eighteenth-century art worlds.

Ranging from California to China, Bengal to Britain, this timely book illuminates the transformations within and between artistic media, follows natural and human-made things as they migrate across territories, and reveals how objects catalyzed change in the transoceanic worlds of the early modern period. Going beyond Eurocentric perspectives, it reveals the innate mobility and transculturality of eighteenth-century art worlds; charting new directions for global art history and cultural history of the period.
Edited by:   ,
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 232mm,  Width: 158mm,  Spine: 18mm
Weight:   634g
ISBN:   9781350259072
ISBN 10:   1350259071
Series:   Material Culture of Art and Design
Pages:   288
Publication Date:  
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Wendy Bellion is Sewell C. Biggs Chair in American Art History and Associate Dean for the Humanities at the University of Delaware, USA. Her research focuses on North American art and the Atlantic World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is the author of Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (2011) and Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (2019). Kristel Smentek is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. Her research engages eighteenth-century European graphic and decorative arts in their transcultural contexts. She is the author of Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2014), co-editor of Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment (2022), and co-curator of the accompanying exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums.

Reviews for Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century: Art, Mobility, and Change

With ten vibrant studies that treat a striking array of media across an ambitious geographic scope, this volume charts some of the liveliest directions in today’s eighteenth-century art history, which has decisively embraced the everyday object and the dynamism of change as a generative critical lens. * Nancy Um, Associate Director for Research and Knowledge Creation, Getty Research Institute, USA * A new history of eighteenth-century art is being written in books like Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century. Ten highly original, meticulously researched, and conceptually exciting essays encourage us to think expansively about material culture’s role in shaping global history. * Stacey Sloboda, Paul H. Tucker Professor of Art History, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA * This important volume puts material culture and its protean meaning-making at the center of eighteenth-century art history. Bellion's and Smentek's lucid introduction, and the innovative scholars they bring into conversation, are united by their admirable attentiveness to objects and voices from around the globe. * Amy Freund, Associate Professor and The Kleinheinz Family Endowed Chair in Art History, Southern Methodist University, USA *


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