Enfilade

From Manchester University Press:

Kate Smith, Material Goods, Moving Hands: Perceiving Production in England, 1700–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-0719090677, £70 / $105.

In eighteenth-century Britain, greater numbers of people entered the marketplace and bought objects in ever-greater quantities. As consumers rather than producers, how did their understandings of manufacturing processes and the material world change?

Material Goods, Moving Hands combines material culture and visual culture approaches to explore the different ways in which manufacturers and retailers presented production to consumers during the eighteenth century. It shows how new relationships with production processes encouraged consumers, retailers, designers, manufacturers and workers to develop conflicting understandings of production. Objects then were not just markers of fashion and taste, they acted as important conduits through which people living in Georgian Britain could examine and discuss their material world and the processes and knowledge that rendered it.

Kate Smith was a Research Fellow on The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857, a 3-year Leverhulme Trust-funded research project based in the Department of History at the University of Warwick (2011–12) and University College London (2012–14).
She is now Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century History at the
University of Birmingham.

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1. New ways of looking
2. Visual access to production
3. Listening in to the manufacturing world
4. Picturing production and embodying knowledge
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index