Enfilade

From Yale UP:

Ashli White, Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and Politics in the Late Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 392 pages, ISBN: 978-0300259018, $50.

How objects associated with the American, French, and Haitian revolutions drew diverse people throughout the Atlantic world into debates over revolutionary ideals

Historian Ashli White explores the circulation of material culture during the American, French, and Haitian revolutions, arguing that in the late eighteenth century, radical ideals were contested through objects as well as in texts. She considers how revolutionary things, as they moved throughout the Atlantic, brought people into contact with these transformative political movements in visceral, multiple, and provocative ways. Focusing on a range of objects—ceramics and furniture, garments and accessories, prints, maps, and public amusements—White shows how material culture held political meaning for diverse populations. Enslaved and free, women and men, poor and elite—all turned to things as a means to realize their varied and sometimes competing visions of revolutionary change.

Ashli White is associate professor of history at the University of Miami. She is the author of Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic.