Enfilade

From Penn State UP:

Cécile Fromont, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-0271092188, $110. Also available as an ebook.

Early modern central Africa comes to life in an extraordinary atlas of vivid watercolors and drawings that Italian Capuchin Franciscans, veterans of Kongo and Angola missions, composed between 1650 and 1750 for the training of future missionaries. These ‘practical guides’ present the intricacies of the natural, social, and religious environment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century west-central Africa and outline the primarily visual catechization methods the friars devised for the region. Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola brings this overlooked visual corpus to public and scholarly attention.

This beautifully illustrated book includes full-color reproductions of all the images in the atlas, in conjunction with rarely seen related material gathered from collections and archives around the world. Taking a bold new approach to the study of early modern global interactions, art historian Cecile Fromont demonstrates how visual creations such as the Capuchin vignettes, though European in form and crafstmanship, emerged not from a single perspective but rather from cross-cultural interaction. Fromont models a fresh way to think about images created across cultures, highlighting the formative role that cultural encounter itself played in their conception, execution, and modes of operation. Centering Africa and Africans, and with ramifications on four continents, Fromont’s decolonial history profoundly transforms our understanding of the early modern world. It will be of substantial interest to specialists in early modern studies, art history, and religion.

Cécile Fromont is Professor in the History of Art department at Yale University. She is the author of the award-winning book The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (2014) and the editor of Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions (2019), the latter also published by Penn State University Press.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgements

Introduction
1  ‘Nonsense’: Capuchin Images of Kongo and Angola Against Italian Preconceptions
2  Practical Guides to the Mission: The Capuchin Central-African Corpus
3  Images and Devotion
4  Images as Method
5  Images against Idolatry
6  With ‘the Consent of the People, and the Secular Arm of the Prince’
7  Penned by Encounter: Capuchins, Central Africans, and the Making of a Cross-Cultural Discourse
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

From Bloomsbury:

Wendy Bellion and Kristel Smentek, eds., Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century: Art, Mobility, and Change (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-1350259034, $115. Also available as an ebook.

Things change. Broken and restored, reused and remade, objects transcend their earliest functions, locations, and appearances. While every era witnesses change, the eighteenth century experienced artistic, economic, and demographic transformations that exerted unique pressures on material cultures around the world. Locating material objects at the heart of such phenomena, Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century expands beyond Eurocentric perspectives to discover the mobile, transcultural nature of eighteenth-century art worlds. From porcelain to betel leaves, Chumash hats to natural history cabinets, this book examines how objects embody imperialism, knowledge, and resistance in various ways.

By embracing things both elite and everyday, this volume investigates physical and technological manipulations of objects while attending to the human agents who shaped them in an era of accelerating global contact and conquest. Featuring ten essays, the volume foregrounds diverse scholarly approaches to chart new directions for art history and cultural history. Ranging from California to China, Bengal to Britain, Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century 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.

Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century is part of the Material Culture of Art and Design series, edited by Michael Yonan.

Wendy Bellion is Sewell C. Biggs Chair in American Art History and Associate Dean for the Humanities at the University of Delaware. 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. 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.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction, ‘Things Change’ — Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware and Kristel Smentek, MIT
1  ‘A Sort of Picture or Image of my Self’: Amoy Chinqua’s Almost Ancestral Portrait of Joseph Collet — Winnie Wong, University of California, Berkeley
2  Shooting for Freedom: Examining the Material World of Self-Emancipated Persons — Tiffany Momon, Sewanee: The University of the South
3  Something Old, Something New: Repurposing and the Production of Ephemeral Festival Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Paris — Matthew Gin, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
4  Botanical Fantasy in Silk: Transformations of a Rococo Floral Design from England to China — Mei Mei Rado, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5  Making Marble Edible: Madame de Pompadour, Friendship, and the Multiple Lives of Porcelain — Susan M. Wager, University of New Hampshire, Durham
6  The Sovereign Betel in Eighteenth-Century Bengal and Bihar — Zirwat Chowdhury, University of California, Los Angeles
7  Isaiah Thomas’s Stamp Acts at the Halifax Gazette: Printers and Tacit Protest in Revolutionary America — Jennifer Y. Chuong, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
8  Between Art and Nature: The Dauphin’s Treasure at the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid — Tara Zanardi, Hunter College, CUNY
9  California Indian Basket Weavers, Spanish Imperialism, and Eighteenth-Century Global Networks — Yve Chavez, University of California, Santa Cruz
10  British Prints between Caricature and Ethnography — Douglas Fordham, University of Virginia

Index

From Liverpool UP:

Katy Barrett, Looking for Longitude: A Cultural History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-1802070538, £76 / $130.

Why make a joke out of a niche and complex scientific problem? That is the question at the heart of this book, which unearths the rich and surprising history of trying to find longitude at sea in the eighteenth century. Not simply a history on water, this is the story of longitude on paper, of the discussions, satires, diagrams, engravings, novels, plays, poems, and social anxieties that shaped how people understood longitude in William Hogarth’s London. We start from a figure in one of Hogarth’s prints—a lunatic incarcerated in the madhouse of A Rake’s Progress in 1735—to unpick the visual, mental, and social concerns which entwined around the national concern to find a solution to longitude. Why does longitude appear in novels, smutty stories, political critiques, copyright cases, religious tracts, and dictionaries as much as in government papers? This sheds new light on the first government scientific funding body—the Board of Longitude—established to administer vast reward money for anyone who found a means of accurately measuring longitude at sea. Meet the cast of characters involved in the search for longitude, from famous novelists and artists, to almost unknown pamphleteers and inventors, and see how their interactions informed the fate of longitude’s most famous pursuer, the clockmaker John Harrison.

Dr Katy Barrett is an interdisciplinary curator, scholar, and writer focusing on interactions between art and science. Currently she works as Deputy Curator of Art and Head of Interpretation at the Houses of Parliament. She has previously worked as Curator of Art Collections at the Science Museum, London; Curator of Art, pre-1800, at Royal Museums Greenwich; and has held various posts in national and university museums. She has higher degrees in History of Art and History of Science and is active on social media as @SpoonsonTrays.

Available from Blackwell’s:

James Stourton, Heritage: A History of How We Conserve Our Past (London: Apollo, 2022), 496 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1838933166, £40.

Heritage is all around us: millions belong to its organisations, tens of thousands volunteer for it, and politicians pay lip service to it. When the Victorians began to employ the term in something approaching the modern sense, they applied it to cathedrals, castles, villages, and certain landscapes. Since then a multiplicity of heritage labels have arisen, cultural and commercial, tangible and intangible—for just as every era has its notion of heritage, so does every social group, and every generation. In Heritage, James Stourton focuses on elements of our cultural and natural environment that have been deliberately preserved: the British countryside and national parks, buildings such as Blenheim Palace and Tattersall Castle, and the works of art inside them. He charts two heroic periods of conservation—the 1880s and the 1960s—and considers whether threats of wealth, rampant development, and complacency are similar in the present day. Heritage is both a story of crisis and profound change in public perception, and one of hope and regeneration.

James Stourton is a British art historian, a former Chairman of Sotheby’s UK, and the author of Great Houses of London, British Embassies, and the authorized biography of Kenneth Clark. Stourton frequently lectures for Cambridge University History of Art Faculty, Sotheby’s Institute of Education, and The Art Fund. In addition, he is a senior fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, and he sits on the Heritage Memorial Fund, a government panel that decides what constitutes heritage and thus what should be saved for the nation.

C O N T E N T S

Preface

Introduction
1  The First Threats
2  The Search for Arcadia
3  Assembling a National Collection
4  The Exodus of Paintings
5  Brave New World
6  Birmingham and Anti-Heritage
7  The Backlash: The Heroic Period of Conservation
8  Rescuing a City: York
9  The Sack of Bath
10  The Archaeologists
11  Beyond the Town
12  The Fall and Rise of Country Houses
13  The Enthusiasts: Canals and Railways
14  Regeneration: Mills, Housing, and Power Stations
15  Regeneration: Cities, Docklands, and Basins
16  Liverpool Story
17  Margate Sands
18  The Heritage Industry and the Lottery
19  Churches
20  Museums
21  Heritage: An Unfinished History

Acknowledgments
Endnotes
Select Bibliography

From Yale UP:

Jennifer Van Horn, Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art during Slavery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 344 pages, ISBN: 978-0300257632, $60.

A highly original history of American portraiture that places the experiences of enslaved people at its center

This timely and eloquent book tells a new history of American art: how enslaved people mobilized portraiture for acts of defiance. Revisiting the origins of portrait painting in the United States, Jennifer Van Horn reveals how mythologies of whiteness and of nation building erased the aesthetic production of enslaved Americans of African descent and obscured the portrait’s importance as a site of resistance. Moving from the wharves of colonial Rhode Island to antebellum Louisiana plantations to South Carolina townhouses during the Civil War, the book illuminates how enslaved people’s relationships with portraits also shaped the trajectory of African American art post-emancipation. Van Horn asserts that Black creativity, subjecthood, viewership, and iconoclasm constituted instances of everyday rebellion against systemic oppression. Portraits of Resistance is not only a significant intervention in the fields of American art and history but also an important contribution to the reexamination of racial constructs on which American culture was built.

Jennifer Van Horn is associate professor of art history and history at the University of Delaware.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Neptune Thurston’s Portraits
1  Making Portraits
2  Fleeting Portraits
3  Haunted Portraits
4  Viewing Portraits
5  Destroying Portraits
Epilogue: Archibald Motley’s Portraits

Notes
Illustration Credit
Index

From Princeton UP:

Glory Liu, Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-0691203812, £30 / $35.

The unlikely story of how Americans canonized Adam Smith as the patron saint of free markets

Originally published in 1776, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was lauded by America’s founders as a landmark work of Enlightenment thinking about national wealth, statecraft, and moral virtue. Today, Smith is one of the most influential icons of economic thought in America. Glory Liu traces how generations of Americans have read, reinterpreted, and weaponized Smith’s ideas, revealing how his popular image as a champion of American-style capitalism and free markets is a historical invention.

Drawing on a trove of illuminating archival materials, Liu tells the story of how an unassuming Scottish philosopher captured the American imagination and played a leading role in shaping American economic and political ideas. She shows how Smith became known as the father of political economy in the nineteenth century and was firmly associated with free trade, and how, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the Chicago School of Economics transformed him into the preeminent theorist of self-interest and the miracle of free markets. Liu explores how a new generation of political theorists and public intellectuals has sought to recover Smith’s original intentions and restore his reputation as a moral philosopher.

Charting the enduring fascination that this humble philosopher from Scotland has held for American readers over more than two centuries, Adam Smith’s America shows how Smith continues to be a vehicle for articulating perennial moral and political anxieties about modern capitalism.

Glory M. Liu is a college fellow in social studies at Harvard University. Her work has appeared in publications such as Modern Intellectual History, The Washington Post, and Aeon.

From Princeton UP:

Paul Sagar, Adam Smith Reconsidered: History, Liberty, and the Foundations of Modern Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-0691210834, £28 / $35.

Adam Smith has long been recognized as the father of modern economics. More recently, scholars have emphasized his standing as a moral philosopher—one who was prepared to critique markets as well as to praise them. But Smith’s contributions to political theory are still underappreciated and relatively neglected. In this bold, revisionary book, Paul Sagar argues that not only have the fundamentals of Smith’s political thought been widely misunderstood, but that once we understand them correctly, our estimations of Smith as economist and as moral philosopher must radically change.

Rather than seeing Smith either as the prophet of the free market, or as a moralist who thought the dangers of commerce lay primarily in the corrupting effects of trade, Sagar shows why Smith is more thoroughly a political thinker who made major contributions to the history of political thought. Smith, Sagar argues, saw war, not commerce, as the engine of political change and he was centrally concerned with the political, not moral, dimensions of—and threats to—commercial societies. In this light, the true contours and power of Smith’s foundational contributions to western political thought emerge as never before.

Offering major reinterpretations of Smith’s political, moral, and economic ideas, Adam Smith Reconsidered seeks to revolutionize how he is understood. In doing so, it recovers Smith’s original way of doing political theory, one rooted in the importance of history and the necessity of maintaining a realist sensibility, and from which we still have much to learn.

Paul Sagar is senior lecturer in political theory at King’s College London and the author of The Opinion of Mankind: Sociability and the Theory of the State from Hobbes to Smith (Princeton).