Enfilade

From Brepols:

Ada De Wit, Grinling Gibbons and His Contemporaries (1650–1700): The Golden Age of Woodcarving in the Netherlands and Britain (Turnhout: Brepols, 2022), 426 pages, ISBN: 978-2503584881, €150.

One of the greatest artists of the English Baroque, Grinling Gibbons (1648–1721) was born in Rotterdam to English parents. He moved to England at the age of nineteen and embarked on a spectacular career. His exuberant lifelike carvings in limewood can be admired at Hampton Court Palace and at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. But what was the Dutch tradition that shaped him? And what set him apart from the other carvers of his time? This book explains the importance of woodcarving and provides new insights into the work of woodcarvers in the Netherlands and Britain. Full of discoveries and new images, it discusses little-known interiors, objects, craftsmen, and their patrons and provides a rich introduction to the ornamental world of woodcarving.

Ada de Wit is Curator of Works of Art and Sculpture at The Wallace Collection, London. A specialist in decorative arts and historic interiors, she is an expert on the art of Grinling Gibbons.

From the University of Delaware Press:

Amanda Lahikainen, Money and Materiality in the Golden Age of Graphic Satire (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2022), 234 pages, ISBN: 978-1644532690 (cloth), $120 / ISBN: 978-1644532683 (paperback), $35.

This book examines the entwined and simultaneous rise of graphic satire and cultures of paper money in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. Asking how Britons learned to value both graphic art and money, the book makes surprising connections between two types of engraved images that grew in popularity and influence during this time. Graphic satire grew in visual risk-taking, while paper money became a more standard carrier of financial value, courting controversy as a medium, moral problem, and factor in inflation. Through analysis of satirical prints, as well as case studies of monetary satires beyond London, this book demonstrates several key ways that cultures attach value to printed paper, accepting it as social reality and institutional fact. Thus, satirical banknotes were objects that broke down the distinction between paper money and graphic satire ​altogether.

Amanda Lahikainen is the executive director of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Ogunquit, Maine. Prior to joining OMAA, she served as an associate professor of art history and chairperson of the art department at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments
List of Tables and Figures

Introduction: The Inflation of Georgian Graphic Satire
1  Money, Fact, and Value
2  Crisis
3  Subjectivity and Trust
4  Imitation and Immateriality
5  Materiality
6  The Deflation of Georgian Graphic Satire
Epilogue: Beyond Britain

Notes
Bibliography
Index

From Four Courts Press:

Patricia McCarthy, Enjoying Claret in Georgian Ireland: A History of Amiable Excess (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2022), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1801510134, €40.

This book looks at Ireland’s love affair with claret, which began in earnest with the establishment of Irish families in the wine trade in Bordeaux in the early eighteenth century. So much red wine from Bordeaux was being consumed by Ireland’s nobility and gentry that Jonathan Swift referred to it as ‘Irish wine’, in the full knowledge that his correspondent would understand that he meant claret. One writer observed that ‘drinking had become so fashionable, that gentlemen competed eagerly to have the largest cellar and spend the most on hogsheads of wine every year’, and claret was the wine of choice. At Dublin Castle the amount of wine consumed was prodigious: it was acknowledged by all that balls, dinners and the contents of the Castle’s cellars played a major part in the popularity of the lord lieutenant and indeed resulted in the premature death of one. Not surprisingly, gout—referred to as ‘the Irish hospitality’ by one observer—was rampant and some of the rather bizarre ‘cures’ suggested are discussed. The book deals with questions such as how was the domestic wine cellar planned and used? When did connoisseurship in wine commence? What was the role of the merchant, apart from providing the wine? On the domestic front, to what lengths did men go in purchasing the many fashionable wine accoutrements used in the traditionally ‘male’ dining room? Why did ‘toasts’ figure so prominently, not just at dinner parties in mixed company, but particularly among male groups in clubs and associations? The ‘Irish Wine’ trade fostered not only a reputation for excessive conviviality, but created a healthy profit for its merchant importers.

Patricia McCarthy is an architectural historian and author of ‘A Favourite Study’ Building the King’s Inns (Dublin, 2006), and Life in the Country House in Georgian Ireland (Yale University Press, 2016).

From Yale UP:

Thomas Truxes, The Overseas Trade of British America: A Narrative History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 464 pages, ISBN‏: ‎ 978-0300159882, $40.

A sweeping history of early American trade and the foundation of the American economy

In a single, readily digestible, coherent narrative, historian Thomas M. Truxes presents the three hundred–year history of the overseas trade of British America. Born from seeds planted in Tudor England in the sixteenth century, Atlantic trade allowed the initial survival, economic expansion, and later prosperity of British America, and brought vastly different geographical regions, each with a distinctive identity and economic structure, into a single fabric. Truxes shows how colonial American prosperity was only possible because of the labor of enslaved Africans, how the colonial economy became dependent on free and open markets, and how the young United States owed its survival in the struggle of the American Revolution to Atlantic trade.

Thomas M. Truxes is Clinical Professor of Irish Studies and History at New York University. He is the author of Irish-American Trade, 1660–1783 and Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York, among other books.

C O N T E N T S

Preface
A Note on the Text

Introduction
1  Tudor Beginnings, 1485–1603
2  Emergence, 1603–1650
3  Shaping Atlantic Commerce, 1650–1696
4  Engines of Opportunity, 1696–1733
5  Testing the Limits of Empire, 1733–1763
6  Crisis, 1763–1773
7  Trade and Revolution, 1773–1783
Epilogue: The Empress at Sea
Conclusion

Appendix 1: The Balance of Payments of British America
Appendix 2: Statistical Tables

List of Abbreviations and Short Titles
Notes
Index

From Simon & Schuster:

David Hackett Fischer, African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022), 960 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1982145095, $40.

In this sweeping, foundational work, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Hackett Fischer draws on extensive research to show how enslaved Africans and their descendants enlarged American ideas of freedom in varying ways in different regions of the early United States.

African Founders explores the little-known history of how enslaved people from different regions of Africa interacted with colonists of European origins to create new regional cultures in the colonial United States. The Africans brought with them linguistic skills, novel techniques of animal husbandry and farming, and generations-old ethical principles, among other attributes. This startling history reveals how much our country was shaped by these African influences in its early years, producing a new, distinctly American culture. Drawing on decades of research, some of it in western Africa, Fischer recreates the diverse regional life that shaped the early American republic. He shows that there were varieties of slavery in America and varieties of new American culture, from Puritan New England to Dutch New York, Quaker Pennsylvania, cavalier Virginia, coastal Carolina, and Louisiana and Texas. This landmark work of history will transform our understanding of America’s origins.

David Hackett Fischer is a University Professor and Warren Professor of History emeritus at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He is the author of numerous books, including the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner Washington’s Crossing and Champlain’s Dream. In 2015, he received the Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.