Enfilade

From The University of Chicago Press:

Dael Norwood, Trading Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022), 312 pages, ISBN: 978-0226815589, $45.

Trading Freedom explores the surprisingly rich early history of US-China trade and its unexpected impact on the developing republic.

The economic and geographic development of the early United States is usually thought of in trans-Atlantic terms, defined by entanglements with Europe and Africa. In Trading Freedom, Dael A. Norwood recasts these common conceptions by looking to Asia, making clear that from its earliest days, the United States has been closely intertwined with China—monetarily, politically, and psychologically. Norwood details US trade with China from the late eighteenth through the late nineteenth centuries—a critical period in America’s self-definition as a capitalist nation—and shows how global commerce was central to the articulation of that national identity. Trading Freedom illuminates how debates over political economy and trade policy, the building of the transcontinental railroad, and the looming sectional struggle over slavery were all influenced by Sino-American relations. Deftly weaving together interdisciplinary threads from the worlds of commerce, foreign policy, and immigration, Trading Freedom thoroughly dismantles the idea that American engagement with China is anything new. Publication supported by the Bevington Fund.

Dael A. Norwood is assistant professor of history at the University of Delaware.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction: America’s Business with China
1  Founding a Free, Trading Republic
2  The Paradox of a Pacific Policy
3  Troubled Waters
4  Sovereign Rights, or America’s First Opium Problem
5  The Empire’s New Roads
6  This Slave Trade of the Nineteenth Century
7  A Propped-Open Door
8  Death of a Trade, Birth of a Market

Acknowledgments
Appendix: Accounting for the China Trade
Notes
Index

From Manchester UP:

Emma Gleadhill, Taking Travel Home: The Souvenir Culture of British Women Tourists, 1750–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), 312 pages, ISBN: 978-1526155276, £80 / $120.

Taking Travel Home provides a cultural history of the travel souvenir. It situates the souvenir at the crossroads of competing ideas of what travel stood for which were fought out amongst a rapidly growing constituency of British tourists between 1750 and 1830. Drawing from the theory of the souvenir as a nostalgic narrative instrument, the book uncovers how elite women tourists developed a souvenir culture around the texts and objects they brought home to realise their ambitions in the arenas of connoisseurship, science, and friendship. Ultimately, it argues that souvenirs are representative of female agency during this period. For elite women, revelling in the independence and identity formation of travel, but hampered by polite models of femininity and reliant on their menfolk, the creation of souvenirs provided a way to prove their claims to the authority of the travelling subject.

Emma Gleadhill is a Sydney-based historian and artist.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction: Remembering Travel

Part I: Gendering Connoisseurship
1  The Grand Tour: A Masculine Legacy of Taste
2  Shopping for Souvenirs
3  Creating Their Own Cultural Capital: Lady Anna Miller and Hester Lynch Piozzi

Part II: Gendering Science
4  Every Fair Columbus
5  Dorothy Richardson’s Extensive Knowledge
6  Lady Elizabeth Holland, the Social Orchestrator of Science

Part III: Gendering Friendship
7  From Diplomatic Gift to Trifle from Tunbridge Wells
8  A Snuff-box and Other Napoleonic Keepsakes
9  Princess Ekaterina Dashkova’s Gifts to Martha Wilmot

Conclusion: Remembering the Souvenir

Index

Distributed by Yale UP:

Holly Shaffer, Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760–1910 (London: Paul Mellon Centre, 2022), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107284, £45 / $55.

Grafted Arts focuses on Maratha military rulers and British East India Company officials who used the arts to engage in diplomacy, wage war, compete for prestige, and generate devotion as they allied with (or fought against) each other to control western India in the eighteenth century. This book conceptualises the artistic combinations that resulted as ones of ‘graft’—a term that acknowledges the violent and creative processes of suturing arts, and losing and gaining goods, as well as the shifting dynamics among agents who assembled such materials. By tracing grafted arts from multiple perspectives—Maratha and British, artist and patron, soldier and collector—this book charts the methods of empire-building that recast artistic production and collection in western India and from there across India and in Britain. This mercenary method of artistry propagated mixed, fractured and plundered arts. Indeed, these ‘grafted arts’—disseminated across India and Britain over the nineteenth century to aid in consolidating empire or revolting against it entirely—remain instigators of nationalist agitation today.

Holly Shaffer is assistant professor of History of Art and Architecture at Brown University with a focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and South Asian arts and their intersections.

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Note (added 17 January 2024) — As announced in January 2024, Grafted Arts was awarded an HBA Book Prize, for a single-authored book with a subject between 1800 and 1960 (alongside Mark Crinson’s Shock City: Image and Architecture in Industrial Manchester).