Enfilade

Spread across the volumes are essays addressing the long eighteenth century, including topics of illustrations and visual culture. From Edinburgh UP:

Mary Hammond and Jonathan Rose, eds., The Edinburgh History of Reading, 4 volumes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 1512 pages, 978-1474478717, £350. [Each volume is also sold individually.]

Bringing together the latest scholarship from all over the world on topics ranging from reading practices in ancient China to the workings of the twenty-first-century reading brain, the 4 volumes of The Edinburgh History of Reading demonstrate that reading is a deeply imbricated, socio-political practice, at once personal and public, defiant, and obedient. It is often materially ephemeral, but it can also be emotionally and intellectually enduring.

Volume Titles

Early Readers, edited by Mary Hammond, with contents listed here.

Early Readers presents a number of innovative ways through which we might capture or infer traces of readers in cultures where most evidence has been lost. It begins by investigating what a close analysis of extant texts from 6th-century BCE China can tell us about contemporary reading practices, explores the reading of medieval European women and their male medical practitioner counterparts, traces readers across New Spain, Peru, the Ottoman Empire and the Iberian world between 1500 and 1800, and ends with an analysis of the surprisingly enduring practice of reading aloud.

Modern Readers, edited by Mary Hammond, with contents listed here.

Modern Readers explores the myriad places and spaces in which reading has typically taken place since the eighteenth century, from the bedrooms of the English upper classes, through large parts of nineteenth-century Africa and on-board ships and trains travelling the world, to twenty-first-century reading groups. It encompasses a range of genres from to science fiction, music and self-help to Government propaganda.

Common Readers, edited by Jonathan Rose, with contents listed here.

Common Readers casts a fascinating light on the literary experiences of ordinary people: miners in Scotland, churchgoers in Victorian London, workers in Czarist Russia, schoolgirls in rural Australia, farmers in Republican China, and forward to today’s online book discussion groups. Chapters in this volume explore what they read, and how books changed their lives.

Subversive Readers, edited by Jonathan Rose, with contents listed here.

Subversive Readers explores the strategies used by readers to question authority, challenge convention, resist oppression, assert their independence and imagine a better world. This kind of insurgent reading may be found everywhere: in revolutionary France and Nazi Germany, in Eastern Europe under Communism and in Australian and Iranian prisons, among eighteenth-century women reading history and nineteenth-century men reading erotica, among postcolonial Africans, the blind, and pioneering transgender activists.

Forthcoming from The Getty (in July) . . .

Diana Davis, The Tastemakers: British Dealers and the Anglo-Gallic Interior, 1785–1865 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2020), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-1606066416, $65.

In this volume, Diana Davis demonstrates how London dealers invented a new and visually splendid decorative style that combined the contrasting tastes of two nations. Departing from the conventional narrative that depicts dealers as purveyors of antiquarianism, Davis repositions them as innovators who were key to transforming old art objects from ancien régime France into cherished ‘antiques’ and, equally, as creators of new and modified French-inspired furniture, bronze work, and porcelain. The resulting old, new, and reconfigured objects merged aristocratic French eighteenth-century taste with nineteenth-century British preference, and they were prized by collectors, who displayed them side by side in palatial interiors of the period.

The Tastemakers analyzes dealer-made furnishings from the nineteenth-century patron’s perspective and in the context of the interiors for which they were created, contending that early dealers deliberately formulated a new aesthetic with its own objects, language, and value. Davis examines a wide variety of documents to piece together the shadowy world of these dealers, who emerge center stage as traders, makers, and tastemakers.

Diana Davis specializes in the interface between collectors, dealers, and the art market in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments
Note to the Reader

Introduction

Part 1 — Trade, Taste and Retail
1  ‘The Revised Taste of Louis the Fourteenth’
2  ‘Nos Amis, Les Enemies!: Britain and France
3  ‘The Wily Brocanteur‘
4  ‘The New Race of Connoisseurs’

Part 2 — The Dealer-Producer
5  Manufacturers of Antique Furniture
6  ‘Matt and Burnished Gold’
7  ‘China Painted and Gilt’
8  ‘A Burst of Splendour’: The Anglo-Gallic Interior

Conclusion

Appendix 1  Selected Dealer Biographies
Appendix 2  Sale Catalogs

Sources and Bibliography
About the Author
Illustration Credits
Index

Distributed by Yale University Press:

George Humphrey Yetter and Carl Lounsbury, Restoring Williamsburg (The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2019), 296 pages, ISBN: 978-0300248357, $50.

Today best known as the world’s largest ‘living history’ museum, Williamsburg was the capital of the colony of Virginia in the 1700s and the setting for key debates leading to the American Revolution. Inspired by growing interest in America’s colonial heritage, W. A. R. Goodwin, supported by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., initiated a major restoration in the 1920s and 1930s that has allowed visitors to see how Williamsburg looked in the 18th century. Restoring Williamsburg expands on Williamsburg Before and After, a now-classic book with more than 200,000 copies in print, offering an updated and nuanced look at the continuing process of restoration. In addition to capturing moments throughout the site’s transformation, the book offers important considerations about modern curatorial practices and changing approaches to historic preservation.

Lavishly illustrated with more than 350 photographs, watercolors, sketches, maps, and other illustrations, Restoring Williamsburg features new images from both before and after the restoration. This is an important contribution not only to architectural history and restoration practices but also to our understanding of the town that continues to inspire Americans to think about their history.

George Humphrey Yetter, who wrote Williamsburg Before and After, is the former associate curator of architectural drawings at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Carl R. Lounsbury is the former Shirley and Richard Roberts Architectural Historian at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and currently teaches history at the College of William and Mary.

From the Oxford University Studies in The Enlightenment series:

Melissa Percival and Muriel Adrien, eds., Fancy in Eighteenth-Century European Visual Culture (Liverpool: Voltaire Foundation in association with Liverpool University Press, 2020), 325 pages, ISBN: 978-1789620030, £65 / $100.

From The U of C Press:

Toby Green, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019), 640 pages, ISBN: 978-0226644578, $40.

By the time the “Scramble for Africa” among European colonial powers began in the late nineteenth century, Africa had already been globally connected for centuries. Its gold had fueled the economies of Europe and the Islamic world for nearly a millennium, and the sophisticated kingdoms spanning its west coast had traded with Europeans since the fifteenth century. Until at least 1650, this was a trade of equals, using a variety of currencies—most importantly, cowrie shells imported from the Maldives and nzimbu shells imported from Brazil. But, as the slave trade grew, African kingdoms began to lose prominence in the growing global economy. We have been living with the effects of this shift ever since.

With A Fistful of Shells, Toby Green transforms our view of West and West-Central Africa by reconstructing the world of these kingdoms, which revolved around trade, diplomacy, complex religious beliefs, and the production of art. Green shows how the slave trade led to economic disparities that caused African kingdoms to lose relative political and economic power. The concentration of money in the hands of Atlantic elites in and outside these kingdoms brought about a revolutionary nineteenth century in Africa, parallel to the upheavals then taking place in Europe and America. Yet political fragmentation following the fall of African aristocracies produced radically different results as European colonization took hold.

Drawing not just on written histories, but on archival research in nine countries, art, oral history, archaeology, and letters, Green lays bare the transformations that have shaped world politics and the global economy since the fifteenth century and paints a new and masterful portrait of West Africa, past and present.

Toby Green is a senior lecturer in Lusophone African history and culture at King’s College London and is author of The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300-1589.

C O N T E N T S

List of Maps
Foreword
Note on Spellings/Names
Glossary

Introduction

Part One
Causes: Economic Divergence in West and West- Central Africa
Timelines for Part One
1  ‘Three Measures of Gold’: The Rise and Fall of the Great Empires of the Sahel
2  Causeways across the Savannah: From Senegambia to Sierra Leone
3  Ready Money: The Gold Coast and the Gold Trade
4  Rivers of Cloth, Masks of Bronze: The Bights of Benin and Biafra
5  The Kingdom of Kongo: From Majesty to Revolt
Coda to Part One

Part Two
Consequences: Politics, Belief and Revolutions from Below
Timeline for Part Two: West African Political History, c. 1680–1850
Prologue to Part Two
6  ‘With Boots Worth 3 Slaves’: Slavery and Value in the Eighteenth Century
7  On a War Footing: The ‘Fiscal- Military State’ in West African Politics
8  Feeding Power: New Societies, New Worldviews
9  Transnational Africas, Struggle and the Rising of Modernity
10  Warrior Aristocracies and Pushback from Below
11  Let them Drink Rum! Islam, Revolution and the Aristocracy

Conclusion

Bibliography
Notes
List of Illustrations
Index