A Cultural History of Objects in the Age of Industry 1474298796, 9781474298797

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Series Preface
Introduction Carolyn L. White
1 Objecthood Lu Ann De Cunzo
2 Technology Timothy J. Scarlett and Steven A. Walton
3 Economic Objects Cassie Newland
4 Everyday Objects Dan Hicks
5 Art Maggie M. Cao
6 Architecture William Whyte
7 Bodily Objects Diana DiPaolo Loren
8 Object Worlds Barbara J. Heath
Notes
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF OBJECTS VOLUME 5

A Cultural History of Objects General Editors: Dan Hicks and William Whyte Volume 1 A Cultural History of Objects in Antiquity Edited by Robin Osborne Volume 2 A Cultural History of Objects in the Medieval Age Edited by Julie Lund and Sarah Semple Volume 3 A Cultural History of Objects in the Renaissance Edited by James Symonds Volume 4 A Cultural History of Objects in the Age of Enlightenment Edited by Audrey Horning Volume 5 A Cultural History of Objects in the Age of Industry Edited by Carolyn L. White Volume 6 A Cultural History of Objects in the Modern Age Edited by Laurie A. Wilkie and John M. Chenoweth

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF OBJECTS

IN THE AGE OF INDUSTRY VOLUME 5 Edited by Carolyn L. White

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2021 Copyright © Carolyn L. White and contributors, 2021 Carolyn L. White has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. Series design by Raven Design Cover image: Canned goods counter at Macy’s Department Store, New York City, c.1898 © Bridgeman Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

  HB: Pack:

978-1-4742-9879-7 978-1-4742-9881-0

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CONTENTS

L ist

of

I llustrations 

vii

S eries P reface 

xi

Introduction Carolyn L. White

1

1 Objecthood Lu Ann De Cunzo

15

2 Technology Timothy J. Scarlett and Steven A. Walton

39

3 Economic Objects Cassie Newland

57

4 Everyday Objects Dan Hicks

77

5 Art Maggie M. Cao

89

6 Architecture William Whyte

111

7 Bodily Objects Diana DiPaolo Loren

135

vi

CONTENTS

8 Object Worlds Barbara J. Heath

155

N otes 

175

B ibliography 

177

N otes

206

I ndex 

on

C ontributors 

208

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES 2.1 Newly created mid-level clerks developed objects to help manage the flow of information in novel ways as the scale of industry grew. F. Wolf’s time card from a day at the Union Foundry and Pullman Car Wheel Works in 1886 shows that his 10.5-hour workday was counted against two different contracted orders, indexed by their numbers

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2.2 Vernier External Callipers, with sliding Vernier scale, which magnifies the increments of measurement by up to 3.8 times with an accuracy of 0.001 inch with each adjustment. Made in London between 1800 and 1825 by Holtzapffel and Company. Vernier External Callipers, 1800–1825, object number 1930-172 

46

2.3 Illustration of a large forge mill from a 1771 edition of Diderot’s encyclopedia, showing the arrangement (top view) of structures for power generation and transmission. Getty images 492654850

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2.4 Models played a key role in technological education, broadly defined, and these objects worked alongside drawings and text descriptions in classrooms, in establishing patent claims, and for inspiring aesthetic and technological admiration. Pictured is one of Franz Reuleaux’s pedagogical models that demonstrates a universal joint to transmit power at any angle. The model was built by Gustav Voigt in 1882. Photograph: Jon Reis of object Q3 in the Reuleaux Kinematic Mechanisms Collection at the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

2.5 Painting by John Ferguson Weir (1841–1926), The Gun Foundry (1864–1868). Weir’s painting includes technical details he developed through his many experiences at the West Point Foundry including the careful depiction of the Rodman core cooling system in use on the viewer’s right. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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3.1 Silvertown India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works in All the Year Round, 1875. Courtesy of Getty images

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5.1 Edouard Manet, L’asperge (Asparagus), 1880, oil on canvas, Musee D’Orsay, gift of Sam Salz, 1959

90

5.2 John Singleton Copley, Mrs. John Winthrop, 1773, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Morris K. Jesup Fund, 1931

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5.3 Ammi Phillips, Mrs. Mayer and Daughter, 1835–1840, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1962

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5.4 Currier & Ives, Four-in-Hand, 1861, hand-colored lithograph, Metropolitan Museum of Art, bequest of Adele S. Colgate, 1962

95

5.5 Albert Bierstadt, Donner Lake from the Summit, 1873, oil on canvas, New York Historical Society, gift of Archer Milton Huntington

97

5.6 Francis Edmonds, The Image Pedlar, c. 1844, oil on canvas, New York Historical Society, gift of The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts

99

5.7 William Merritt Chase, Studio Interior, c. 1882, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Carll H. de Silver in memory of her husband, 13.50

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5.8 William Harnett, The Faithful Colt, 1890, oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1935.236

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5.9 John Haberle, Imitation, 1887, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, New Century Fund, gift of the Amon. G. Carter Foundation

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5.10 James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold, The Falling Rocket, 1875, oil on panel, Detroit Institute of Art, gift of Dexter M. Ferry, Jr

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ix

6.1 “Contrasted Residences for the Poor,” A. N. W. Pugin, Contrasts (1841). Author’s collection

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6.2 The Eiffel Tower. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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6.3 Glasgow University. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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6.4 Paris Opera House. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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6.5 Cologne Cathedral. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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7.1 Advertisement for Woodhead & Company’s Diamond Jet Blacking shoe polish, showing two women discussing a man’s shiny boots, with the Woodhead factory in the background, 1867 136 7.2 From Spaniard and Morisca, Albino Girl (De español y morisca, albina), Miquel Cabrera

137

7.3 Buttons and lice comb from Fort Independence, Boston. © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology

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7.4 Glass vaginal syringes recovered from 27/29 Endicott St., Boston. Originally published in Bagley (2016: 140), reproduced with permission of the author

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7.5 Nineteenth-century ceramic Prosser button excavated from Harvard Yard. © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology

144

7.6 Buttons recovered from Boston Industrial School for Girls. Courtesy of the City of Boston Archaeology Program

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7.7 “A Court for King Cholera,” Punch Magazine, October 1852. Wellcome Collection. CC BY

147

7.8 Advertisement for Hood’s Sarsaparilla, The Boston Globe, Boston, Massachusetts, March 30, 1895, Saturday

148

7.9 Fragments of a Hood’s Sarsaparilla bottle recovered from Harvard Yard. © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology

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7.10 Advertisement for Pinaud’s perfumes, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, February 9, 1877

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7.11 Manofica ornaments in silver, bone, and coral. Verona, Italy, nineteenth century. Wellcome Collection, Science Museum, London. CC BY

153

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

8.1 Monetaria moneta and Monetaria annulus. Photograph: the author

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8.2 Making “props.” From Stearn (1890: 354)

168

8.3 Collection of shells used for shell-work. Photograph: the author

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8.4 Seated shell-work figures. Note the use of cowries for the legs of the sofa. Courtesy of the Strong, Rochester, New York

172

TABLE 8.1 Archaeologically recovered cowries from Massachusetts and Rhode Island

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SERIES PREFACE

Our lives are lived with and through and surrounded by objects. We shape them, we use them, and they shape us, too. Small wonder that scholars study them: not just those in disciplines like anthropology, archaeology, or science and technology studies that have long led the way in such research, but also— increasingly—historians, social scientists, literary theorists, and others. This sixvolume Cultural History of Objects is a response to the growing appreciation of the subject’s significance: both an authoritative summing up of the state of the art and a provocation for future work in the field. A Cultural History of Objects explores how objects were created, the changing ways in which they have been used and understood, and their ongoing and cumulative consequences. Stretching from antiquity to the contemporary period, it is a chronologically wide-ranging but culturally specific project, one that focuses quite deliberately on the experience of the Western world. Over the past three thousand years, Europe has seen the creation, maintenance, and development of a series of particular attitudes to the material world. These attitudes have been worked out through the creation and use of artifacts. These practices have involved expanding scales of production, commodification, industry, technology, and networks of distribution. At the center of this process is the idea of the object: a thing distinct from the subject who owns or uses it. This Western history of objects stands in contrast to nonWestern and prehistoric attitudes to material culture in which distinctions between subjects and objects are often less clearly drawn. For that reason, these volumes do not present a history of technology, a history of artifacts, or of material culture in which the geographic scope would necessarily be global and cross-cultural. Rather, the focus of the exercise is specifically the cultural history of objects.

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SERIES PREFACE

This assumption shapes the periodization of the project, in which each volume deals with a recognizably Western epoch: 1. A Cultural History of Objects in Antiquity (c. 1000 BCE–500 CE) 2. A Cultural History of Objects in the Medieval Age (500–1400 CE) 3. A Cultural History of Objects in the Renaissance (1400–1600 CE) 4. A Cultural History of Objects in the Age of Enlightenment (1600–1760 CE) 5. A Cultural History of Objects in the Age of Industry (1760–1900 CE) 6. A Cultural History of Objects in the Modern Age (1900 CE–present)

Each volume shares the same structure. After an introduction, which places the period in a broader context, considering wider issues of cross-cultural exchanges with the non-Western world and the legacy of previous periods, the first chapter explores the critical question of how objecthood was understood and experienced. Successive chapters then uncover aspects of objecthood, tracing developments in technology, economic objects, everyday objects, art objects, architecture, and bodily objects. The final chapter goes further, opening up the volume and the subject more generally by using a particular object or class of objects to consider the “object worlds” of the period: the ways in which objects shaped human life in the past and shape scholarship in the present. This approach enables readers to trace the story chronologically or thematically, reading each volume to explore a particular moment in time or reading the same chapter across all volumes to understand how particular types of object changed through time. Either way, A Cultural History of Objects offers an authoritative, provocative, and original account of this subject, whose importance can only grow. General Editors: Dan Hicks and William Whyte

Introduction CAROLYN L. WHITE

What sorts of objects did people use during the Age of Industry? What kinds of choices were available? Why did people make the choices they did? These questions tap into vast literatures of consumerism, material culture, trade, technology, art, architecture, and economics—all addressed directly in this volume. Consumers do not only make choices, but the scope and character of those choices is made for them by the confluence of resource variability and availability, technology of manufacture, and culture of distribution, along with individual buying power. As such, the objects chosen assume a sort of independent agency. The making of the self, the fashioning of the self, and the act of selfrepresentation hinges on the physical and cultural core of the means available to make those images. In this way, the cultural expression (or externalization) of subjectivities can make that formative or transformative object into what is essentially a visceral substance—a substance of the body. As such, the interobjectivity of other self/objects includes both audience to the performance and its mutable effects (Latour 1996). As the chapters in this volume suggest, the roles of objects of all kinds are those extant means at play in such subjectivities and interobjectivities. Thus, a core question here is: How can any object as a form of material culture be used to explore interobjectivities? My own work has focused in part on daily life and individual objects that were closely aligned with their owners, tracing those objects’ trajectories of manufacture, use, discard, and subsequent archaeological recovery to offer a “hardness of the real.” People cannot merely represent themselves in any way they like. They can only do so by making

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF OBJECTS IN THE AGE OF INDUSTRY

use of those materials available by purchase, trade, or gleaning. The cultural and symbolic character of such materials already absorbs and recapitulates these eccentricities of accessibility (i.e. the rarity of diamonds, the difficulty of working silk). Any analysis of material culture here must take the agency of the object in the construction of this identity into account. By taking a material approach, it is possible to view objects as constitutive of the self. While not all of the contributions to this volume place the individual at the center of analysis, they use the “hardness” of the material world as the place where meaning is made. This volume offers multiple perspectives on materiality that are long overdue. Several scholars have offered summaries of the heightened interest in the work of theorists used in material culture studies (Webmoor 2007; Hicks 2010; Preucel and Mrozowski 2010: 13–18; Ingold 2011 offer somewhat contrasting perspectives). Each of these summaries invokes a call to action. For example, Hicks and Beaudry note that particular artifacts and bodies of material culture are often lost in theoretical debates on materiality (Hicks and Beaudry 2010: 15), and Ingold states that “one looks in vain, however, for any comprehensible exclamation of what ‘materiality’ actually means, or for any account of materials and their properties” (Ingold 2011: 20). Much of the successful work within archaeology that focuses on material culture (in the anthropological sense) has done so within a limited sense, typically focusing on a single object or a single site (see contributions to White 2009; Hicks and Beaudry 2010). The contributions in this volume, and in the series more generally, constitute a massive leap forward in a synthetic, substantive, detailed, and deep engagement with materiality at different focal lengths. In this introductory chapter, I look at two case studies that bookend the edges of the Age of Industry—an age that saw a massive shift in the world of objects in the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. The case studies are examples of contrast, of looking at objects at the small scale and the large scale, and of seeing a world in which the colonizing relationship between England and her colonies was dominant and the role of westward expansion shifted the sense of how the world worked. Each of these examples demonstrates the tension between the general and the specific over the 140 years that are the focus of the volume and the ways the objects in those worlds both shaped and were shaped by people that made, used, and lived among the materials of the period. Each example in the volume and the case studies in this introductory chapter offer images taken at different focal lengths to observe several important trends in the Age of Industry. The period of 1760–1900 was a timespan of radical shifts in the material world, but no more and no less, perhaps, than the other spans of time marked in the volumes that comprise the broader series here.

INTRODUCTION

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CASE I: TRANSATLANTIC TRADE FOR DAILY ITEMS During the Age of Industry, objects were produced in numerous levels of quality and expense, with associated attributes of style, fashion, and meanings traded and exchanged through local and long-distance networks. Eighteenth-century New Englanders, like people everywhere, communicated ideas about themselves as individuals and as members of various groups through the buildings they built, the materials they purchased, the food they ate, and the vast range of goods they produced, purchased, used, and discarded. In the colonies, many of these objects were imported from the mother country, almost exclusively through transatlantic trade in the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century. The close trading practices between New England and England in the eighteenth century embody this first phase of industry in this volume. The case example here is that of the trade in clothing and personal adornment from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In the eighteenth century, American people relied on the materials sold to them from their primary trade partner, England. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, residents relied heavily on British material goods in almost every aspect of their lives. Although there was local production of some goods, the material world for most of the town’s inhabitants was composed largely of goods shipped from the mother country of England. Such reliance on foreign objects by the residents of Portsmouth at the time of the American Revolution reflects the consequences of trade and defines what were objects of desire in the British colonies before and after their transition to independence. A critical moment in the trade relationship between England and America occurred in the transition from colony to nation in the late eighteenth century. As in most colonial contexts, the relationship between England and her colonies was built on trade. Goods and profit motivated the settlement of the Americas as small groups of people set out to find resources desired by the British. As settlements were established and these supplies flowed regularly between the mother country and the colonies, populations expanded and the outposts became towns and the towns became cities. Such was the case in New England; Portsmouth, New Hampshire, offers an excellent locale from which to see this process, and clothing, in particular, concentrates the ways that politics and objects came into focus during the American Revolution through the homespun movement. Trade in the City of Portsmouth, New Hampshire Portsmouth, New Hampshire, sits at the mouth of the Piscataqua River, two miles from the Atlantic Ocean. By the eighteenth century, it was a small city with laid-out streets, commercial centers, and a bustling shipping center based on the wharves and docks along the shoreline. Its location at the river’s mouth

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF OBJECTS IN THE AGE OF INDUSTRY

was largely responsible for the eighteenth-century fortune made through trade. Ocean vessels that could reach the city easily carried imports from Europe into the New World and exports to England and the West Indies. Once those shipments were offloaded, they could be shipped once again to the interior of the state; the secondary transportation networks were additional catalysts of Portsmouth’s commercial success (Candee 1992: 1). Portsmouth was an important point in the vectors of the triangle trade, and fish and lumber were the most important goods offered by Portsmouth’s merchants. Fish, milled boards, staves, and shingles were shipped to the West Indies in exchange for sugar, molasses, cotton, wool, or rum; more often, cash or credit was sent to England to pay for English cargoes brought to Portsmouth. Spain and Portugal were also trading partners, exchanging fish for salt and wine, but cash or credit for English goods was traded more often (Clark 1970: 98). The economy also relied on coastal trade to Boston and other eastern seaboard towns, as well as on the shipbuilding trade (Clark 1970: 98). As ships docked in Portsmouth’s harbor, merchants advertised their goods in the numerous local newspapers, such as the New Hampshire Gazette. The advertisements provide a slice of commercial life of the time. Goods were either sold from the merchants’ warehouses or to Portsmouth shopkeepers, who advertised the goods again. The Portsmouth shops supplied not only the city residents, but also those who traveled to the coast to purchase manufactured goods from inland New Hampshire and Maine. Stores carried all manner of goods: clothing, hardware, foodstuffs, and wine are all listed in the same advertisements, and account books from Portsmouth contain entries across numerous categories. This form of trade was echoed in cities across the Americas, with merchants importing goods to larger cities, initiating successive sales to smaller retailers and wholesalers, who then sold their goods to even smaller retailers, wholesalers, or individual consumers. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Portsmouth’s merchants began to turn to new revenue streams as the resources on which they had built their fortunes began to falter. The port was closed during the Revolutionary War, but privateering safeguarded Portsmouth’s economic stability (Heffernan and Steckner 1986: 69). When the port reopened in 1783, the British West Indies—the destination for most of Portsmouth’s exports—remained closed to Portsmouth ships, creating true challenges for trade. The 1785 tariff act taxed goods brought to American ports in foreign vessels, which further hurt Portsmouth, and economic depression hit the city because of the trade imbalance (Ingersoll 1971). American shipping was revitalized briefly following war in Europe in 1789, and Portsmouth’s merchants saw new action through trade at this time and Portsmouth began to thrive once more (Ingersoll 1971). The late eighteenthcentury boom led to a nineteenth-century bust—the 1807 Jefferson Embargo

INTRODUCTION

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that attempted to cut off trade with the British and French in order to stimulate self-sufficiency in the new nation had devastating effects on the Portsmouth economy. Overseas trade to and from Portsmouth essentially collapsed, and other shipping ports eclipsed the city. Most significantly, Portsmouth merchants had created their own demise through the overexploitation of fish, lumber, and other agrarian products—by the beginning of the nineteenth century, these once vast resources were exhausted (Lord 1976; Candee 1992). Without goods to sell or cash to purchase the goods of others, Portsmouth had nothing to offer on either side of the trade relationship. Objects and People The roaring economy of Portsmouth in the eighteenth century created a demand for craftspeople affiliated with maritime trade, such as sailmakers, ropemakers, blockmakers, blacksmiths, shipwrights, and carpenters (Clark 1970: 104). Joiners and builders constructed houses for the wealthy merchant and middle classes (Garvin 1983). The resident elites, in turn, demanded and procured luxury goods that were both imported and locally produced. In the eighteenth century, most of Portsmouth’s residents were employed in crafts and services to the town’s elite. The vibrancy of this secondary level of economic success hinged on the success of the international shipping trade and the revenues it produced. Craftspeople (goldsmiths, armsmakers, staymakers, wigmakers, etc.) set up retail stores to appeal to Portsmouth’s elite. Numerous silversmiths worked in Portsmouth, including three individuals in a row of adjoining shops (Parsons 1983). John Gaines and George Gaines produced furniture, along with a host of other cabinetmakers (Jobe 1993). Charles Treadwell was a hairdresser, and his wife, Mary Treadwell, sold groceries, dry goods, hardware, and sundries from a shop in their house in the middle of Portsmouth (Clark 1970: 105). The wealth brought in through the shipping trade pulsed through the city, creating business opportunities and prosperity directly and indirectly for its residents. The urban layout of Portsmouth required that people crossed paths regularly, regardless of gender, class, ethnic, religious, or political divisions. There was mixed use on the lots on which the residential structures were constructed. In Portsmouth, as in many eighteenth-century towns, craftspeople had shops inside their homes. Merchants had storehouses on the same properties where they lived. Furthermore, although the organization of the neighborhoods reflected class demarcations, the houses of elites and non-elites were not very far from one another, separated by a few blocks at most. The layout of the city, then, also had important ramifications for the significance of clothing. The Portsmouth elite have been described as having a concern for status, family wealth, and power to a degree unmet by any other settlement north of Virginia (Clark 1970: 104). Although this assertion probably fails to credit the concern that other settlements had for status (cf. Heyrman

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1984; Goodwin 1999), there are many examples of fine Portsmouth architecture, furniture, and material culture to illustrate this claim. People marked themselves as individuals and as part of a larger group along lines of gender, class, ethnicity, religion, etc., in the public arena. Each time a person dressed and went out of doors, their neighbors and other townspeople would see the signs of group affiliation and individuality that were manifest in clothing (Lurie 1981; Barthes 1983; McCracken 1988; Craik 1994; Rubinstein 1995; Crane 2000; Entwistle 2000). Assembling for religious gatherings was a formal environment in which residents could mingle together on regular occasions. There were also private social gatherings that allowed people to wear their finest clothes. Beyond these affairs, the meeting of community members occurred on an informal basis, on the streets, in the shops, and in the taverns (Garvin and Garvin 1988). Despite the material evidence of social differentiation in architecture and luxury possessions, Portsmouth elites did not have much occasion to gather separately from their non-elite brethren. The main opportunity for display of one’s appearance would be in daily activities, and the power and meanings carried in visual appearance, then, took on great significance. On Either Side of the Revolution During the years of the Revolutionary War, Americans on both sides were encouraged to use locally manufactured goods in order to reduce the colonies’ reliance on imported commodities. Both legal restrictions and popular movements were used to pressure people to avoid imported goods, items that were key components in daily life for colonists. One of these movements was the homespun movement, in which people were urged to wear clothes made from cloth woven at home rather than imported British cloth. The degree to which the archaeological record reflects this practice in the late eighteenth century and the extent to which the allure of European trade items gave way to nationalism and patriotic ideology is reflected in the artifactual evidence of personal adornment. Personal adornment can be used as a lens through which to view individual identity and group affiliation along gender, class, ethnicity, and race lines (White 2004, 2008). At a household level, personal adornment reveals how much and in what ways Portsmouth’s residents used clothing as a marker of status in conjunction with other prestige items. In the early to mid-eighteenth century, clothing items were imported almost entirely from England, as were most of the desirable goods consumed in the city. As such, the homespun movement posed a significant disruption to American consumer practice. Personal adornment recovered in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, demonstrates that, before the Revolution, residents of the colonies, and of Portsmouth in particular, followed fashion trends established in England, purchasing imported

INTRODUCTION

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textiles and dress accessories imported to the colonies (White 2010). Advertised in local newspapers, their origins in London, Liverpool, and other British sources were emphasized. For example, Gilbert Deblois advertised a variety of goods, “imports from London, Bristol, and Scotland,” to include textiles, horn, mohair and metal buttons, combs, fans, wigs, and shoe buckles, among a long list of other goods. As expected, the archaeological record of Portsmouth from the preRevolutionary era reflects a consistency with fashions worn in Britain. In all facets of their lives, Portsmouth residents surrounded themselves with British material goods, so it is no surprise that British goods dominate the personal adornment assemblages. The artifacts from the pre-Revolutionary era were largely manufactured in England, and both expensive and inexpensive items are recovered in Portsmouth’s pre-Revolutionary contexts. Clothing fasteners, hair accessories, jewelry, and miscellaneous objects of personal adornment of British origin were recovered from excavated pre-Revolutionary contexts. The Impact of the Revolution: Clothing As inhabitants of the American colonies formed a somewhat hastily gathered identity as they reacted against perceived unfair taxation practices within the colonies, they tried to force the repeal of parliamentary taxes by boycotting English goods (Ulrich 2001: 176). People were encouraged to produce textiles at home, and there were home gatherings for women to spin and proclaim their boycott of British goods, as well as the suitors who purchased them. Ulrich described such actions as places where people “asserted their commitment to their country, to God, and to a new version of an old ethic of productivity” (Ulrich 2001: 176), and they catalyzed broad interest in household production of textiles and other household goods, crosscutting class and occupation strata. But, contrary to the myth of the homespun movement, the archaeological record lacks any evidence that Americans took up the movement to reduce reliance on imported/British goods in terms of fashion and personal appearance in any significant way. The archaeological record does not display a dramatic increase in American-made goods. To the contrary, the artifacts show that people continued unabated to pay very close attention to trends in clothing and adornment set and spread by British fashion and production. For example, buttons and buckles are sensitive artifactual categories that index trends in fashion and visual appearance. Found in relative plentitude, buttons and buckles were focal points of elaboration on men’s clothing, and they expressed subtle shifts in fashion. In the early part of the Age of Industry, between 1760 and 1780, buckles and buttons grew in size and prominence on men’s coats, waistcoats, shoes, breeches, and stocks. This fashion shift conveniently corresponds with the war era and offers an easy index to measure

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF OBJECTS IN THE AGE OF INDUSTRY

adherence to foreign fashion. In Portsmouth, assemblages of buttons and buckles matched the fashions started in England. The button assemblage from Portsmouth increased in variety, design, and size in the period during and following the Revolution. A variety of materials were used to make buttons: silver, pewter, copper alloys, and shell. The most fashionable of these found in Portsmouth––such as the large copper-alloy coat button with a stamped design––matched the fashions in England at the time. Buttons grew in size and elaboration at a similar pace as buckles. Large coat buttons were very fashionable in London, and archaeological examples from Portsmouth exhibit the same increase in size. There were a variety of technical developments in gilding and shank attachment developed in England, and examples, such as new shank attachments, are found in late eighteenth-century contexts in Portsmouth. Shipping records in the years following the Revolution describe casks of buttons, gilded and plated in various ways (Anonymous 1708– 1892). Bills and other economic records contain intriguing details about the fashionability of buttons: one recipient in Philadelphia received a shipment of buttons selected on account of their being “very prevailing” (Anonymous 1727–1927). What is most striking in the Portsmouth assemblage is just how few items appear to have been manufactured locally. There are bone buttons that were likely made in home production, and there are occasional artifacts that seem to have been made by local people developing new skills, but by and large, until the turn of the century, the accessories to dress were British imports. The Myth of Homespun? The shipping trade fostered the growth of Portsmouth from small outpost to seaport city in the eighteenth century. The vitality of this trade infused the city with goods and currency while the residents furnished their homes and clothed their bodies with the goods obtained via long-distance trade with England. This close-knit relationship became politically toxic with the onset of the American Revolution; the relationship was viewed as unbalanced, with America being an overly dependent consumer of British goods. Interestingly, American consumption of British textiles and clothing items was decried publicly, and nationalistic ideology was activated through the homespun movement, which urged people to reduce reliance on traded goods and to clothe themselves with locally made textiles. What is surprising, given the public nature of the political outcry and the well-documented pervasiveness of the movement, is that the expected archaeological signature of this initiative is absent. The kinds of artifacts preserved in Portsmouth do not differ significantly before and after the American Revolution. The artifactual evidence of clothing does not seem to adhere to a new national identity in which the local was prized over the foreign. In fact,

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the foreign continued to be more desirable than the local, at least in regard to clothing. Americans continued to dress according to European fashion, physically maintaining a link to the mother country through their physical appearance while politically separating themselves from foreign rule. It was not until the second decade of the nineteenth century that the archaeological record begins to reflect a particularly American source for most of the personal adornment artifacts recovered in Portsmouth. In Portsmouth, as in the rest of the American colonies, the residents forged new identities, transforming themselves and their children from English colonists in outposts and then cities in the New World to citizens of the new United States. It is surprising to see such a lag in the adoption of locally produced goods at the time of a newly minted national identity. Local efforts to persuade people to abandon European goods failed in the realm of clothing and personal adornment; Portsmouth residents continued to import most of their clothing items from Europe before and after independence. The people in the city built on trade saw these foreign elements as intrinsic to their ideas of self-expression. The assemblage of personal adornment artifacts provides evidence of the allure of certain objects, in this case the kinds of clothing and personal adornment to which people were accustomed, even though these goods could only be acquired through long-distance trade. Interest in taking up a patriotic ideology was selective— despite the political discontent of the colonies in relation to the mother country and the creation of a new American identity, foreign items of dress were nonnegotiable commodities.

CASE II: WESTWARD EXPANSION AND MATERIALITY Shifting perspective away from the eastern part of the United States, I turn to the western United States at the end of the nineteenth century for a radically different perspective on this material world, marking the shift in materiality. The time period here is one of westward expansion and of increasingly rapid movement, with scores of people moving from the eastern United States to the west, via overland routes, first, and then by railroad. Of course, travel from east to west also occurred via the sea, and the westward expansion then moved from the far west coast eastward. The material world of the west at the end of the nineteenth century was manifest in mining towns, outposts, trading posts, and waystations that speckled the vastness of its landscape. Granite Creek Station was one of several significant stopping places for emigrants, travelers, saddle trains, and stagecoaches passing through the Black Rock Desert region of northwestern Nevada, USA, on their way to California in the mid-nineteenth century. The site functioned as a campsite, trading post, ranch, stagecoach station, and military camp. As a site along the California emigrant trail, most travelers experienced the site as a

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routine stop where they could rest themselves and their livestock and procure water and supplies. For other travelers, it was a locus of extraordinary pain and suffering, described in their own words through diaries and letters. The site was also the location of several episodes of violence, including one described as “The Butchery at Granite Creek Station,” between local Paiutes and western settlers. The site offers an opportunity to see the synthetic world of materiality through a site of multiple valences, as a place of economy, technology, architecture, and objecthood. Early Emigration: Granite Creek as an “Awful Gloomy” Resting Place Of the several major overland trails established for transcontinental travel, the California Trail was the primary route through modern-day Nevada. Once emigrant parties reached the Sierra Nevada mountain ranges, emigrants had to choose one of several routes for this final and brutal section before reaching California (Fletcher 1980: 168). The Nobles Trail was one of these routes, one that diverged from the treacherous Lassen Cutoff (also known as the Lassen Death Route). In 1851, William H. Nobles opened the route while searching for gold in the Black Rock Desert. This new route left the Lassen–Applegate Trail at Black Rock Hot Springs and proceeded southwest across the Black Rock Desert playa to Granite Creek. From there, it continued southwest to Great Boiling Springs (near present-day Gerlach), along the northern edge of the Smoke Creek Desert to Deep Hole Springs, and then on to California through Nobles Pass, passing just north of Honey Lake and proceeding to Shasta City. From there, emigrants could take other roads leading south into California or north into Oregon Territory. Nobles described the advantages of this cutoff, claiming that unlike the other routes in the area, where emigrants could travel up to fifty miles between water sources, on the Nobles Route there were no more than twenty-five miles between springs or creeks, as it was flat (so emigrants would not have to abandon goods when traversing rough terrain) and straight, making it shorter. The reality of the experience of the Nobles Trail diverged from the advertising. A government engineer, hired to improve the route, noted that Granite Creek was a “small and insignificant stream where the water is warm and insipid,” which his cattle refused to drink, as well as refusing to eat “the coarse grass which covers 3 or 4 acres of the flat mouth of the stream” (Brock and Black 2008: 10, 34), and so the springs were deepened and paved to improve the water supply and the road was widened. Once improved, the route became known as the Fort Kearny–South Pass–Honey Lake Wagon Road, also known as the Humboldt Wagon Road. Daily life for an emigrant passing through Granite Creek depended on the time of year, the volume of emigrants, and the expectations and experiences of the families and individuals who were moving west. It was not uncommon for

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emigrants to travel this part of the trail from Black Rock or Trego Hot Springs to Granite Creek at night to escape the heat of the day on the open playa. Granite Creek was one of many grim and inhospitable places emigrants faced on the trail, and many recorded their travails associated with the place, virtually fighting against the landscape and the physical realities of the journey on a daily basis. George Grove Davis stated that Granite Creek had “some very bad water, no grass, but plenty of dead cattle and horses. Awful gloomy” (Davis 1860). Ruth Eliza Warner Taylor noted in 1860 that she “came twelve miles to Granite Creek and camped (they have the longest miles here that I have ever seen)” (Taylor 1861). Such sentiments are but two instances of hardship at Granite Creek, though the documentary record contains many more, binding the physicality of hardship to the materiality of the west. “The Butchery at Granite Creek Station” In the mid-1860s, Granite Creek and its surrounding stations experienced several episodes of violence. The Humboldt Register reported the murder of the station-keepers by American Indians, specifically Paiutes, on April 15, 1865, in a story entitled “The Butchery at Granite Creek Station” (Fairfield 1916: 369; Amesbury 1967: 17). The “butchery” was catalyzed by the alleged murder of station-owner Lucius Arcularius, who was generally well-liked, though he was faulted for being “too kind to the Indians” (Fairfield 1916: 368). Despite a lack of direct evidence, white settlers presumed Native Americans were responsible. Following Arcularius’s murder, in mid-March 1865, a Paiute man inquired after him at the station. A local “unsavory figure” named “Puck” Waldron took offense and thought the man was defaming the deceased Arcularius. He drew his revolver with no warning and told the man “to look into it,” and then shot and killed him. Three station-keepers secretly buried the body, attempting to cover up the murder, but Paiutes nearby witnessed their actions (Fairfield 1916: 39; Brock and Black 2008: 161). There are differing reports as to the date of the event, but most say that on April 1, 1865, Granite Creek Station was attacked and burned and the station-keepers violently killed. The documentary record is rich in contradictory detail about this event, reflecting the zeitgeist of ethnic tension around westward expansion. One station-keeper was found in the station house, with his legs dismembered below the knees. The station dog was killed, though only his skin and a large bloodstain was found. One account notes that the Paiutes used a mattress to light the storehouse roof on fire, causing the remaining two station-keepers to flee. One keeper ran east, but was easily tracked, brought back to the station, and burned to death, his arms pinned down with large piles of rocks. A portion of the skull, a jaw-bone, and some small pieces of bone were found; the other portions of the body having been reduced to ashes. At the point where the arms would be, were large rocks piled up, everything indicated

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that he had been thus weighted down; and then a large pile of sawed lumber was built up over this—stubs of the sawed lumber near these marks were found—and the poor fellow thus burned up. (Fairfield 1916: 369–70) The third station-keeper ran southwest and was shot, killed, and mutilated. Every structure at the station was burned to the ground (Fairfield 1916: 369– 71). The physical markers of violence, retaliation, and a vigorous power struggle are readily apparent in these narratives, as is the role of the built environment and the body. The tensions between colonizer and colonized, between Native American and European are palpable here, as is the power of the writer of the narrative (the white Euro-American perspective). Local accounts cast the “butchery” as revenge for the murder and secret burial of the Paiute man. Taken in broader context, one must look to the existence of other conflicts and pressures on Native Americans in the wake of Euro-American settlement. The treatment of the three station-keepers’ bodies, the skinned dog, and the total destruction of the station may suggest Northern Paiute methods for combating witchcraft, perhaps one of many ways that Native Americans viewed white settlers. Death by burning is especially specific to the way that Northern Paiutes historically killed witches, as Gualtieri (2006) has explored. The Northern Paiute and Pyramid Lake Indian Wars were ongoing, and a particularly violent episode—the Mud Lake Massacre—resulted in the mass rape and murder of Native American women and children in that region (Fairfield 1916: 368–70; Wheeler 1971: 70; Brock and Black 2008: 160–1; cf. Gualtieri 2006: 305–10). In actuality, the Granite Creek Station incident may be part of a broader pattern of Native American active agency—an area that is only now beginning to be taken up by Western scholarship. The Materiality of the West In 2014 and 2015, we conducted surveys of Granite Creek Station and the surrounding trails to identify the presence, size, scope, state, and affiliation of the remains of the station and surrounding trails. We also sought to illuminate aspects of daily life along the trail and to investigate the physical evidence for the violence that was said to have taken place there. Daily life at the station—both routine and despairing—was manifest at the site. We recorded segments of the original Nobles Trail, portions of the later stage and freighting road, and roads from twentieth-century ranching. Metal detecting along the entirety of this one section of the trail feature revealed animal shoes, a ferrous wedge or spike, and a mid-nineteenth century bullet. Along with the feature’s clear shape as a swale and its relatively narrow width, we think that it is a segment of the original Nobles Trail emigrants took as they left Granite Creek—the portion of the trail that emigrants would embark upon

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following the completion of the trek across the playa and just before heading into the mountains. As such, it is a place of hope and despair, of a fresh start, and of a weariness embodied in the lives of the travelers. Additional artifacts reflect the everyday activities of the emigrants, as well as their access to resources, whether purchased or carried along the trail. Our survey identified a distinct pattern of artifacts that resemble a “throw zone” or “trash halo,” which commonly surround early and mid-nineteenthcentury habitation structures. Excavations revealed artifacts related to health, subsistence, and personal adornment, including embossed medicine bottle fragments, olive glass, a comb tooth, a ferrous clothing buckle, and ferrous clothing buttons. In addition to these very personal artifacts, materials related to food consumption and preparation were recovered. All of the recovered materials were made in America. Extensive earthmoving activity was also recorded, perhaps reflecting attempts to improve the water sources at the site. There are at least two separate construction events present that were likely intended to keep water in the meadow (marsh area) in order to provide abundant grass for cattle. These features consist of ditches and berms to direct water flow. Other findings spoke to the violence that occurred at the site. During excavation, an artifact-rich charcoal layer was identified just outside the remaining surface features, likely resulting from the burning of the station house. A depression found adjacent to the stone corral may have been used as a defensive earthwork. Numerous pieces of ammunition, including rim-fired shell casings, spent bullets, and a lead 44-caliber pistol ball with sprue and ramming marks, were also recovered at the site. Perhaps most importantly, our survey recorded numerous architectural and landscape features that connect to the documentary resources describing the conflict at the site. The station house, storehouse, corral, proximity to the playa, and other landscape features were located and mapped. The most likely candidate for the station house consisted of a single room, with multiple dry-laid courses of granite and few other naturally occurring boulders. It is the most intact structure dating from the emigrant trail/stagecoach/military time period on the site. Test excavations within the structure revealed few artifacts, including a cow (Bos) radius, a few fragments of nails, and a large bolt. The corral mentioned in accounts of the conflict at Granite Creek is a large stone corral made of white and gray granite, one to three courses tall. Interestingly, very few artifacts were detected around the corral. According to the story in the Humboldt Register, the battle between the station-keepers and the local Northern Paiutes lasted anywhere from half a day to three days, with so much ammunition spent that “the whole front of the corral is bespattered with lead of the bullets fired from the house” (Fairfield 1916: 369). Both sides reportedly ran out of ammunition, which forced the Paiutes to try and burn the

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station house and the station-keepers to flee across the playa (Fairfield 1916: 369–70). The entirety of Feature 2, the stone corral, was metal detected and revealed no spattering of lead as reported in the Register. Although excavations revealed it is possible that a skirmish of some kind did happen at Granite Creek Station between the station-keepers and local Paiutes, an assertion supported by the presence of a heavily burned layer, the archaeological evidence currently available suggests that there was no sustained battle at the site. If there was a fight, it was on a much smaller scale than reported by the Register. This dissonance between the archaeological and documentary records on American Indian and Euro-American settler relations is not uncommon for this time. Incidents involving violence between these peoples were often blown out of proportion or entirely fabricated to incite anger and prejudice among Euro-Americans against indigenous peoples, as well as to provide entertainment with stories of the “wild west” (Layton 1977). The investigation of Granite Creek Station uncovered a more nuanced understanding of violence and hardship during westward expansion in the name of preservation and site memorialization. *** The two case studies presented here, one in the eastern United States and another in the western United States, bookend the Age of Industry, a time in which objects shifted from the handmade to the machine-made. These two case studies reveal the different levels of scale on which interest in materiality can hinge. Whether examining the world of industry through individual artifacts of personal adornment or looking at a vast open landscape that people traveled through, each subset of people communicated ideas about themselves through the physical world that, in turn, reflected back on their daily experience as individuals, as families, and as subjects circumscribed by place, time, and multitudinous factors. By looking at the material world of the Age of Industry, the chapters here are themselves object lessons for understanding the limitless approaches to understanding the past through objects. Some contributors work with their materials up close, taking particular classes of material to understand the span of years that make up this era, while others use a much wider lens to gaze around time and space.

CHAPTER ONE

Objecthood LU ANN DE CUNZO

I embraced the challenge of writing this chapter before considering that I had not ever actually used the term “objecthood” myself. A little sleuthing led me to John Coltman’s (2015: 27) recent call to relocate art history in its “objecthood.” As far back as the 1760s, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the “father of art history,” had privileged viewing as the basis of art study. Although he prioritized our sense of vision, Winckelmann called for active viewing, which involved intimate handling of the object. This analytical technique of engaging with a work’s objecthood, Coltman (2015: 22–4) argues, had become ancillary in art history. The more expansive literature on “personhood” (“state or condition of being a person”) offered a parallel framework on which to model a concept of objecthood. The study of personhood (objecthood) focuses on how social relations mediate sameness and difference in the construction of the person (object) in specific cultural contexts. The study of objecthood may then be understood to be the study of materiality, which refers to the difference that difference makes among specimens from a particular cultural, functional class of objects, such as chairs or hats. Aspects of difference include form, material, color, surface, size, and the like. Studies of materiality ask what accounts for these similarities and differences. Chris Fowler’s (2010: 352–3) methodology for studying personhood may guide us in answering this question: “interrogat[e] the relationship between human beings, objects, animals, substances, and places at a most fundamental level” (emphasis added). He goes on associate the process of objectification with personification, because “the practices by which people make things, live with them, and use them also make those people” (Fowler 2010: 359).

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The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) identified desire as the fundamental motivation of all human action. Driven by desire, people in the Western world in the latter eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created, maintained, and reshaped particular attitudes toward objects. Westerners differentially negotiated a variety of desires that shaped objecthood: consider, for example, physical survival, sexual pleasure, intellectual improvement, emotional nostalgia, social identity, moral goodness, political power, economic wealth, task performance, and geographical exoticism. These desires were enacted through practices concerned with object creation, acquisition, use, and rejection. In turn, these practices involved expanding scales of production, commodification, industry, technology, and networks of distribution. People responded with varying degrees of self-reflection and ambivalence toward these emerging industrial technologies and landscapes, the prevalent utopian discourses that legitimated consumption, and the work opportunities and losses that they engendered. In this chapter, I examine Westerners’ changing ideas about, desire for, and relationships with objects in light of the entanglement of the Enlightenment thinking, capitalism, religion, technological development, and European imperialism that shaped them. I organize the chapter in a loose chronology (I am, after all, a product of Enlightenment rationality), and I acknowledge that I have minimized the extent of variability across space, between groups, and over time in the process of constructing a general overview. In particular, the complex stories of landless immigrants from Europe, Africans brought as captives, and Native Americans’ roles in structuring these ideas about objects warrant separate chapters. This narrative focuses on European origins and the expression of the phenomena outlined above in the USA, principally as experienced by the elite and middling classes. Variable, contradictory, and complex, eighteenth-century European Enlightenment thinking profoundly shaped Westerners’ ideas and relationships with other peoples and with objects. So, too, did the tensions and conflicts engendered by an expanding capitalist political economy. Archaeologist of capitalism Mark Leone (1999: 4) depicts capitalist society as “owners, governments, and their agents continuously introducing technical changes that alter the structure of labor, and pushing these changes into areas, cultures, and classes where they did not exist before, or where they become intensified.” Individuals competed to accumulate capital in the forms of land, raw materials, money, and property of all types. This consolidation of resources led to new social relations between those whose wealth provided the means to control sectors of the economy and those whose labor and skill were commodified. Moreover, by the 1760s, new technologies and imperial expansion had enabled growing numbers of Westerners to desire and live surrounded by an increasingly diverse array of things “whose distribution in space, aesthetic

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quality, and use value became subject to renegotiation. Things … gain[ed] more visual presence, domesticate[d] the interiors they inhabit[ed], or invest[ed] them with uncanny traits” (Baird 2013: 9). Consumers valued sensory engagement with objects and increasingly invested them with sentiment, expectation, and memory (Baird 2013: 10). Celebrities contributed to the process, using everyday objects associated with particular places in the creation of cultural personhood. Fashions, scientific objects, exotica, relics, collectibles, historical artifacts, and commodities started moving across state borders, linking remote places and functioning as containers of cultural stereotypes and identity exchanged over a larger colonial network (Baird 2013: 14–15). These objects participated in a process of redefining and remapping the known world according to new power binaries: Europe versus the New World, imperial centers versus the colonies, the civilized world versus the “savage” or “exotic” other spaces (Baird 2013: 13). On January 15, 1759, the British Museum opened six years after parliament established it as the first national public museum in the world. Physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane’s collection formed the core of the museum. The collection was soon expanded, adding the first ancient Egyptian mummy in 1756, and in 1772 the first major collection of classical antiquities. A selection of the more than 31,000 specimens that Captain James Cook’s men collected during their Pacific voyages between 1767 and 1770 further expanded the growing collections (Thomas 2013: 73). Enlightenment philosophes (philosophers) shared a positivist confidence in humanity’s intellectual powers of reason to achieve and order knowledge of nature, and they believed in the power of progress to improve human society and individual lives (Bristow 2017). The ability of science to reveal natural law was grounded in a unique method that involved a combination of theory, experiment, and observation. Scientific knowledge was regarded as trustworthy because it relied upon replication and recording of evidence in unbiased circumstances, often by use of instruments, and because the subjective experience of the observer/ theorizer was strictly separated from the objective process of the method. (Smith 2013: 211) Philosophers of science believed the history of truth was revealed in the “accumulation of an ever more accurate reflection of nature in the mirror of the human mind, expressed by individuals in theories about the natural world” (Smith 2013: 211). Writing in the 1770s, Immanuel Kant argued that “we can speak of the world only insofar as it is accessible to humans” (quoted in Harman 2014: 242). He went on to defend scientific study of the natural world (McCormick n.d), which was believed to increase human technological capabilities and control over natural processes.

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Philosophes’ challenges to Westerners’ fundamental understandings of the world further fueled a collective angst. Understanding required ordering and classification, an enterprise that came to characterize the Enlightenment’s arts and sciences, as well as its artisan shops and markets. These activities could hardly be pursued, however, without the mass production, distribution, and movements of new goods and artifacts (Craciun and Schaffer 2016: 2). New technologies of seeing, such as microscopes and telescopes, expanded the gaze both of philosopher–scientists and consumers. People became fascinated with automata, toys, and other crafted objects that blurred the distinction between human and object (Baird 2013: 11–13). The philosophes introduced historical legitimacy to the project of European global dominance. With varying degrees of respect for difference, they assessed non-European cultures, and they were critical of colonialism (Festa and Carey 2009; O’Brien 2009: 283–4). J. G. Herder, who began writing in about 1770, argued that history was not a project of documenting “progress,” but rather of distinguishing varieties of human excellence. He asserted the importance and uniqueness of each people and denied the existence of races (Carey and Trakulhun 2009: 273–4; Zammito 2012: 821). Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, in his 1795 volume Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progress de l’esprit human, wrote of European imperialism from an alternative, and ultimately more popular, position: “In one place will be found numerous people, who, to arrive at civilization appear only to wait till we shall furnish them with the means; and who, treated as brothers by Europeans, would instantly become their friends and disciples” (quoted in Festa and Carey 2009: 1). This idea of empire as one potential means to realize a benevolent global union also came to characterize British thinking, even as the revolutionary period from 1760 to 1800 produced the outlines of the modern democratic state (Palmer 1959). Expansive European imperialism and colonization led to theorizing the place of human groups around the world. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the categories came increasingly to be understood as immutable. In England, this thinking included racialization based primarily on skin color. Boundaries separated humans from animals, and essentialized genders and classes became “fixed” (Wahrman 2004: 112–13, 128, 142–3, 152–3). The associations of male with production and female with reproduction, male with public and female with private, male with objective and female with subjective, male with rational and female with emotional became reified in the material world (Blaettler 2012: 764). Male fashion turned away from layers of brightly colored, textured, shimmering textiles toward military styles and forms, and women were draped in classical style in light, clingy fabrics (Wahrman 2004: 64–8). Etiquette was becoming a consummate tool for the elite to maintain distinction and rank as commodities became more available and affordable to

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the less wealthy. Etiquette disciplined behavior and marked “gentility” and legitimacy (Shackel 1993: 8; Calvert 1994: 270). The tea ritual in particular disciplined the female body, and the material culture of the tea table enhanced the whiteness of these women of privilege and leisure, unsullied by labor (Kowaleski-Wallace 1997: 20, 29). In England, literature abetted this taming or domestication of women (Wahrman 2004: 10) while providing an outlet for male angst about the corrupting influences of female consumption. For example, Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace (1997: 4) suggests that in his 1771 novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Tobias Smollett portrays the perversity of women’s foolish, dangerous desire to consume the fashionable and exotic. This desire for goods threatened male control and, ultimately, the patriarchal order (Kowaleski-Wallace 1997: 5). For women, it presented a paradox in this era of imperial expansion. Politically, the imperative to grow the economy through consumption empowered women even as doing so signaled her personal depravity (Kowaleski-Wallace 1997: 68). In the late eighteenth century, the emergent separation of work and home associated with new technologies and changing relations of production had profound implications for social ranking as well as gender roles, identities, and relations. These processes were not without their anxieties for new consumers, which authors explored in “it-narratives”—novels involving speaking objects or nonhuman characters. Themes of exchange, movement, disconnections among people, and the alienation prevalent in a commodifying world pervaded these narratives (Baird 2013: 12). The objects are portrayed as contributing to morality, functioning as emblems, lessons, and even reproach (Lamb 2011: 201). Facing these changes in human relationships fostered by a changing economy, new things, and expanding encounters with diverse others, Kant philosophized about the relationships among beauty, the sublime, nature, morality, and human emotion. For Kant, experiencing the beautiful and sublime in nature symbolized moral will and could prepare individuals to act free from desire or with disinterest. Friedrich Schiller and other post-Kantians “argued for a direct and even indispensable influence of aesthetic experience on moral development” (Guyer 2012: 325). For Friedrich Schelling, the beauty in art consisted of imitating the beauty of nature (Guyer 2012: 347). Intimately entangled with these conceptions of nature, beauty, and social hierarchy was that of improvement. A concept with broad cultural connotations and origins in Roman cultural ideals, improvement was both an “ideology relating human rationality to material and social transformation, and a set of metaphors that organized such practices and ideologies” (Quentin 2016: 12). Eighteenthcentury Europeans initially applied the ideal to agricultural improvement of the land, whose beauty and fertility had suffered from generations of debilitating cropping. Unsurprisingly, the concept was extended across spatial and symbolic

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domains in the Atlantic World. Ultimately, it encompassed an individual’s desire for rank achieved through acts of self-improvement. A cultivated body and mind epitomized the polite, moral, civilized gentleperson (Hancock 1995; Quentin 2016: 5). The goal of moral transformation also animated emerging punitive practices. Crimes against property had escalated with the new productive technologies, wealth, and growing value placed on property. By the 1770s, reformatories were experimenting with a combination of isolation and manual labor (Foucault 1995: 77, 122–3). The solitude of isolation enabled reflection, repentance, and, theoretically, total submission (Foucault 1995: 236–7). Surveillance, coercion, and constraint supplemented regularized schedules, silence, and common workspaces to remake, or invent, a self-disciplining subject (Foucault 1995: 128–9). Conditions in the American colonies paralleled and diverged from the European experience in the mid-eighteenth century. In the South, single cashcropping of tobacco and rice and the institutionalization of racialized slavery introduced capitalist relations before the era of this volume’s focus. In the rural North, Allan Kulikoff (1992: 2) dates the beginning of the capitalist transformation to the 1750s, a product of struggles over land, credit, and the division of labor. Secularization and mercantilism legitimized wealth and consumption (Deetz 1977: 135). Cary Carson (1994: 682–3) asked why later eighteenth-century Americans deserved their international reputation as obsessed consumers of every passing fashion. He blamed the excessive association of English commodities with status, which accelerated the embourgeoisement of farm women. Many women became engaged in home manufacture for cash to improve their homes and to purchase goods, in part to ensure good marriages for their daughters (Kulikoff 1992: 49; Woodward 2007: 115–16). What James Deetz described as the Renaissance worldview had a profound impact on English material culture and, increasingly, that of English America. Enlightenment rationalist thinking shaped a worldview based on order and control. In turn, Anglo-Americans expressed an increasingly mechanical, balanced, and individualized worldview in the built environment (Deetz 1977: 39–40). Georgian architecture was marked by strict bilateral symmetry in facade and plan, as well as spatial separation of individuals and activities. Pattern books incorporated references to classical architecture, and design overrode function (Deetz 1977: 111–12). Women prepared fewer meals like stews consumed corporately from pots. Animals began to be butchered into individual meat cuts. Families sought to acquire individual seating and place settings for everyone, and separate servings of meat, vegetables, and carbohydrates appeared on each plate (Deetz 1977: 59). Outside the home, household members buried household refuse farther away from the house in pits rather than pitching it into smelly, open middens outside the nearest entry. Deetz (1977: 123–7) did

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acknowledge processes of hybridity at work in the colonies, and that a different worldview structured African American life. Others have elaborated these points, emphasizing the diversity of perspectives driving colonists, indentured servants, and enslaved peoples’ actions. American and French revolutionary events further influenced Western European and European Americans’ ideas about the power, meanings, and values of people and objects. The Enlightenment-inspired ideology of the American Revolution raised fundamental questions about identity, ultimately subverting “every basic identity category, [and] shading easily into concerns about the protean and inadequate nature of these categories” (Wahrman 2004: 238). American colonists’ desire for (perceived right to) and access to consumer goods supported the drive toward revolution. Taxes on imports such as tea, textiles, and other consumer goods contributed to a colonial, shared language of revolution and an “imagined community” identity forged in the similarities of colonists’ material demands up and down the Atlantic coast. The politicization of goods in support of independence also involved valorizing the work that produced them. Thus, the products of home manufacture embodied the morality of making productive contributions to the community (Thornton 1989: 3; Breen 1994: 448). Following independence, Americans set about creating a national economy and identity. Republican Americans aspired to virtue, a union of reason and sentiment. In Jeffersonian political ideology, independent farmer–citizens personified virtue, laboring to produce and to improve the land. Their wives’ and mothers’ capacity for feeling granted them an equally powerful symbolic role in the new Republic, even as it excluded them from political power (Kulikoff 1992: 138–9; Shackel 1996: 19; Kelly 2008: 49–50). Gendered, ethnic, and regional cultures and values clashed with a nationalizing class structure, values, and identities, complicating the Republican experiment. In the South, the agricultural system based on enslaved labor had been capitalist for decades. By 1830, as plantation farmers moved westward seeking cheaper and less exhausted land, they brought almost a quarter million enslaved African laborers with them (Kulikoff 1992: 227, 231). A new urban capitalist class was also forming in the North, composed of merchants, lawyers, master craftsmen, gentleman farmers, and early manufacturers. They expressed their ideals and goals in their houses, building austere, restrained classical buildings as exemplars of local privilege and civic virtue, historicizing legitimacy and symbolizing competition and Atlantic World connections (Sweeney 1994: 57; De Cunzo 2004: 47–8). Resisting the industrial modernization that spread across England, Republican political idealists also appropriated the ideal of improvement to reestablish economic and social links between city and countryside and to serve the ends of both profit and moral betterment (Quentin 2016: 5–6). Authors

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portrayed the dynamism and vitality of the American landscape as progressing, if unsteadily, from wilderness to cultivation, the highest order of the enlightened farm (Shields 1994: 120; De Cunzo 2004: 43–4). The appearance of rear ells on rural New England houses materialized this ethic of improvement. Lewis Quentin (2016: 78) argues that “ells allowed for individual differentiation of rooms and segmentation of work and home such that one did not immediately impinge or overlap the other.” They allowed processing of dairy products and other agricultural goods indoors, despite inclement weather and darkness. They did so without disturbing the bilateral symmetry of Enlightenment, classical building forms. Those built with a second story also created a path for hired household labor to move through work areas without having to pass through the front parlor (Quentin 2016: 78). Yards were also reorganized into a front yard, dooryard, and barnyard, and their relative cleanliness and order came to “signif[y] a whole series of moral, political, and economic characteristics that reverberated broadly” (Quentin 2016: 141, 144). In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, New England households shifted production and consumption strategies, creating unprecedented opportunities for merchants and shopkeepers to insert themselves into the local economy. They helped to justify the consumption of the new panoply of commodities available in the new nation by promoting the transforming properties of these goods and marketing consumer culture (Clark 1990: 155; Jaffee 2010: 157). The process of commercialization of the countryside had begun, facilitating the shift from local exchange and expanding the role of commodities in everyday life. Commerce was idealized as an agent of moral and cultural uplift, bringing the goods of civilization to citizens of the new Republic (Thornton 1989: 11). In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many farming families acquired commodities with a mindset distinguished by utility, sense of place, and a growing interest in fashion (De Cunzo 2004: 68). Even among the gentry, however, David Jaffee (2010: 3) proposes that desire for more expensive goods occasionally pressed into service for a genteel performance “did not make for a life dominated by consumption or transform the social or economic structure of agrarian life” (Jaffee 2010: 3). Globes, maps, books, mirrors, and mechanical devices did offer new forms of visual perception deemed crucial to selfimprovement and cultivation, and they expanded the reach of Enlightenment ideas in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century rural America (Kelly 2008: 59; Jaffee 2010: 49). The penetration of consumer goods into rural areas extended household production, especially in the North, and networks of local credit and noncash exchange broadened and deepened. “As exchange relationships developed like a matrix over the countryside, tensions inevitably grew between needs and opportunities that were locally perceptible and demands from a greater

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distance” (Clark 1990: 126). By the 1820s, the landless were moving westward with their credit and debt. By the mid-1840s, New England shopkeepers pressed for cash transactions to relieve a growing debt crisis. This growing and struggling economy contributed to changes in the larger social structure that marked rural capitalism (Clark 1990: 224–7). Urban America also experienced accelerated change in the half-century following the Revolution. Spatial separation of work and home altered household compositions and eventually effected a structural transformation of city and society. In New York City, for example, the process began in the 1790s, and by the time it was completed, the city’s population had more than tripled (Wall 1994: 49, 50). An urban proletariat was taking shape as the apprenticeship for craft training was abandoned and labor commodified (Kulikoff 1992: 110). In the first decades of the nineteenth century, in the nation’s large cities, the economy was diversified, professionalized, and specialized with the establishment of insurance companies, banks, and transportation corporations. Physically, separate residential and commercial districts and class-segregated neighborhoods appeared. Dell Upton (1992: 53–62) elucidated “a distinctive group of metaphors [that] characterized the encounter of Americans and their commercializing cities” in this period. He defined Republicanism as a discourse about the self-in-space. Materialistic theories of human psychology were accepted, promoting faith in material culture’s instrumentality in character formation and social location. An especially important and popular metaphor linked healthy bodies, virtuous persons, and orderly spaces; indeed, each ideal was attributable to each material domain. The grid provided a related metaphor, enabling citizens to classify and segregate space, creating order and unity through rational control. The grid empowered citizens to “create [an] ideal urban society by guiding [their] actions into socially beneficial channels,” and it promoted liberty of movement for citizens within their own sphere. But the grid could be and was transgressed physically and sensorially. According to prevailing miasma theory, disorderly spaces fostered disease as well as moral corruption. Anxiety and cultural malaise about the rapid change and growth of American cities intensified. Capitalist entrepreneurs expanded mechanized production beyond the timber, milling, and forging industries following the US War of 1812 with England. They gradually adopted machinery to ease the labor of producing goods, and learning about mechanical technology became part of everyday life for many. Entrepreneurs and artisans began to develop factories to make uniform goods using power-driven machinery, although they did not achieve uniformity through mechanization until the late nineteenth century. Nonetheless, early factories did achieve efficiencies by consolidating production processes in one location and dividing the processes into a series of increasingly simple, preferably mechanized steps. Factory work demanded stamina and constant

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attention in tasks that ranged from the boring, repetitive, and physically uncomfortable to the intellectually challenging and complex. Workers had to synchronize their actions in a mechanized manufacturing process in order not to disrupt production, contributing to the stressful environment. Surveillance enforced the disciplinary requirements of the new work regime for those who resisted it (Gordon and Malone 1994: 227, 297, 347–8; Shackel 1996: 73). Mechanization affected people’s perspectives on and relationships with objects in other ways as well. Early industrial production systems required specialized tools and manufacturing processes to produce objects, inextricably linking form and material. More profoundly, mechanized, standardized production “engendered a new way of thinking, in which sameness became a virtue in its own right,” and in which variation became an uncomfortable reminder of an unpredictable, uncontrollable world (Kuchler and Oakley 2014: 82, 88). Another fundamental difference distinguished the relationship between maker and object in craft and mechanized production: in the latter, the creative part of making is removed from the process of engaging maker and material and resituated prior to making in the form of an intellectual design process (Ingold 2000: 295). Industrial technologies were quickly aestheticized in an effort to integrate them into republican civilization. Fusion of utility and beauty in design and decoration generated a perception of the machine as art and promoted its centrality in Western culture. The designed machine was intended to provoke delight and emotional resonance in American capitalists and consumers. The technological sublime animated and naturalized the machine—powerful, beyond human scale, awesome, majestic, in motion—like an animate creature (Kasson 1976: 139, 158–64). Grant McCracken (1988: 3) concluded that the changes in “Western concepts of time, space, society, the individual, the family, and the state” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are attributable to the Consumer Revolution: What men and women once hoped to inherit from their parents, they now expected to buy for themselves. What were once bought at the dictate of need, were now bought at the dictate of fashion. What were once bought for life, might now be bought several times over. (McKendrick et al. 1982: 1, quoted in McCracken 1988: 17) Experience and creative endeavors became the basis of personhood, individuality, and self-realization. McCracken (1988: 18–19, 40) and Cary Carson (1994) concur that objects had to carry new status meanings in an increasingly anonymous, role-differentiated society. Capitalism confuses social relations and goods, treating them both as “things” or objects (Leone 1999: 5). Dialectical relationships developed between new tastes and the means to manipulate them. The patina of inherited objects declined as a symbol of wealth and power.

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Arguably, the elite became prisoners of fashion, constantly innovating, replacing, and consuming more and more frequently to fulfill their desire for distinction. Self-improvement also demanded the reconfiguration and segmentation of time—to devote to working, learning, spending, socializing, and leisure—and of space—for privacy and differentiation (McCracken 1988: 20–1). Time discipline, good health and self-improvement, curiosity about the world, appreciation of nature and the landscape, fashion, display, and sociability all contributed to the emergence of another genteel phenomenon: pleasure travel (B. Carson 1994: 398, 405). Novelty continued to attract travelers and consumers through the midnineteenth century. Objects were now understood to have three dimensions: aesthetic, social, and orthopedic. In a mechanistic sense, objects like corsets and chairs controlled behavior (Charpy 2015: 200–1). Taxonomies and containers for ordering consumer goods appeared in profusion. Objects like clocks, watches, and lighting devices, for example, helped define new relationships with time. They became emblematic of abstracted, then standardized and regularized time, enabling the disciplines that reorganized rhythms of everyday life and delayed the effective onset of night. Object surfaces themselves imposed a daily discipline through markings left by gestures, engaging housekeepers in a material negotiation of control driven by the reification of morality in cleanliness. Selffashioning required self-reflection, literally, and self-observation: goods such as mirrors, writing desks, dressing gowns, and diaries became tools for selfobjectification. Perceptions of and relationships with space also changed. Mechanical transport vehicles such as steamboats and trains moved people as well as goods, and telegraphy enabled virtually instantaneous communication around the world (Charpy 2015: 204–5). The middle class that emerged in the 1820s and 1830s in America’s rapidly growing cities distinguished themselves by ideals of social respectability, ritualized practice, and the sanctity of individual private space. At home and on the street, these urban and industrializing settings “created a kind of ecology of embarrassment and increased the sense of vulnerability to possible rudeness.” Social pressure led to demands for conformity expressed in the demand for physical control. Codes of etiquette provided a measure of relief, imposing a discipline on the body and stifling actions that drew attention to its workings (Kasson 1990: 115–16, 124; Cook 2008: 68). Other impulses and institutions shaped the public landscape and social encounters in this period. Retail space and notions and practices of shopping were changing. Interior spaces of shops created intimate settings for ritualized exchanges between men (sellers) and women (buyers) (Kowaleski-Wallace 1997: 81). Subsequently, the ever more permanent interaction between social change and consumption inspired a new consumer space: the department store (McCracken 1988: 27–8).

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Museums were also transforming in nature and purpose. National museums promoted political and intellectual utopian visionary projects, moving away from the assumptions informing early modern cabinets of curiosities toward more empirical assessment and organization around emerging scientific paradigms (Aronsson 2011: 3; Thomas 2013: 69–7). Museums accepted the role of “describing the natural world, of bringing it into intellectual order through classification, and of diffusing this knowledge … of the physical reality in which all citizens lived” (Johns 1994: 350–1). The scale of collecting during imperial travels of conquest is astounding, and it contributed to the proliferation of science museums (Thomas 2013: 76). In the first half of the nineteenth century, the British empiricist tradition from John Locke to David Hume provided intellectual context for Jeremy Bentham and other philosophers’ promotion of this scientific empiricism (Livingston 2012: 590). Bentham’s panopticon exemplified the spatial form required to order and reform the world under the emerging global economies of power. Panopticons provide surveillance in support of the goal of self-surveillance, combining discipline and self-disciplining. New penitentiaries created panoptic, “salubrious spaces” that repositioned the individual body-in-space, refashioning the incarcerated to act as responsible, moral individuals. Within these new institutions, wardens imposed systems of routinized movement, communication, activity, and temporality to realize individuals’ transformation (Upton 1992: 65, 69; Garman 2005: 16, 42–3). By the mid-nineteenth century in the USA, the white male heads of middleclass and elite urban households had primary responsibility for their families’ economic welfare in the public arena of the market economy. At the same time, violent upheavals shook American Christianity. The revivals of this Second Great Awakening ultimately cohered to unify Americans and mediate the unsettling forces of economic revolution and institutional restructuring (SmithRosenberg 1985: 129). Integrally related to the Romanticism challenging extreme rationalist thinking, revival Protestantism offered women collective emotional experiences and spiritual ecstasy in the context of a profound reverence for nature (Smith-Rosenberg 1985: 138; LeeDecker 2009: 145). Religious reforms, including the evangelical practice of benevolence campaigns to the poor, immigrant, enslaved, and intemperate, increasingly became accepted as appropriate “public” domains for women, even as liberal theology reified the domestic as the distinct, autonomous social sphere of women (Sklar 1977; Perry 2008: 88). Catherine Beecher’s 1841 Treatise on Domestic Economy was the first manual to lay out the full behavioral and ideological argument for this “spiritualized, specialized, and politicized view of motherhood,” denominated the “cult of true womanhood” and the “cult of domesticity” (Sklar 1977: vi; McDannell 1986: 18; Buchli 2010: 503). Christianity provided general principles for domesticity

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and womanhood. Women were to aspire to Christ’s model of “self-denying benevolence” (Beecher 1841, in Sklar 1977: 158), embodying the virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Housework, childrearing, and entertaining became moral responsibilities. To later feminists, this prescriptive literature effectively portrayed women as hostages in their homes (Welter 1966). Beecher encouraged women to impose a system on their domestic economy and to assert control of their household (Sklar 1977: xv). Women should understand that they are “training for the discharge of the most important, the most difficult, and the most sacred and interesting duties that can possibly employ the highest intellect” (Beecher 1841, in Sklar 1977: 144). Arguing for the importance of time management and moderation in material consumption, Beecher guided the emerging middle class through the process of forming new identities through overlapping practices of family custom, labor relations, and domestic consumption (Sklar 1977; Jaffee 2010: 227). In Great Britain, Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901) came to represent replacement of the old aristocracy’s attitudes with a new set of values more closely aligned with the commercialism of the expanding middle class (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1992: 75). In the USA, perhaps nothing demonstrates the panWestern quest for wealth and its rewards more than the California Gold Rush. In 1848, John Sutter’s discovery of gold triggered massive emigration from the eastern USA and a global emigration of ambitious fortune-seekers from China, Germany, Chile, Mexico, Ireland, Turkey, and France (http://ocp.hul.harvard. edu/immigration/goldrush.html). Ultimately, hundreds of thousands sought their fortune in California following subsequent precious metal discoveries across the western USA. Meeting the massive demand for domestic housing in California and elsewhere, reformers legitimized emerging middle-class values and promoted the home as a unifying sacred symbol (McDannell 1986: 45). Victorians revered the home’s privacy, enclosure, separation, and protection as distinct from the capitalist economic sphere. In Victorian ideology, architecture functioned both as a mode of communication and a reforming, utopian enterprise, designed to encourage “morality, piety, patriotism, order, stability, affection, intellectuality, education, purity, refinement, and discipline” (McDannell 1986: 24). Feminized nature offered pure sentiment and inspiration for domestic environments. The physical layout of homes mediated relationships not only of nature and culture, but also of male and female, public and private, young and old, work and leisure. Reformers designed homes that embodied order, purity, cheerfulness, work, authority, class stability, religion, refinement, and ethnic identity that Catholics valued as well (McDannell 1986: 22, 26–7, 46–58). Middle-class women were to claim responsibility for the sanctity of the home, in part through display of religious articles representing the divine that dwelt in

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the everyday and in the home (McDannell 1986: 153; Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1992: 76). These environmental determinist beliefs justified that creation of the beautiful surroundings deemed essential to raising morally upright families. Increasingly available domestic commodities were deployed to create such wholesome domestic environments, especially for children (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1992: 77). The redefinition of childhood comprised another facet of domesticity, and education of small children “passed from the ‘world of words and ideas, to the world of things’” (McMurry 1988: 183). Proscriptive literature abounded regarding age- and gender-specific design and contents for children’s rooms (McMurry 1988: 189–99). Emerging “consumer lifestyles” in the USA and Britain were crafted from relationships between objects and individuals. For example, in 1861, London chemist William Crookes prefaced his new edition of Michael Faraday’s highly popular lectures The Chemical History of a Candle thus: The huge wax candle on the glittering altar, the range of gas lamps in our streets, all have their stories to tell. All, if they could speak (and after their own manner they can), might warm our hearts in telling, how they have ministered to man’s comfort, love of home, toil and devotion. (Schaffer 2004: 148) In this ode, Crookes epitomized a “distinctive … Victorian combination of scientific authority, respectable domesticity and mass advertising” (Schaffer 2004: 151). Marketers and advertisers also inscribed more nuanced meanings on objects of fashion, including moral denotations, aesthetics, and ethnicity (McCracken 1988: 22; Woodward 2007: 115–16). Objects informed Victorians’ opinions of their owners, making home furnishing a powerful statement of self. An “elaborate artifactual system … was central to the Victorians’ understanding of themselves and their place in the world” (Ames 1992: 7–8). Like and unlike elite families, middle-class families in the Victorian era built hierarchies of class into their homes. Formal, ceremonial rooms at the front of the house served the family and their guests; rear support spaces accommodated servants. Hierarchies of ornament also signified the “value” of the users of these spaces (Ames 1992: 13). Indeed, power played throughout the material relations of the home, in domestic staff uniforms and call bells as in collections of exotica from past and distant lands commodified and decontextualized from their communities, empowered to self-fashion their new bourgeois owners (Charpy 2015: 214). Cultural production and prestige became codified in parlor vocabulary. Furniture suites depicted the hierarchical, structured inequality of class and gender. An aesthetic of light, movement, and reflection linked Victorian families with European courtly culture. Through daily life ceremonies performed in these spaces, families demonstrated a desired elegance and nobility, control and civilization (Ames 1992: 25, 194; Jaffee 2010: 326). Fascination

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with memory and connections promoted photography and collecting and displaying objects as tools to fashion the self. Staging of memorabilia of personal and familial experiences joined the panoply of ritualized domestic practices for women. Handling, sharing, and moving photographs highlighted the value of their materiality as objects that brought the “viewer into bodily contact with the trace of the remembered” (Ames 1992: 43; Edwards 2009: 331, 335; Charpy 2015: 208–10). Dining was endowed with heightened value because it was essential as well as an occasion to display the highly civilized behavior that elevated people over all other living beings, and some people over others (Ames 1992: 67–8). Ritualized family meals became venues for incorporating new materials into a new domestic tradition associated with the ideals of women’s sphere. Specialized courses, more sophisticated dishes, a wider range of ingredients, and matched sets of dinnerwares proliferated (Wall 1994). Dining rooms also celebrated man the hunter and provider when ornamented in the theme of predation that pervaded the nineteenth-century Western world. Stereotypically masculine economic values countered and balanced stereotypically feminine values and experiences of nurture, community, family, and connectedness (Ames 1992: 71–3, 88). Today, this dining room equipage connotes raped landscapes, slaughter and extermination of animals, and rapacious consumption of nonrenewable resources; in short, a mentality that allowed (and, tragically, still allows) powerful people to prey on the world and even other people in acts of colonization. Capitalist farming and ranching families negotiated these values and virtues on their own terms. For them, an “agricultural ladder” represented the imagined hierarchy, from enslavement through farm ownership (Orser 1999: 149–50). They valued regulation, order and system, records and accounts, efficiency, and profit; all had implications for farmstead design. Proposals for rural house plans clearly specified the importance of the kitchen as a space in which the agricultural and domestic intersected. Beginning in the 1850s, at least in the American east, farm families began providing separate accommodations on the farm for laborers. Moving laborers out of the family house enhanced family privacy and class separation (McMurry 1988: 62, 68–75, 106–10). The tensions that consumerism and materialism wrought between urban middle-class and rural families in the second half of the nineteenth century were embodied in their respective homes: the woman of leisure and moral motherhood living the ideals of domesticity surrounded by beautiful consumer goods versus the farm woman in her productive, efficient kitchen and comfortable sitting room (McMurry 1988: 147–8). Ultimately, the sitting room evolved into a parlor as railroad- and mail-order houses, newspapers, and magazines made parlor culture available to rural women, albeit in simplified, informal material form (McMurry 1988: 156).

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Region and denomination, as well as class and occupation, introduced variation into the concept of a Christian life-world glossed over in general characterizations of capitalism, domesticity, and Victorian ideologies. For example, Middle Atlantic Methodists initially rejected worldly goods, embodying asceticism in all modes of consumption, and only relaxing their discipline after the mid-century (De Cunzo 2004: 178–9). In the rural Ozarks of Arkansas, ideals of corporateness, organic integration, and conservatism of life bound by family and community prevailed beyond the Civil War, and families acquired commodities such as cooking stoves and canning jars as tools to uphold these values. Consumer choices were constantly negotiated. Agricultural equipment embedded people in chains of dependency on the industrial order, and the consequences of this entrenchment demanded careful scrutiny (Stewart-Abernathy 1992: 114–16). Indeed, industrialization, social reform movements, migration, utopianism, and the Civil War all required women to respond outside the bounds of the cult of domesticity ideology (Welter 1966). The proliferation of mechanical devices and tools for housework designed to save time and labor, but coupled with increasing expectations for cleanliness, hygiene, decorative exuberance, and the replacement of domestic servants with tools for housewives, ultimately meant more work at home for many women (Cowan 1983). Manufacturers not only mechanized the production of goods and domestic tools: beginning in 1855, crop production was also mechanized. Self-styled progressive farmers devoted themselves to improvement for profit, and many chose to embrace technological innovation, scientific experimentation, and land management practices (McMurry 1988: 3, 60; De Cunzo 2004: 132). Synthetic materials such as vulcanized rubber played a significant role in the process and enjoyed tremendous commercial success. Developed in chemistry labs, synthetics signaled a “brave new world” of mastery over nature, even as they revolutionized the production of materials and the goods out of which they were rendered (Kuchler and Oakley 2014: 83). Throughout this period, philosophers and economic, political, social, and cultural theorists expressed a fascination with and concern over the contradictory effects of the immense productive capacities of capitalist economies. Ambivalence flourished about technology’s implications for human social life (Woodward 2007: 19). The belief that “the new commercial, industrial, and democratic civilization was producing a debased form of human being and human life” became increasingly common (Brudney 2012: 731, 769–70). Westerners lacked concern and love for distant humans and for humanity in general. Social reform movements, such as Charles Fourier’s utopian socialism, for example, were established on the concept of gender equality. Industrial technologies like railroads linked objects, people, and society in a network of relations that supported contemporary utopian social experiments. In the USA, Henry David

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Thoreau was an early opponent of materialism, citing the inversion of values as among its graver consequences. Material signs like clothing, he argued, marked social distinction, subjected Americans to the lure of fashion, and displaced concern with the immaterial, the spiritual, and one’s individual interiority. Protestant clergy and congregants also engaged in the critique, celebrating function over appearance and rejecting surfaces as superfluous if not immoral (Keane 2005: 183–4). By the 1870s, a modern corporate structure had become an increasingly common successor to the family and partnership structures of earlier businesses (Wall 1994: 156), and the capitalist critique broadened and deepened. Karl Marx and his colleagues launched the most instrumental critique of capitalism and commodification at this same moment. Marx wrote, “Humanity is viewed as the product of its capacity to transform the material world in production, in the mirror of which we create ourselves.” Labor equated humans’ conscious creation of a world of objects through “his work upon inorganic nature.” Capitalism interrupts this cycle of production that creates our understanding of who we can be. Commodities—objects exchanged based on their monetary value, a social construct—are essentially expressions of the history of working-class exploitation under capitalism, the objectification of alienated labor (Miller 2005: 2; Woodward 2007: 19, 36–7; Blaettler 2012: 779–80). Ideology plays a “central role in creating a credible world of meanings [through commodities] … that hides the exploitative or inequitable … in everyday working life” (Leone 1999: 6). Marx supported his position with the argument that under industrial capitalism, workers only chose to whom to sell their labor. Proletariat industrial production technologies emerged as machines increased productivity and intensified labor. Capitalists used machines to control labor. Capitalist production fed on the power inequality and appropriation of unpaid excess labor. This is the root of commodity fetishism: the “worker becomes [a] cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates” (Blaettler 2012: 779–82, quoting Marx and Engels 1975). Marx attributed to commodities “a strange kind of agency, a mystical power that appears to emanate, fetish-like, from the object itself.” Lured by the commodities they produced, workers overlooked their alienation and identified with other classes of consumers. In this way, objects engendered a false consciousness in the working class. As the distances between producer and consumer grew, they derived knowledge of each other only from the objects (Thoburn 2014: 209). Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) offered a scientific theory of biological evolution that soon extended to material culture and human societies. Darwin understood life to constitute adaptation to the “exigencies of matter,” a process recorded in the histories of objects (Grosz 2009: 125). In the 1870s, Marx capitalized on Darwin’s contention that human technological evolution warranted study (Hicks 2010: 31).

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As with things, so too with people. Humans had been classified grossly as “primitive” and “natural” or “civilized” and “cultured” (Ulrich et al. 2015: 24). In the 1870s, A. L. F. Pitt Rivers advanced a linear, progressivist model of cultural evolution. Different peoples encountered in the imperialist project were located at various stages along an evolutionary continuum. This imaginary of human evolution helped rationalize and naturalize notions of racial difference, forming the basis of scientific racism and legitimizing modern commercial nations’ role to “supervise” these lesser others within and beyond their borders. Following the American Civil War, for example, the white community racialized the work of Reconstruction on a white male supremacist platform (Wilkie 2000: 245; Fahs 2008: 116; O’Brien 2009: 303; Camp 2013: 35–6). Social Darwinism also justified an expanded and elaborated project of categorizing, segregating, and disciplining citizens according to age, gender, health and disability, criminal behavior, and economic means (Garman 2005). International exhibitions, world’s fairs, and industrial expositions, beginning with the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, introduced a new mode of mass consumption and inspired excursion tourism. In the process, these spectacles served nationalist, imperialist superiority and capitalist greed. Through the utopian dreamscapes they created, these technological wonders both enforced and obscured the relationships of power that enabled them (Levell 2000: 38). With entry of the USA into this materialist discourse, a unilineal, progressivist ideology also came to pervade the international exhibitions. New exhibits of recently colonized peoples promoted the agenda of empire and the associated right to exploit and degrade colonized populations. Over the course of the later nineteenth century, the exhibitions expanded in scope and scale. Their sponsors and designers deployed them to model modern city plans, architectural forms, functions, aesthetics, and even social ordering (Hinsley 1996: 120–1). In American cities, civic improvements, and public works projects became monuments to the “greatness of commercial society” (Praetzellis and Praetzellis 1992: 97). In addition to the world’s fairs, vernacular traveling shows delivered versions of scientific nationalism and imperialism to a much broader public. P. T. Barnum linked science and spectacle as early as the 1840s, taking his “freak shows” on the road across the USA. Barnum and other showmen incorporated Native Americans and other exotic peoples into their spectacles, providing spectators with intimate encounters with people and animals from around the globe. For cultural historian Janet Davis (2008: 166–7), the American circus helped make “spectacle, novelty, and ostensible educational uplift an integral part of the modern entertainment experience.” Staging a hierarchical taxonomy of human bodies, genders, races, and classes, the circus and international exhibitions also became sites of nostalgia for “exotic” cultures that were “dying” through the homogenizing effects of modernization (Davis 2008: 169; Spitta 2009: 69–73).

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The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have also been considered the zenith of the “museum age.” The number of museums increased, especially those dedicated to displaying cultural objects. Their mission was to provide the right kind of object lessons for Western societies in transition from a spiritual to a scientific, material era and from producer to imperialist consumer societies. Curators embraced evolutionary theories that objectified and marginalized non-Western cultures in the hierarchy of progress and civilization (Woodward 2007: 18). Museums became “outlets for a changing vision of the future based on a changing vision of the past” (Bronner 1989a: 219). In their influential study of American consumer culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Richard Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (1983: xi–xii) enumerated three key developments in the USA in this period: firstly, the emergence of a “class” of corporate and institutional professionals and managers and a proliferation of corporate structural forms; secondly, the maturing of the national marketplace; and thirdly, a new philosophy and gospel of release, hedonism, and self-fulfillment. Material culture historian Thomas Schlereth (1989: 347–8) attributed modernization in this era to “industrial production, commercial agriculture, technical innovation, capital accumulation, market economies, urban consciousness, bureaucratic organization, specialization of skills, and intensive education.” Technological systems—power, production, distribution, and communication—heightened interdependence among people (Cowan 1997: 150–65). Capitalist “captains of industry” like Rockefeller, du Pont, and Stanford commanded the consolidation of large-scale, national businesses, which constituted a second transformation of American society equal to initial industrial capitalism. Rural communities were urged to modernize, consolidate, institutionalize, and increase the efficiency of citizens’ lives. Corporate advertisers promoted a consumer culture that threatened to erode traditional authorities and diminish local community structures (Barron 1997: 8, 19; Sandage 2008: 144–5). In her study of American commodities in this period, Mona Domash (2006: 2) asks “how American economic dominance throughout large portions of the world came to be understood by everyday Americans as natural, inevitable, and fundamentally good.” Internationalization demanded increasingly large, sophisticated corporate structures as well as capitalization to invest in factories, corporate bureaucracy, and advertising (Domash 2006: 6, 23). The international exhibitions provided a critical platform for America’s first international companies to position themselves as civilizers by sharing the benefits of industrialization. This positioning created different knowledge and valued other peoples, nations, cultures, and places (Domash 2006: 3–4). Beginning in the 1870s and 1880s, following lower internal demand after the Civil War, US exhibitors branded machines and industrial commodities “great

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works of peace.” The Singer Company represents an excellent example. In its exhibition entries, the company advertised sewing machines as feminine and hence civilized through images, domestic-inspired architecture and interior design, and portrayal of the woman’s place in the home. Together, these elements broadcast a clear message: civilization at home through proper domesticity and civilization beyond through the “civilizing” effects of sewing (Domash 2006: 58–61). Frederick J. Turner’s “frontier thesis,” presented in his 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” proclaimed exceptionalism was embodied in Americans’ frontier character driving a desire to bring progress and civilization to the wilderness. McCormick Harvesting Machine Company quickly appropriated this myth and melded it with evolutionary principles as the foundation of their brand: tame the wilderness through agriculture; as the machine evolves from primitive to civilized, so too does society. Machinery civilized via the nature of the labor it enabled for men and women. This ideology propelled the corporation’s imperial expansion beyond America’s borders (Domash 2006: 96–7, 102). Western social thinkers like American scientist and logician Charles S. Pierce also informed American ideology in the late nineteenth century through his rejection of rationalism and positivism in favor of “thinking through the lived experience of the body” (Crossland 2010: 393). For prominent British artist and social philosopher John Ruskin, beauty became an experience of freedom. He believed art and the beauty in nature had the power to transform the lives of people oppressed more by visual illiteracy than by poor material conditions (Guyer 2012: 381). Ruskin had great influence on nineteenth-century Gothic Revival and twentieth-century functionalist reactions against all revivalist styles in architecture and design, providing a major inspiration for the Arts and Crafts Movement and the valorization, indeed perhaps fetishization, of the handmade object (Landow 1985). A romantic technological utopianism enticed others to envision a perfect world in which mechanical ingenuity mastered nature in the service of prosperity and leisure, helping “ever larger numbers of men (but not women) to reach the Romantic goals of creativity and free expression” (Cowan 1997: 211). Contemporary observers recognized the connection between accumulation and display as the foundation of change in American life (Bronner 1989b: 30). Ownership of a wealth of goods fostered an easy life, the measure of “progress” (Bronner 1989b: 50). Fashion ideologues were engaged in a continuing search for some means of organizing and controlling the chaotic potential of the proliferating meanings attached to commodities. The search was pervaded by tension between simplicity and extravagance, as well as authenticity and artifice, and by the

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implicit realization that obsessive preoccupation with either authenticity or artifice could lead to catastrophe. The result was … Victorian respectability, rooted in tense ambivalence. (Lears 1989: 85) In the final decades of the nineteenth century, however, leisure and consumption increasingly became understood as the means to self-fulfillment in a world of disciplined factory or bureaucratic labor (Leach 1989: 101). New technologies of lighting facilitated year-round nocturnal and diurnal endeavors of display and decoration. They were syncretic and surrealist: syncretic because they incorporated religious, secular, folk, and foreign myths for commercial purposes; and surrealist because they aimed to endow artificial and material things, even urban spaces, with life. Commercial designers shifted the improvising power of the imagination away from natural and religious things toward artificial and secular things. They strove for theatrical effects and for a new enchantment, systematically interpreting and dramatizing commodities and commodity environments in ways that disguised and transformed them into what they were not. (Leach 1989: 100) Shopping, whether at stores, county fairs, or from the new mail-order catalogs, became performances of a “commodity aesthetic.” This aesthetic constituted a way of seeing oneself, society, and the world as a raw or empty space to be furnished with mobile, exchangeable goods, and it celebrated the collapse of boundaries between individual and commodity at the moment of purchase (Agnew 1989: 135). Many Americans resisted or tempered the materialist project. Some isolated themselves in intentional communities, often founded on socialist or communist ideals. Others simply did not have the means to act on their desire to consume, even if they had embraced the ideology. Most, perhaps, negotiated an ambivalence rooted in alternative values. Paul Mullins (1999: 3–4) has argued that racism formed the fundamental contradiction of consumer culture in the later nineteenth century. Domash (2006: 184–5) proposes that white Americans accepted an ideology of “flexible racism” grounded in the proliferation of commodities and advertising enabled and given meaning by imperial expansion. In this imaginary, “uncivilized others” appear as malleable, potential consumers who could be transformed by engaging with Western commodities (Domash 2006: 184–5). Mullins (1999: 185) analyzed consumerism in relation to African America. He concluded that “African America stood at the heart of consumer space as laborers, marketers, and consumers, but African America’s centrality to consumption and impression on White subjectivity was evaded or ignored by White America.” Some African Americans imagined consumption to be

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a privilege linked to labor and civil privileges and thus a hopeful space of citizenship and aspiration. For all African Americans, however, consumer purchases required constantly negotiating the lived and structural contradictions of racism. Consumption in fact proved an idealistic place of grasping at desire and aspiration, strongly conditioned by branding and brand marketing (Mullins 1999: 3, 18, 29–31, 170). African Americans turned not only to the allure of consumerism to fight the structural racism and sexual violence that White Americans continued to inflict on them in the late nineteenth century. In the rural South, sharecropping presented a new form of economic exploitation. African-derived beliefs about the relationships between objects and people had been revised and adapted over the generations. This cultural inheritance structured a world animated by spiritual protections, a cosmological orientation, and the power of materials like iron, transformed from “earth” into powerful tools. Hoodoo practitioners attempted to control others’ health and action through potions, charms, and incantations. Objects most intimately connected to a person had the strongest magical connection, and thus were most instrumental (Wilkie 2000: 182–3; De Cunzo 2004: 247). Late nineteenth-century immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and from China introduced other materialist beliefs into the USA’s multicultural stew. The middle class responded generally with contempt, fear, and attitudes of superiority. Perceptions of, if not actual encounters with, these “exotic” immigrants contributed to a middle-class worldview of exclusivity and excessive boundary maintenance (Williams 1985: 21). Some middle-class women participated in an expansive domestic reform movement designed to uplift immigrant and working-class women. Acting on behalf of other women as well as themselves, they sought to professionalize housework, helping to transform Victorian views on women and blurring the ideological lines of private = women and public = men. In the process, they also transformed urban space and material culture, creating a suite of new tools and equipment for cooking schools, public nurseries and kindergartens, playgrounds, and housing cooperatives (Spencer-Wood 1994: 178, 187–9). Working women and women of leisure appropriated American ideals of consumption, individualism, and heterosexual sociality in this period, but lower-class and immigrant women resisted wholesale acceptance of white middle-class ideals and aspirations (Spencer-Wood 1994). Rather, they crafted personal styles in conversation with the “New Woman” ideology, which “imbued women’s activity in the public domain with a new sense of female self, a woman who was independent, athletic, sexual, and modern” (Peiss 1986: 6–7). Young working women “put on style,” engaging in a discursive practice with wealthy women in which they played with haute couture. Social clubs, commercial amusements such as dance halls and amusement parks, and the

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streets became sites of working-class youth sociability and cultural style (Peiss 1986: 64–5, 121–9). I chose to conclude the body of this chapter with an image of young working women “putting on style” to emphasize the point that “objecthood” exists in relationships among objects and people. Between 1790 and 1840, only a third of the period that this volume covers, Jack Larkin (1988) described the experiential changes in material life for middling Americans thus: from a time of dirty bodies sleeping together in small houses, near-constant illness, hard daily labor guided by diurnal and seasonal cycles, immense investments in making clothing and food, limited travel, and relatively few imported consumer goods to a time when technological and ideological changes meant aspiring to more space housing more goods, greater privacy, cleaner and healthier bodies, multiple changes of clothes, greater mobility, and seeking the means to achieve this life. While true for many, many others in the West—notably, indigenous peoples, the enslaved, the landless, and the impoverished—did not enjoy these changes in living conditions. Throughout the period of this study, a broader segment of the population did come to share a desire to collect, possess, and own objects, and to suffer anxiety over their ability to acquire them or to make the appropriate choices. The currency market expanded, and the exchange value of objects became more important. Objects also became increasingly important tools in the construction of identity. Consumers were distanced from makers and, as a result of mechanization, makers were more distanced from the materials out of which objects were created. Over time, consumers avowed a greater variability of desires that they perceived goods would satisfy. It became more difficult to surprise and delight; Victorian consumers sought more exotic, technologically complex objects crafted of new, even synthetic materials. New objects and the practices to produce and consume them manipulated and mediated people’s relationships with time and space. Perhaps most profound, and seemingly natural to us today, was the functional segmentation of time and space for work and family, and imagining and valorizing leisure. Today, we consider it too simplistic to conceptualize these changes during the “Age of Industry” as linear and progressive, as nineteenth-century evolutionists would have us believe. Capitalist and Enlightenment science and technology increasingly rationalized and ordered the material world: segmenting, classifying, and creating taxonomies of objects and actions. Progressive unilinear evolution enticed Westerners with means, as they associated civilization, education, gentility, Christian virtue, and control over resources with the height of cultural evolutionary achievement. However, at the same time, increasing differentiation and variation in objects’ materiality inscribed and enabled multiple and even divergent references and connections. Difference in objecthood during the “Age of Industry” empowered a subtle and nuanced cultural discourse about social relations that continues today.

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CHAPTER TWO

Technology TIMOTHY J. SCARLETT AND STEVEN A. WALTON

INTRODUCTION: IDEA OF TECHNOLOGY; IDEA OF OBJECT Objects have cultural histories surrounding their creation, use, and discard; but, recursively, the technology used to produce an object has a cultural history of its own. Both historians of technology and archaeologists have studied the depths of invention, innovation, and production of technology, as well as—for a slightly shorter period of time—the consumption, perception, and effect on users of those technologies. In this chapter, we concern ourselves with objects in terms of their generation or transformation: that is, technology that allows for the creation of material objects in the second half of the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries, which here is the “Age of Industry.” This period exists before mass production and the assembly line, itself understood as what we now call “Fordist” production. Both of those organizational schemes have deeper roots in the past. At the same time, a focus on production is insufficient in detail, depth, or breadth to explain how objects “come to be.” It was in fact the objects themselves—and huge demand for them—that would push engineers to develop the assembly line just after this era came to a close. In one sense, all human-made objects are technologies, if “technology” is taken to be the artificial extension of human capacity. During the Age of Industry, antiquarians and early archaeologists certainly defined technology in this way as they shifted from cabinets of curiosity and began to build object typologies and chronologies to illustrate unilinear evolutionary models of

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human development. But in the modern and ethnocentric sense, technology has attained a connotation of complexity that tends to exclude the simple, for which the scale of complexity descends to “machines,” “tools,” and “objects” (Marx 1994, 1997). Although the word “technology” itself did not become commonly associated with complex machinery until the nineteenth century and was not popularly used in this way until after the Second World War, there are instances in English where people described complex assemblages of human-built systems as technologies going back to the early eighteenth century. Technology was especially abstracted to consider the class of complex machinery in the late eighteenth century German world—“A new branch of scientific knowledge, viz. technology, or the theory and accurate description of useful arts and manufactures” (1787; OED, sb. “technology” 4a). Our current conflation of technology with the most complex and now mostly digital systems obscures its resonances for the period under consideration in this volume. For the Age of Industry, one has to consider how certain subtypes of objects came to be considered technology (Schatzberg 2018). Technology has been considered through a number of lenses in historiography. Traditionally, it was the object that sprang from the mind and hand (or often assistants’ hands) of a particular genius such as Edison, Tesla, or Ford. In other cases, it was the engine of economic growth, originally in terms of the growth of the producer, such as in how many bolts of cloth mills designed by Titus Salt or Samuel Slater could produce. Later, historians began to describe technology in terms of commodities offered for sale/purchase at stores, as at Wannamaker’s in Philadelphia—the first department store in the USA, built in the 1870s—or the shopping arcades in Paris and other European cities fifty years earlier. Many of these things were to be displayed on the mantelpiece of a fine and wonderfully cluttered Victorian home. Historians have also considered technology using an evolutionary metaphor, with species of objects and their traits competing for resources in the marketplace, leading to the success or extinction of those objects that were well- or ill-adapted to their niche (Basalla 1988).

SCALE, VOLUME, SCOPE, AND PACE The world in 1760 was largely handmade; by 1900, it was virtually all machine-made. As objects, machines reveal the complexity of the “progressive” transformation from hand labor, to machine-assisted production, to humans assisting machines, and finally to fully autonomous machines maintained by a few watchful humans (although that last part is beyond the scope of this chapter). Overall, the pace of work increased, workers were disciplined to the rhythm of the factory’s mechanisms, and more workers were drawn into factory production. The life history of textile machines reveals the slow and

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incremental changes in work, a social network or set of relations among human and nonhuman actors that together resulted in change. Yet other objects of this era (e.g., patent records) operate to obscure this networked view through a rhetoric that argues for the “solitary genius,” enhancing the punctuated equilibrium of technological change. While accurate in broad strokes, this picture is not complete. Industrialization arrived unevenly across different areas of production and in different places and times. In addition, the ideas of craft and its practices were constantly reinvented and evolving alongside the intensification and segmentation of production in industry. Despite pressures of “de-skilling,” there were probably more skilled artisans in more diverse trades in England in 1850 than there had been in 1750, because there was more industry (Adamson 2013: xvi). Even in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the greatest symbol of the emerging modern era—the electric lightbulb—was still handmade by skilled glassblowers. Through the 150 years of the Age of Industry, increasingly capitalized producers were able to apply greater quantities of nonhuman power to the machinery operated by workers in newly named “manufactories.” While these new architectural objects and their social systems were preceded by ever more complex putting-out systems, owners began to realize benefits from concentrating larger numbers of workers around a single strong power source. These manufactories, literally and ironically “places where things are made by hand,” may have been powered by waterwheels, turbines, steam engines, or eventually electric motors, but they allowed workers to turn out more goods at potentially less cost per unit object (Bradley 1999). These manufactories engendered increasingly complex social relations over time as people debated the social value of different types of labor, be that labor purely physical or involving managerial, artisanal, scientific, engineering, or dexterous skills. Not only were larger products possible, but also the relative ease of manufacturing any given object was increased. True mass production would not come into being until the early twentieth century, yet the “massification” of consumption began to appear in the later eighteenth century as more manufacturers shifted from piecework toward large-batch production, marketing taste and fashion to dramatically increase demand for a smaller range of products that could be made more cheaply and efficiently and thus be more widely available for consumption (Simmel [1904] 1971). In this period, production and marketing tended to be under a single roof. Objects found their way into the hands of consumers through small shops, but tracing distribution networks backwards led very quickly to the producers themselves. Those producers might retail or wholesale out of their shopfront, but their manufactured objects—plates, saws, or dressers—were likely being made in the rooms behind or on the floors above the storefront. As scales changed, so did the complexity of distribution systems.

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WORKERS, SKILLS, AND MANAGEMENT: WORKERS AS OBJECTS During the Age of Industry, owners and capitalists tried to complete the transformation of workers into objects, and particularly as technological objects. This objectification was complex, taking many different trajectories and forms, and individuals and entire classes of workers resisted or struggled to control the narrative. Significant among these trajectories, mercantile capitalists had already embraced the dehumanization of people into property in order to build the plantation agriculture system, transforming human bodies into commodities from/with which owners could violently extract energy and labor, harvest resources, breed for growth of stock, and enjoy for sexual gratification. Particular to our discussion, however, is that by enslaving bodies, capitalists could forcibly organize labor, direct embodied artisanal skills, transfer and appropriate entire techno-ecological and sociotechnical systems, and mandate other organizations’ labor. The lived conditions of people that struggled through this system did not simply improve following manumission with the rising dominance of industrial capitalism (Curry-Machado 2011; Knight 2015). At the beginning of our period, labor was still mostly local, and organized into relatively small-scale units oriented around the household. But with the arrival of water- and coal-powered centralized power sources and the expansion of the canal system in Britain for the transportation of raw materials (including engine fuel) and finished goods, industrialists became dominated by a logic to concentrate formerly scattered production sites under one “factory” roof. Such undertakings required considerable capital to build the mill or factory and fill it with increasing amounts of machinery, even if initially the factory was filled with highly skilled workers. Independent artisans were drawn under one roof and under the economic, if not the craft, supervision of a capitalist. This transformation occurred first in the textile industries, then, over the next century, it spread to virtually all industries producing consumer goods. Heavy industries, such as ironworks, resisted this transformation slightly longer due to their infrastructure and resource requirements. Ironworks also made capital goods in customized production, instead of consumer goods for retail. As industrial capitalism replaced mercantilism during the Age of Industry, other types of workers were increasingly objectified. As Karl Marx noted in his critique of the evolution of capitalism, laborers lost autonomy and ownership over the means of production, but also capitalists wanted to treat people as if they were merely tools—instruments as part of a labor process. At a practical level, owners and managers tried to devalue workers’ embodied skill as they devised objects to replace those skills in hand- and machine-assisted labor (e.g. jigs, go/no-go gauges, and fixtures for machining). There is admittedly irony in the fact that the types of manufacturing that adopted these aids

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tended to initially need increased skills for manufacture. New types of labor arose alongside these changes, from machinists to engineers and inspectors and other new types of “skilled” labor who resisted objectification, and new social organizations through which various communities of workers could collectively act to improve wages, conditions, and hours. In the USA, labor unions and skilled engineering professional associations both started forming in the 1870s, formalizing a division of labor that had grown up in previous decades. The owners of large operations who had significant investment capital were generally from a separate class, while early in the Age of Industry, the owners of small manufactories such as potteries and machine shops often evolved from master artisans. This division intensified dramatically after the turn of the twentieth century. By the end of the Age of Industry, inanimate objects played a central role in the final steps toward objectifying people as instruments. A group of media technologies, including flash photography, facilitated the organizing and sharing of management information and enabled the rise of systematic management. In the 1870s, artist Eadweard Muybridge developed the ability to photographically capture and examine slices of rapid motion, where a timed series of flash cameras recorded sequential images of motion. Muybridge then animated them on his zoopraxiscope, in some ways similar to older stroboscopes and similar devices for animating drawings. This technique enabled an explosion of work in the following decade at the University of Pennsylvania, where Muybridge created more than 100,000 images, among them sequences of all manner of labor, from household chores to industrial labor, blacksmithing, and even a self-portrait swinging a miner’s pick. Among his European colleagues, Etienne-Jules Marey extended the idea to capture images that also documented time. Time-motion photography let people rethink the ways in which animals and humans moved their bodies, and that documentation opened the door to engineering physical movement in work (Hendricks 1975; Rabinbach 1990: 100–3; Brown 2005: 10–12, 88). Meanwhile, the growth of manufactories and businesses during the nineteenth century had resulted in companies that ran operations of immense scale and scope. The burgeoning size and geographic fragmentation of railroads and industrial operations had outstripped the capacity of managerial techniques. In response, clerks and growing numbers of mid-level managers invented practical systems to keep track of materials, tools, shipments, people, time, and all sorts of data that could be accounted for using technological objects, including standardized and printed forms, compiled onto tabular lists and bound into ledgers that tracked production costs, centralized accounting, and coordinated quality control. These objects of control extended to the furniture of offices themselves, where the traditional secretarial desk morphed into an elaborate pigeonhole structure for a tracking system to follow the materials, production, and labor of an entire multi-structure factory complex or network system (like

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a railroad). Accounting systems operated through objects that, when deployed, permitted hierarchical supervision from the head office, through middle managers, down to the shop floor (Figure 2.1). These tools allowed large firms to shift from gang labor toward piecework wage systems. At the same time, companies created entire systems of procedures to replace the existing ad hoc methods in order to address the “human element” in operations as they tried to manipulate workers’ motivations and quality-of-life concerns (Litterer 1963; Nelson 1974: 480–1).

FIGURE 2.1  Newly created mid-level clerks developed objects to help manage the flow of information in novel ways as the scale of industry grew. F. Wolf’s time card from a day at the Union Foundry and Pullman Car Wheel Works in 1886 shows that his 10.5-hour workday was counted against two different contracted orders, indexed by their numbers.

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In the 1880s, the mechanical engineer Fredrick Winslow Taylor analyzed the efficiency of tool use and then began time studies in workspaces with the aim of rationalizing them to make work outputs more regular, predicable, and efficient. Following from these efforts, a group of researchers tried to formalize the datatracking systems of systematic management, eventually combining methods of bookkeeping and accounting with time-motion engineering, finally linking Taylor’s time studies with the motion studies of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth after the turn of the century. A community of industrial engineers that grew up around this work developed a management system that experienced a meteoric rise in industry in the nineteenth century’s final decade. The objects that enabled “Scientific Management,” as it became known in the early twentieth century, included the punch clock, stamp card, and, above all others, the stopwatch. These are the objects that signify the growing vision that human labor could be scientifically rationalized into Taylor's “one best way” to accomplish tasks and that workers could be trained to execute that one way, ending wasted and inefficient efforts and movements but also essentially ending skilled labor in production (Nelson 1974).

TOOLS: PRECISION, MEASUREMENT, AND EFFICIENCY Although the idea of revolutions in human history has become a bit worn around the edges, the Industrial Revolution, though debated on its relative merits to humanity and the globe, cannot be underestimated for the profound effect it had in terms of the processes it developed and the objects it made. The increasing use of iron and other metals over wood and the growth of industrial power—most notably seen through the development of the steam engine, but seen at the same time in waterpower industries as well, and then by the later nineteenth century in electric power—generated a material world by the middle of the nineteenth century unimagined in centuries past. The resultant profusion of objects in the increasingly easy availability of traditionally made objects, new versions of traditional objects, and the invention of new sorts of items ushered in a new era in human history (Hindle and Lubar 1988). One of the most profound shifts in all of human history occurred in the middle of the eighteenth century with the development of machine tools. Fine hand craftwork can produce exquisite objects, as are often seen in museums, but almost all such work is necessarily slow, and there is an incentive, therefore, to privilege fine work and ornamentation over large-scale production. The development of machine tools for either the power-intensive heavy production of raw materials, large-scale parallel manufacture using automatic machinery, or the precision manufacture of parts (which is also related to the standardization that will appear in the middle of this period as well) created a fundamental

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shift in the nature of objects between the mid-eighteenth century and the midnineteenth century. Key to understanding both of these areas is to distinguish between scale and precision. Heavy machines contributed to scale; automatic machinery contributed to both scale and precision; and fine machine tools pushed precision to new levels. Some of the machine tools that were invented, such as James Naysmith’s steam hammer (1839), allowed industrial workers to make and manipulate components that would previously have been simply too large or too unwieldy to create. Meanwhile, instruments like the micrometer allowed institutions like the United States Navy to specify measurements on drawings

FIGURE 2.2  Vernier External Callipers, with sliding Vernier scale, which magnifies the increments of measurement by up to 3.8 times with an accuracy of 0.001 inch with each adjustment. Made in London between 1800 and 1825 by Holtzapffel and Company. Vernier External Callipers, 1800–1825, object number 1930-172. Science Museum Group Collection Online, https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/ objects/co59275 (accessed December 4, 2019).

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of products and then inspect the delivered objects, expecting accuracy to the nearest 0.001 inch (Figure 2.2). The increase in overall scale of production in most industries from the mid-eighteenth century onward clarifies the trend. The development of better methods and tools for precision working of materials lowered the cost of finely engineered technologies and made these products available to a broader range of consumers. Technology became more democratized in a sense, most clearly expressed in the clock. At the start of this period, timekeepers were large objects with gross movements, suited only for public display atop an ecclesiastical, municipal, or industrial clock tower. Only the elite could afford small clock mechanisms, and they were therefore made gilt with ornament. As precision in manufacture changed and workers produced more standardized parts of less expensive sheet brass and other materials, by the 1850s clocks had become common in middle-class parlors. Yet still by 1900, a pocket watch remained a precious thing.

OBJECTS AND TECHNOLOGICAL LEARNING People learn technological skills through embodied interactions with objects that include tools, muscle memory, and raw materials, as well as immaterial knowledge about the objects design and use. This practical skill and artisanal knowledge was technê for the ancient Greeks. Sometimes scholars approach the process of making in this way, discussing the operational sequences of manufacture (châine opératoire), working with the embodied skills of tool use and raw material (knowhow, savoir faíre), and the technical knowledge of what one is making and how it will be used (connaissance). Scholars use many variations on these themes, which they apply to study the technological and artistic labor that comes with disciplined mastery over time. These approaches allow researchers to study collections of objects, mixing the detailed measurement of traits or characteristics with insights from experimental and experiential learning in order to understand decision-making among communities of makers (Dobres 2000; Bleed 2001). Yet these techniques begin to fail when the production system becomes highly segmented and specialized, where tasks are divided among many workers, most of whom lack direct connection with retailers and consumers of their manufactures. These ways of thinking about technological process in behavioral terms were only intended to be used as tools of analysis for objects produced within less complicated social and technical systems, such as in antiquity. Consequently, they are designed for application to analyze craft skill and not engineering, scientific, or organizational skills in production, particularly when the information loops that connect an object’s producers and users are so complicated as to become mystified and impenetrable to the normal observer.

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Most technology before the eighteenth century existed in the “prediscursive” mode. Knowledge of technology was passed down through personal contact and bodily interaction. As early as the seventeenth century, however, technical education had started to take forms students might recognize today. Technological techniques and objects like the woodcut, copperplate, and steel engraving enabled a shift in who could produce knowledge, as well as the topics about which knowledge producers dedicated their efforts. Printing technologies allowed a shift in the way mechanics, manufacture, and architecture were communicated and perhaps taught. For the first half of the Age of Industry, skilled workers diffused technology by moving and taking their knowledge with them. In the second half of the era, published treatises and the dissemination of the patent system allowed entrepreneurs to start local industries without direct knowledge of them (although without skilled laborers, many were doomed to failure). Scientists and mechanics began to publish encyclopedias and journals, several of which invited contributions that improved the applied arts (Figure 2.3). Print resources became numerous and usually included useful and illustrative figures, such as Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751– 1772), Cutbush’s The American Artist’s Manual, or, Dictionary of practical knowledge in the application of philosophy to the arts and manufactures (1814), Alexander’s Dictionary of Mechanical Science, Arts, Manufactures, and

FIGURE 2.3  Illustration of a large forge mill from a 1771 edition of Diderot’s encyclopedia, showing the arrangement (top view) of structures for power generation and transmission. Getty images 492654850.

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Miscellaneous Knowledge (1827), or Prechtl’s Technologische Encyklopädie, oder alphabetisches Handbuch der Technologie, der technischen Chemie und des Maschinenwesens (1830–1869). Even Scientific American, which began in 1845, focused primarily on technology and the useful arts. These books were objects that particularly helped to spread technological information while also attempting to transform the artisan’s embodied secrets into literary prose for a different class of reader, even if the elite initially thought poorly of them as a literary activity. Diderot pinned all manner of hand tools and large equipment to his pages “like an entomologist’s insect specimens” organized into the rational type collection of a natural history museum (Adamson 2013: 7). By the mid-nineteenth century, encyclopedias like these included the most mundane and pedantic details of craftwork. But of course, the “art and the mystery” of technological activities, from mining and milling ore to making quality glass goods, remained full of those artisanal skills, learned by repetition of action using tools on materials. Generally, this learning process remained governed by apprenticeship and extended through years as a journeyman at a particular craft. Artisanal skill and identity proved very difficult to rationalize and control. During the Age of Industry, objects came to play an important role in engineering education—a concept itself that was developed during this period. While most technological education to this time was learned through the apprenticeship system (and indeed most would still be for some time after this era), formal schools for instruction started to appear during this time. France’s École des Ponts et Chaussées (1747) and the United States Military Academy (1802), while set up to train officers, included a curriculum that emphasized math and engineering. Civilian schools followed in the early nineteenth century, and the concept of a civil engineer became distinct from a military one. Schools maintained collections of scale models of mechanisms and machinery that students could study and compare with drawings, pattern books, and design and art publications (Figure 2.4). Students would also take trips to tour factories and shops, studying processes and practices in different operations. Students at schools learned established approaches to drafting and drawing in classes informed as much by art as mathematics and science (Figure 2.5). They would learn to survey the land and take field notes, for example, or make measurements with instruments and then produce scaled drawings or plans. While the process was little different from how individuals had learned surveying in previous centuries, now the instructors taught classes of students who were expected to take the knowledge out into the realm of industry. Those who had previously apprenticed in foundries became students of mechanical engineering and started working from objects; they would reproduce different formats of visualization, from perspective to isometric drawings and other freehand visualizations, eventually working the other way as they moved to

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FIGURE 2.4  Models played a key role in technological education, broadly defined, and these objects worked alongside drawings and text descriptions in classrooms, in establishing patent claims, and for inspiring aesthetic and technological admiration. Pictured is one of Franz Reuleaux’s pedagogical models that demonstrates a universal joint to transmit power at any angle. The model was built by Gustav Voigt in 1882. Photograph: Jon Reis of object Q3 in the Reuleaux Kinematic Mechanisms Collection at the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University.

FIGURE 2.5  Painting by John Ferguson Weir (1841–1926), The Gun Foundry (1864–1868). Weir’s painting includes technical details he developed through his many experiences at the West Point Foundry including the careful depiction of the Rodman core cooling system in use on the viewer’s right. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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give their ideas tangible form. As they completed their studies, factory-based industries began to hire these students to develop new or improved products and processes. Meanwhile, young people of more modest financial means still apprenticed in machine shops or foundries, textile mills, or dye works, learning artisanal skills perhaps along with mechanicians’ skills or managerial skills. Different shops and manufactories had different ways of doing things; local traditions would later be labeled “shop practice” (and much later “shop culture”). Youngsters learned by moving between different shops and manufactories to learn different ways of organizing or doing work (Meyer 2006). In the early nineteenth century, social elites felt artisans to be no better than the machines they operated, as “unwashed artificers” who were merely instruments used in production. This could be remedied, some felt, by creating schools of design that would expose artisans to art and the products of enlightened minds. The schools would teach drawing and would build collections of machine models as well as reproductions of fine art, all sufficient to teach the mechanical arts (Adamson 2013: 127–9). In the USA, a handful of private universities were chartered in the first half of the nineteenth century that were dedicated to the improvement of the mechanical arts, such as Rensselaer Polytechnic (1824). Many universities began adding options for scientific and technical training by the late 1820s and 1830s. After the passage of the Morrill Land Grant Act (1862), each state was given public land to sell so that it might generate revenue to establish a university, generally dedicated to advancing the agricultural and mechanical arts. Shortly after midcentury, however, sentiments began to shift in England and eventually other regions of the industrial world, as anti-modern and anti-industrial feelings spread through society (Lears 1994). Yet throughout these movements, artisans continued to use symbolic objects, such as the hammer in hand and other craftly images, mobilizing them as icons of social virtue (Wilentz 1984). The social status of drafting rose alongside the professionalization of engineering and architecture during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Robertson 2011). Drawings serve to illustrate how a type of object served to shift power among formally trained or educated laborers and traditionally trained mechanics. Artisans increasingly found themselves doing less of the designing and therefore drawing, and more frequently building from the drawings of others. Meanwhile, formally trained engineers and draftsmen created styles that established their expertise in the design process. During the nineteenth century, however, printing and communication technologies allowed for the rapid reproduction of technical drawings. Blueprints, for example, were introduced in the 1840s, which slowly replaced the need for tracings by skilled draftspersons. These technologies materialized the struggle over the location of skill in production, during design or manufacture. Many blueprints survive with multiple rounds of comments and revision overlaying the first duplicated

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print of the master drawing. As objects with evocative life histories, marked-up blueprints and tracings show dialogues about who could govern the actions of the artisanal workers in the shops as they produced objects (casting patterns, iron railings, patterned woven fabrics) described by the drawings, about the production of those drawings themselves in offsite administrative offices, or about who should make decisions about where miners directed their efforts in the extraction of ore a mile underneath the superintendent’s office. By the end of the Age of Industry, such variation existed between how different shops worked with blueprints during manufacture that machinists from the USA had difficulty working with British plan drawings, and vice versa, into the twentieth century (Lubar 1995; Brown 2000; Nystrom 2014). Objects started to serve a more expansive role in education in Europe and North America. While the sensory experience of nature and physical objects has long been a tool for education and philosophy, attention to this increased during the Age of Industry. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762), and even John Locke (1689) before him, advocated for the pedagogical use of direct sensory perception in learning through reason. As we have already seen, objects were increasingly central to education in the mechanical and industrial arts. Yet in the late eighteenth century, an influential champion arose who would argue for the importance of “real learning” gleaned from the observation of the material world instead of “book learning.” The Swiss-born Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi became a leading advocate for the pedagogy based in “object lessons” in the schools he established and in his publications at the end of the eighteenth century. While he only lived until 1827, his impact spread through influential students and advocates who continued to develop and implement his ideas around the world. Pestalozzi’s style of teaching was to keep children constantly engaged and active, with ten lessons per day designed around experiences and observations that were used to teach math, music, natural science, history, and geography. Rather than simply teaching with objects, Pestalozzi created elaborate and formal planned lessons built upon objects or observations that connected aspects of matter—like the crystal structure of sugar—with methods for investigation. Then teachers led students to organize the new knowledge they gained from the lessons. Despite the fact that this method did not facilitate the easy design of assessments (i.e. tests of learning), the object lesson concept spread quickly during the middle of the nineteenth century, including to normal schools (teaching colleges) throughout the USA and then down into primary education. The pedagogy was quickly incorporated into teacher training curricula throughout the country and implemented, with variation, in many different contexts, including industrial education programs for African American and Native American students. So successful was the technique that object lessons became a major element in the rhetoric of American culture (Carter 2018: 176).

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The techniques became so commonly accepted through the nineteenth century that elements were adopted by marketing and advertising firms to sell products to consumers, included as a pedagogical system in colonial schools in places like India, and influenced the programming of ethnographic and ethnological museums in the industrial world.

CONCLUSIONS: OBJECTS AND TECHNOLOGY IN THE AGE OF INDUSTRY Glenn Adamson (2013: 185–232) described many of the debates about the different social statuses and values ascribed to the objects of craft, art, and industry (and also those of artisans, artists, factory workers, and industrialists) as the ongoing echoes of trauma that artisans experienced during the Industrial Revolution, complete with failed revival and renewal efforts. Are craft objects folk art? High art? Must craft be functional? Is artisanal superior to factory produced? Is handmade more aesthetically noble than machine-assisted production? Should potters be seen as three-dimensional artists like sculptors? And what of three-dimensional sculptors who now work in digital spaces, transforming hand movements to electric signals to three-dimensional printed objects? Digital arts of the early twenty-first century seem to blur the artisanal and mechanical. In these technological shifts, do we finally see a collapse in the distinction between craft, factory, and high art? Is the maker movement, which values art, craft, and mechanical skills, in addition to coding skills and native digital creation, a signal of this transformation? Or will we see new ways by which particular kinds of creative and productive labors are classified and ranked? Will society learn to value the maintainers as much as the makers, so the world will value the nurses as much as the architects of our systems? These concerns hit home in a society where “makers” are publicly celebrated. Left unspoken is the contrapositive implication that those who labor in noncreative work are therefore “takers”: burdens upon the makers. This belief evolved from the labor relations of the Age of Industry, but the maker movement also complicates our debate because its followers seek to link the identities of mechanics and welders with architects, web designers, and songwriters. As technology systems evolved in the twentieth century, the value placed on physical or manual labor has remained stagnant for more than half a century and the social prestige derived from working with tools has declined. The maker movement is not simply celebrating working by hand, as some of the anti-industrial movements (e.g., Arts & Crafts movement, Roycrofters, etc.) did during the Age of Industry. It celebrates building creative works with either one’s hand or one’s mind and no matter whether the results be tangible or digital objects. As writers debate the significance and value of objects produced through artisanal activities, artistic practice, and factory labor (and the relative value of

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the labor of those persons), the discussions are all engaged in the memory work of different communities coping with their experiences. If anything sets the tone for the transition from the Age of Industry to the Modern Era, scholars are now very interested in using objects to investigate the various ways individuals and groups of people were marginalized by industrialization while others saw their lives improved. We think it would be helpful to expand Adamson’s vision even further. As billions of humans move further into the Anthropocene, what role will technological objects play in the creation of a sustainable, just, and urban world (or in preventing people from building that visionary world)? Can we consider the ways that objects document social and ecological health and wellbeing among all living communities? Pollutants, chemicals, and residues are objects that enter into and then persist in the world. What happens as science, technology, and society (STS), environmental history, and archaeological scholars consider soil or water as objects that themselves teach about social power? Or does the focus on objects distract and mislead us? The first published soil science text that recognized the detrimental effects of industrial-scale factories on the biotic health of soil was Ferdinand Senft’s Lehrbuch der Gebirgs- und Bodenkunde (1847: 172). Senft observed that little or no scientific consideration had yet been given to the intersections of natural and human forces as they interacted over time to form soils that were more robust, fertile, and productive (as with attentive cultivation) or weakened, degraded, and fragile (as with areas surrounding furnaces and mills). Unfortunately, Western soil scientists adopted the dichotomy that separated cultural and natural activities, and they failed to pick up the questions Senft raised about industrial and urban soils. As soil science developed in the nineteenth century, researchers simply objectified these soils as “anthropogenic.” As a result, scientists did not recognize the range of diversity within those soils and developed no discussions about how diverse industrial or urban activities build different kinds, with the exception of studying how to contain or manage contaminants within them. They objectified these diverse soils as degraded, corrupted, and/ or unnatural. One hundred and thirty years later, beginning in the mid-1990s, the International Union of Soil Science (IUSS) responded to the increased interest in urban environments and urban farming, adaptive reuse of abandoned industrial and urban brownfields, and questions of environmental justice and sustainability by expanding the World Reference Base for Soil Resources. The IUSS added a thirty-first category of soils—Technosols—and created a research group to study urban soils and Anthrosols (rural soils formed through intensive farming). After more than ten years of intensive research, soil scientists still identify Technosols as a major research frontier (Lehmann and Stahr 2007; Rossiter 2007; Howard and Shuster 2015; Howard 2017). Will this work help us to imagine sustainable urban habitats with systems that improve energy, waste, or water cycles? It is unclear if improved classification

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schemes for urban and industrial soils will lead scientists to think about them with more nuance. We need people to shift their thinking about themselves from the dichotomous understanding of nature/culture and technology/nature to more networked or ecological visions. We must stop simply thinking of ruderal species and how they colonize contaminated and toxic soils, and instead develop full understandings of industrienatur during the rapid changes of the Anthropocene. How can we build a world in which human technologies and the objects we create through them help to amplify the richness and diversity of our habitats instead of homogenizing them? Can we make ecology into a pragmatic part of design culture through something like reconciliation ecology? Among the changes we must make in order to do so, we will need to rethink the objectness of our technologies, connecting them over greater distances of time and space with their up- and down-stream costs. What is the heritage we draw from (or build with) our technological objects from the Age of Industry? The Modern Era left people with abandoned mills in postindustrial communities, urban and rural brownfields, monuments of rusting machinery, and designed communities that have lost their single-sector employer. For large objects like buildings and landscapes, many people will talk about the importance of sense of place in redevelopment and/or counter-urbanization and the creative class. Some will point to the carbon footprint of demolition versus new construction, celebrating the green values of adaptive reuse. Some will celebrate or revive handiwork, while others will collect outdated and antique (but still functional) tools. Yet others will point out that the resiliency of the living community is what matters, and so steer heritage management according to that. The modern food industry expects humans of the twenty-first century to think of the object world of cooking their food in the same as way the people of the twentieth century came to think of blacksmithing—a quirky hobby for the leisure class. Given the changes that are coming in the twenty-first century— climate change, rural depopulation and urbanization, increasing intellectual labor assumed by artificial intelligence and algorithms, ongoing economic restructuring, and so on—our communities will need these objects to talk about their future.

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CHAPTER THREE

Economic Objects CASSIE NEWLAND

GUTTA-PERCHA Gutta-percha is the latex-like sap of the Palaquium tree (Gamble 1907: 113). Several members of the Palaquium genus produce a latex-like sap, but true gutta-percha can only be obtained from the species known as Palaquium gutta, Burckii. Once the sap is drained from the tree, it coagulates to form a solid at room temperature. Its most interesting property, however, is that, when reheated, the solid becomes plastic again and can be worked into almost any desired shape. It then retains this new shape as it cools and hardens, finally achieving a consistency akin to thick leather. Aside from its useful physical properties, gutta-percha is a rich mahogany color and is appreciated as a material for decorative objects in general. It is thought that the cabinet of curiosities collected by John Tradescant in 1656 contained a sample of gutta-percha described as “mazer wood … [which] being warmed in water, will work to any form” (Tradescant, as quoted in Oxley 1847: 29). From Tradescant’s cabinet to the mid-nineteenth century, however, gutta-percha remained nothing more than a little-known curiosity and a locally used “jungle product.” Its remarkable properties, which until the 1840s had been regarded as a titillating illustration of the exotic, became in the space of a few short years nothing short of essential. Its “discovery” would revolutionize innumerable forms of practice and manufacture, including medicine, dentistry, clothing, factory machinery, household equipment, telecommunications, and many forms of decorative arts.

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Oxley, writing in 1847, lists some of the many applications for gutta-percha, including surgical appliances and an extremely inventive array of domestic items (including a foldable travel bath and a full-size sideboard!). By 1850, Bartlett notes that gutta-percha is being used for stethoscopes, ear trumpets, paint-on skin dressings, waterproof soles for boots and shoes, industrial hoses, speaking tubes and mouthpieces, pumps for fire engines, full-size lifeboats, and sou’wester hats for sailors. He also lists “beautiful works of art,” frames with gilt borders, unbreakable vases, statuary, and busts (Bartlett 1851). By far the largest consumer of gutta-percha, however, was the burgeoning electronics industry. Gutta-percha, it transpires, is an excellent electrical insulator with high dielectric strength.1 It is biologically inert and can tolerate prolonged contact with acid. It soon found employment in the manufacture of battery cells and the covering of wires. When engineers revealed that it was also almost indestructible in seawater and that its dielectric properties actually improved when cold, wet, and under huge pressure, its greatest application became apparent: it could be used to insulate telegraph cables, allowing them to be laid underwater for the first time. Long-held dreams of international telecommunications finally became possible. To say that demand spiked is a serious understatement. Gutta-percha launched and sustained a boom in the manufacture and laying of submarine cables that was to continue for a hundred years. Gutta-percha drove the development of a huge manufacturing industry and fueled monumentally ambitious, nearglobal projects such as the All-Red Line (a British-owned imperial submarine cable designed to encircle the globe). Far-flung corners of the world were put into almost immediate—and rather addictive—contact. The fabrics of empires were stitched ever tighter and control crept back toward imperial centers. The communications made possible by gutta-percha can be said to have changed the world’s economies, political systems, military strategies, and social relationships in more fundamental ways than perhaps any other nineteenth-century material. Confusingly for a material so desperately vital, internationally important, and of such widespread use, the name of this wonder-stuff—gutta-percha—is now almost entirely unfamiliar to twenty-first-century ears. This chapter will explore the world of gutta-percha, from Indonesia to Islington, drawing out some of the many stories from the material.

“DISCOVERY” Many accounts exist of the introduction of gutta-percha to the West. So important was the material to become that the event has been contested and argued over at length. Its arrival has become legend, with all of the attendant narrative smoothing and general tidying-up that the repetition of legends inspires. There is a determined protagonist, a plausible backstory, and a reward for persistence and endeavor at the finale. The account given below is drawn from several

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sources (including Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew [1891] and Buckley [1902]) and largely corresponds to the events as given in a (very nearly) contemporary account by Oxley writing in 1847. (Buckley’s acknowledged anecdotal account is not a particularly scholarly article, relying as it does on extensive use of newspapers and [unsubstantiated] personal testimonials. It is, however, a useful window into the historiography of Singapore and reflects the way European settlers of the period liked to recall, rework, and present the history of their recent past. Buckley’s unashamedly mediatized account is therefore invaluable in the discussion of narrative formation that continues below.) The received legend proceeds thus: in 1842, long-time Singapore resident and surgeon Dr. W. Montgomerie comes across a Malay native who had begun manufacturing riding whips from gutta-percha on the island, purportedly for the growing number of European colonists. Buckley (1902) recounts that these were possessed of “all the tough and elastic properties for which the shamboks or rhinoceros-hide whips of South Africa are so celebrated” (Buckley 1902: 402–3).2 The “tough and elastic” properties of the material, coupled with the ease of working, suggests to Montgomerie that gutta-percha might prove useful in the manufacture of surgical implements. He writes to the Bengal Medical Board to recommend its adoption and includes with the letter some samples of both raw and processed gutta-percha. Montgomerie’s letter is published in July 1842 in the Calcutta Englishman. Montgomerie continues his own experiments with gutta-percha for surgical and medical purposes in Singapore and continues in his personal evangelism for the material. In 1843, Dr. Montgomerie again tries to interest the wider world in his “discovery” and sends out some more samples, this time to the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) in London. At the RSA, the material is tested by a Mr. Solly, and in 1845, it is pronounced very useful. Montgomerie is awarded the RSA’s gold medal for his contribution to science. (Audience claps. Montgomerie exits stage left.) This story is, however, at best an approximation of the original circumstances and is almost certainly partial. In all likelihood, Montgomerie’s gold-medal narrative was simply the most engaging story chosen from several competing (and equally true) versions. Telegraph engineer R. S. Newall, for example, claims quite plausibly in a (somewhat revisionist) pamphlet of 1882 that he first received a sample of gutta-percha in 1837 from a Mr. John Colville in Sumatra; this he kept rather quiet about and experimented with at home (Newall 1882). As a potential narrative legacy, Newall’s claim was hardly likely to prick the interest of the Victorian public, or indeed of later historians of technology! Where Montgomerie labored to bring gutta-percha to the service of humankind, Newell sought to quietly patent it: hardly the stuff of legends. A closer runnerup for the title of discoverer can be found in the person of another Singapore resident, Dr. Almeida. (Indeed, Oxley [1847: 22] expresses some surprise that Dr. Almeida is not given more credit at the time.) A founder member of

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the Singapore Agricultural and Horticultural Society, Dr. Almeida arrived in England in April 1843, bringing with him several samples of gutta-percha. Dr. Almeida presented these to the Royal Asiatic Society, who note his gift with thanks but do nothing in particular with any of the samples. (Oxley [1847] suggests that Dr. Almeida also presented a sample to the RSA, but that this gift also attracted little comment.3) Beyond these claims for primacy, it is also quite likely that many imported objects made from gutta-percha were already available for purchase in London shops (as appears to have been the case with the sjambok whips). The kind of objects fashioned from the material (swords, bowls, curios, etc.) would have been valued for their decorative or other qualities rather than for the mechanics of their natural plastic (which, after all, could only be discovered through the heat destruction of the object itself). It is quite possible that the material could have been “introduced” to Europeans in many thousands of ways before it was “discovered” by the Victorian intelligentsia. What is certainly the case is that from 1845—the date inscribed on Dr. Montgomerie’s gold medal—guttapercha became the cutting-edge material of the age. A great many patents were taken out on the substance. The route via which gutta-percha found its way into the telegraph industry appears to be as contested and convoluted as its route into the country. The famous Michael Faraday is widely credited with the first published observations on the electrical properties (or rather, the lack of them) of gutta-percha in a letter to the Philosophical Magazine dated March 1, 1848. In it, he finds gutta-percha to be an excellent insulator and suggests multiple uses for it in the manufacture of electrical equipment and the undertaking of electrical experiments (Faraday 1848). Faraday does not, however, make any specific mention of the use of guttapercha as an insulator of telegraphic (or any other kind of) wire. Faraday (although frequently cited as bringing gutta-percha to the attention of the electrical industry) does not appear to have made the connection between gutta-percha’s qualities as an insulator and its potential application within the telegraph industry. This leap appears to have been made by William Henry Hatcher, civil engineer and secretary4 of the Electric Telegraph Company, who, in 1846, had suggested its possibilities for insulating cable to Charles Vincent Walker, electrician to the South Eastern Railway company. Walker, along with J & T Forster and Co., went on in 1847 to patent a machine that sandwiched copper wire between two fillets of gutta-percha (Roberts 2006: 108). Walker is also credited with mentioning gutta-percha’s insulating potential to Charles Hancock of the Gutta Percha Company (Roberts 2006: 108). Hancock subsequently designed a machine for covering wires with the material by extrusion, which he patented in July 1848. Whether Hatcher’s observation was inspired by empirical testing or was instead motivated by gutta-percha’s mechanical workability and superficial similarity to rubber (also trialed as an insulator for wire) can only be speculated upon.

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Other competitors for the title include Werner von Siemens, who is credited with insulating an experimental wire with gutta-percha during his time as a lieutenant in the army in 1847 (Feldenkirchen 1996), as well as laying a welldocumented cable across the Rhine in 1848 (Window 1857).5 Newell once more stakes a claim, insisting that he insulated copper wire with gutta-percha as early as March 1848, albeit experimentally and again in the privacy of his own home (Newall 1882). This is plausible, with R. S. Newall & Co. having been responsible for many successful early submarine cables, including the first truly successful line laid beneath the English Channel in 1855 (Roberts 2006). Wikipedia and a great many other online sources hold Charles Wheatstone responsible for making the connection between gutta-percha and cable insulation as early as 1845. It is an entirely plausible suggestion. Wheatstone was working on submarine telegraphy at the time. He was also the brains behind a working partnership with William Cooke, who was in turn a colleague of Hatcher at the Electric Telegraph Company. I cannot, however, find any evidence in support of this widely held claim. These many and complicated wranglings over the discovery, introduction, and application of gutta-percha to the telegraph industry do make one thing absolutely clear: gutta-percha was regarded by all, both at the outset and with the benefit of hindsight, as a wonder-stuff of great note. To have one’s name associated with it was to be remembered as a pioneer, a visionary, and a world-changer.

FROM FOREST TO FACTORY Cutting edge the properties of gutta-percha may have been, it was also a jungle product; a raw, hard gum that arrived on the wharfs fresh and fragrant from the jungles of Malaysia and Indonesia. The manner of collecting ensured that bits of bark, leaves, and small insects would also be present, which had to be removed before any object could be made. (The account below follows information give in Bartlett 1851). Gutta-percha arrived at the factories in blocks of varying sizes. These blocks were then sliced thinly by a steam-powered revolving-knife machine capable of making 600 slices per minute. The slices—looking for all the world like pieces of old leather—were then thrown into large iron boilers and boiled until they had achieved the consistency of tough dough. They were then fed into a macerating machine where rows of revolving teeth spun at 800 rpm and tore the soft gutta-percha to minute shreds. These were then steeped in cold water, where the pure gutta-percha rose to the top to be skimmed off while the impurities sank to the bottom. The now pure gutta-percha was then heated to around 90°C and fed into steam-powered kneading machines. Once the air and water had been squeezed out, the gutta-percha was ready to be rolled into sheets for further use or pressed into molds.

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The first company set up to import and process gutta-percha was the Gutta Percha Company formed by Charles Bewley in February 1845 (Roberts 2006: 128). The Company produced all sorts of gutta-percha goods, from hoses and machine belts to drinking mugs and soles for boots. Charles Hancock swiftly joined the company and at once made the connection between the extrusion machine being used to create hoses and the possibility of insulating electrical wire. In 1848, Hancock patented “an apparatus for covering or coating wire or cord to an infinite length with any plastic substance.” The last piece of the puzzle clicked into place and the submarine cable industry took off like a rocket. While gutta-percha was principally being used for picture frames and sou’westers, the low volumes traded were possible to move via the canal network. The Gutta Percha Company was therefore able to base itself in Islington, London, on a purpose-built wharf off Regent’s Canal. When the cable industry entered the market for gutta-percha it became a seriously bulk commodity, and one that arrived in ton upon ton by oceangoing ships. Oxley asserts that in the early days of gutta-percha use—from 1845 to the time of his writing in 1847—an estimated 6,918 piculs (or 418.38 metric tonnes) of gutta-percha were exported to England to fulfill the growing demand. In 1850, Bartlett reports that imports to the London docks had grown to over 30,000 cwt. (US) (or 1,521 metric tonnes) in that year alone (Bartlett 1851). Moreover, the products produced by these companies—huge drums of cable hundreds of miles long—would also need to be shipped back out again on large, specially adapted ships. Regent’s Canal would no longer cut it. The banks of the Thames at West Ham and Greenwich offered the possibility of extensive wharfages and, being east of the city, provided good access for large, deepdraft vessels. The West Ham marshes were particularly well connected to the railway system. The relatively low cost of these marshy, tidal areas coupled with good access to London and the British mainland via the railways and the open ocean to the east made West Ham a particularly enticing business prospect (Powell 1973). In 1850, Charles Hancock left the Gutta Percha Company to set up a rival firm, the West Ham Gutta Percha Company. The timing was not incidental. The year 1850 marked a watershed year for gutta-percha. It was the year in which the first gutta-percha insulated submarine cable was laid between England and France. Hancock was joined in his ambition by several other startup firms. The West Ham marshes—marginal land at the edge of London Town—quickly became the center of the gutta-percha universe; the Silicon Valley of its day. There was a second, less salubrious reason for locating the manufacturing industry outside the city of London proper. City ordinances forbade the construction of dangerous or polluting industries in built-up areas, and gutta-percha manufactories—with their many engines and their bubbling vats and sulfur for vulcanization—were polluters on a grand scale. For example,

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in 1887, the India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Company factory at North Woolwich housed 47 steam engines and 31 boilers alone. West Ham had a historical (if rather informal) exemption from the normal controls on industry (Powell 1966). The usual regulations on pollution, fire prevention, and the protection of workers and the general public were not enforced. This continued through the nineteenth century. For example, when the curtilage of the Metropolitan Building Act of 1844 (control of toxic industries within the city of London) was drawn up, West Ham was placed just outside of it. In short, it was a near-perfect place to set up a manufacturing enterprise. An entire urban landscape grew up in association with gutta-percha processing and manufacturing. They attracted (and in some cases imported) people to the area. With them came a need for infrastructure. Housing, roads, and utilities; ferry landings, docks, and railway stations; pubs, shops, churches, and schools— all grew up around the factories to service the new workers. Related industries followed, such as haulage firms, foundries, and coal merchants. At Poplar, Canning Town, Greenwich, Hallsville, Silvertown, Beckton, Limehouse, East Ham, West Ham, and North Woolwich settlements sprang up, sprawled, and merged to cover the marshes within just a handful of years. The infamous East End was born, the genesis being provided by gutta-percha. Silvertown is one of the earliest and arguably the best preserved of these East End gutta-percha-generated landscapes. Founded in 1852 by Samuel Winkworth Silver, Silvertown was built on the north bank of the Thames at Woolwich Reach to serve his (catchily named) India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works. A description of the Silvertown manufactory appears in an 1875 edition of All the Year Round, a London magazine founded and owned by Charles Dickens: On the edge of a marsh, in the dubious region between half fluid land and almost solid water, is the thriving colony of Silvertown. Overhead a brumous sky, underfoot artificial “terra” made “firma” by innumerable piles. … a shabby railway station, and a pretty church … Out of a chaos of mud and slime have sprung neat lines of cottages, a grim hostelry “The Railway Hotel,” huge wharves, and the seven acres of now solid ground which form the cause and explanation of the whole curious development. (Dickens 1875) In 1869, Charles Hancock joined Silver’s enterprise. He brought with him not only his expertise, but his several important patents for the seamless application of gutta-percha to wire. With the arrival of Hancock, the Works were expanded rapidly to manufacture gutta-percha-covered submarine telegraph cables, and the surrounding area can be seen to experience a period of rapid growth. In an extremely short space of time, buildings covered every square foot of available space. The engraving in Figure 3.1 shows the Works after this 1869 expansion.

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FIGURE 3.1  Silvertown India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works in All the Year Round, 1875. Courtesy of Getty images.

The new sheds built on piles fronting the river to the southeast are long and narrow and are most likely to relate to the manufacture of gutta-perchainsulated submarine cables. The buildings infilling the northeast corner of the site have a more traditional “factory look” and are most probably related to the processing of gutta-percha. They benefit from multiple stories to take easy advantage of belt-driven machinery (gutta-percha belts, of course), roof lights for illumination and ventilation of large factory floors, and chimney stacks for the boilers housed within. The 1871 census suggests that local East End families moved to the Silvertown area soon after the gutta-percha works were established to take advantage of work in the newly expanded factory. In contrast, the more skilled workers—the engineers, fitters, and instrument-makers—were more likely to have originated from further afield, often from Scotland or from one of the large manufacturing centers in the north of England. There was little in terms of amenities for the Works employees in the early years. A parade of shops called Mickleburgh Terrace fronting North Woolwich Road offered—according to the 1861 census—a coffeehouse, a butcher, a paraffin oil shop, and the Railway Hotel. There are two schools listed in Constance Street, which seem to be housed in two adjoining terraced houses.

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Life for the gutta-percha workers and their families would have been hard. Neighboring Canning Town and Hallsville Estates were notorious, famed to have cost as little as £80 a house to build and attracting widespread derision as: vast estates of jerry-built boxes, having bogs for foundations, ditches for pathways, and stagnant pools for gardens … Partially lying below the river level, it is painfully instructive to contrast their death rates with other districts lying on higher ground. (“New London,” reprinted from the Daily Chronicle in Perris 1898: 314) Dickens’s reference to “neat lines of cottages” suggests that the houses of the gutta-percha workers in Silvertown were not quite so badly built as those of their neighbors. When the average purchase cost of a plot in Silvertown is subtracted from the average mortgage allowance, we are left with a sum of £125. What portion of this remains as profit after the cost of the build is hard to estimate, but mortgage companies were unlikely to be paying so far above the odds for “jerry-built boxes.” Parts of Silvertown were, however, subject to extensive slum-clearance projects from 1919 to around 1932. The roads in Silvertown are shown as laid out for the most part by 1869, with the exception being parts of the new North Woolwich Road as it ran east toward town. This is in contrast with much of Canning Town and Hallsville, which are described as having little more than raised gravel banks that served as streets between rows of houses growing out of the mud. The supply of clean water appears to have been a pervasive problem for the gutta-percha workers of West Ham. In 1880, thirty years after development of the marshes was first begun, William Vernon-Harcourt noted that children were begging for water at Silvertown Station and that “the supply of water … is, and ever has been, most insufficient, and sometimes there is no supply at all” (Vernon-Harcourt 1880). Sewerage was also an issue for the workers in Silvertown. Not only did the settlement lie below the river level, but it was also cut off from the rest of West Ham by the construction of the Royal Docks. This meant that it was excluded from the public sewage systems installed during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Silvertown’s problems were compounded by the impenetrable strip of factories along the river banks, which stoppedup the channels that had traditionally drained the marsh and were now the only means of draining the houses. The channels instantly became long, open cesspools running along the backs of the houses. The only way sewage was cleared from these standing pools/piles (depending on the season) was when the area flooded, at which point the waste would be distributed in a thin, slightly lumpy film over a wide area.

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JUNGLE PRODUCT The new demand for gutta-percha was not only reshaping London, it was rapidly changing the landscape of the jungles from which it came. Part of the reason for this is the nature of the gutta-percha tree. It is a large tree that can grow up to 200 feet (60 meters) in height with a diameter of up to 5 feet (1.5 meters) (Gamble 1907: 113–14). It is also an exceptionally slow-growing species, with specimens not thought sufficiently mature for the collection of gutta-percha until they are around thirty years old (Tully 2009: 575). Gutta-percha trees naturally occur—and indeed will only grow—on a narrow strip of land encompassing the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, and what was the island of Borneo (today comprising Sabah, Sarawak, Brunei, and the various Kalimantans). Within this limited geographical area, the trees are most commonly found throughout the jungles of the alluvial plains and a short way up the sides of the foothills. At the time of the “discovery” of gutta-percha, the British presence in the growing region was limited to three relatively small trading colonies on the Malay Peninsula. The growing regions to the south, including the vast islands of Sumatra and Borneo, had been ceded by the British to the Dutch East India Company in the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824. In the 1840s, the Britishheld lands—known as the Straits Settlements—comprised Penang Island and Province Wellesley, ceded to the British by the local ruler in 1790 and 1798, respectively; Malacca, acquired from the Dutch East India Company as part of an arranged swap for Bencoolen in Sumatra in 1824; and Singapore, established in 1819 by Thomas Raffles for the British East India Company as a trading post. The whole of the Straits Settlements thus comprised approximately 1,276 square miles. Sarawak, on the northwest coast of the island of Borneo, was also nominally under British rule, with James Brooke having installed himself as the White Raja in 1841. The limited territories under British control filled the role of entrepôts for the gutta-percha trade, funneling the produce of the jungles onto British ships and into British factories. The demand following the initial introduction of gutta-percha to Europe sparked a massive increase in price. In 1844, the price of gutta-percha was set at 8 Spanish dollars per picul (one picul equating to 60 kilograms).6 By 1848, shortly after it had come to the attention of the telegraph market, this had risen to 13 Spanish dollars per picul. In 1853, after the successes of the first gutta-percha-insulated cables had become apparent, the price rocketed to 60 Spanish dollars per picul (Buckley 1902: 405–6). The raw gutta-percha for this growing trade was initially met by material sourced from the island of Singapore itself. This was swiftly exhausted, and gutta-percha began to be brought to the settlements from the plains of Perak (a large state stretching inland from Penang Island to the border with Kelantan to the east), Johor (the mainland state between Singapore and Malacca that includes the gutta-percha-rich Pulai

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hills), Selangor and the neighboring state of Malacca, and the central state of Pahang, which encompasses the east of the Malay Peninsula from Singapore to Perak in the north (information compiled from notes made by Murton [1878: 106], Sérullas [1891], Buckley [1902: 403], and Gamble [1907: 113]). In these regions, the gutta-percha tree was noted to be very numerous, in some areas “flourishing luxuriantly” so as to comprise the main or only kind of tree to be found (Oxley 1847: 24). Despite this initial wild abundance, the gutta-percha tree was soon to face threats of extinction. Indeed, in the very same 1847 article that declares its “widespread profusion,” Oxley notes that “the Gutta will soon become a very scarce article” (Oxley 1847: 24). This is due, not least in part, to the manner in which the gutta-percha was collected. The following account of the traditional method of collection is collated from abundant primary and secondary sources, including Oxley (1847), Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (1891), Gamble (1907), Dunn (1975), Kaur (1998), and Tully (2009). The gutta-percha is traditionally harvested by felling the entire tree, rather than tapping, as is commonly practiced with other sap-producing trees, such as rubber. Mature trees were sought in the wild, often a difficult and dangerous task involving many hours, or even days, of travel from the nearest village. Routes were cut using the traditional parang or machete. When a mature specimen was discovered, it was felled several feet from the ground using a biliong or ax. The bark of the freshly felled trunk was then ringed at intervals of approximately fifteen to thirty centimeters to allow the latex to run out. The crown of the tree was removed to encourage the flow of sap. Coconut shells, leaves, or any handy container was then used to collect the dripping sap. Some accounts suggest that holes in the ground were even employed for this purpose. Each tree produced very little sap (gutta-percha coagulates very quickly on exposure to the air), and the vast majority of the gutta-percha remained inside the trees and could not be drained. Monsoon weather was said to improve yields. Tully, however, estimates that as little as eleven ounces (312 grams) of latex could be gathered on average from any one tree (Tully 2009: 571)! The resulting gutta-percha was then boiled in water to remove the worst of the impurities and to aid coagulation. While still warm, it was then shaped into easily transportable blocks for the long journey from the deep forests to the London docks. This traditional method of collection was sustainable when gutta-percha was just one of dozens of locally sourced and locally used jungle products. The exponential increase in demand experienced with the coming of international trade led to the traditional collecting practice becoming unsustainable. Collins (1878) estimates British imports as amounting to 1.34 million kilograms in 1877 alone, which equates to approximately 4 million trees. Sérullas, writing in 1891, puts the figure at over 1.8 million kilograms of gum per year, or a staggering 5.5 million trees. The extraordinarily high prices that the material commanded on

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the world market ensured that every gutta-percha tree was effectively subject to a bounty. The gutta-percha, furthermore, did not lend itself to less invasive harvesting methods—as its relative the rubber tree did—as the precious sap coagulated rapidly on exposure to the air, making yields from tapping methods miniscule in comparison to the cutting and draining of the whole tree. Rising prices drove indigenous gutta-percha prospectors further and further into the forests in search of the wild Palaquium until entire regions were cleared of the species (Murton 1878: 106). Such was the demand generated for gutta-percha that, according to Dr. Eugene Oback: … the countries all around Singapore were searched with great avidity for Taban tress, and almost a craze for getah-collecting sprang up amongst the indigenous population. The consequence was that an immense number of trees of great size and age, probably hundreds of thousands, were ruthlessly destroyed during the first four or five years, and whole forests denuded of them, like those on Singapore. (Oback 1897: 112) Oxley notes the almost complete elimination of gutta-percha trees from the island of Singapore between 1843 and 1847 (Oxley 1847). The tree was reported as extinct from Malacca and Selangor by no later than 1875 and from Perak region by 1884 (Sérullas 1891). Worries about the exhaustion of supply, which began in the very early years of its discovery, become a common theme. The Kew Reports raise concerns about supply in several reports from 1876 onwards, noting: The destruction of the interesting zone of Malay forests proceeds rapidly. The natives cut every available tree, and repeat the process as fast as they spring up again; they have thus suppressed for the last 40 years their reproduction and multiplication. (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 1891: 230) By the 1870s, the supply of gutta-percha from the British-controlled territories on the Malay Peninsula was in serious jeopardy, and little by little, exports from Malay ports began to cease (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 1891: 231). Even the expansion of the Straits Settlements to include Pangkor Island and the Dindings in 1874—creating a further 170 square miles of territory in the prime gutta-percha-growing region—did little to ease the pressure. Britain, having exhausted gutta-percha resources in its own territories and having unwittingly given away the vast majority of its gutta-percha-producing areas as part of the 1824 Anglo-Dutch Treaty, would be forced increasingly to rely on imports from foreign-controlled Borneo and Sumatra. In 1879, 5 million trees were cut down for their gutta-percha on the island of Borneo (Sérullas 1891), and exports of gutta-percha exceeded 3,300 tons from Sarawak alone (Kaur 1998).

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As part of his seminal study on rainforest economics, Dunn (1975) describes the complex spatial and economic networks through which gutta-percha was brought from the deep forests to the world market. Although Dunn is writing with specific reference to the Malay Peninsula, several authors (e.g. Cleary 1996) note that his observations also hold true for the Indonesian islands in the region. The route given below is a summary of that described by Dunn. The primary collectors of the products were the indigenous groups based deep in the interior of the forests. They pursued a lifestyle based around hunting and gathering. The collectors passed on the raw products to the primary traders. Sometimes primary traders were specialist members of the same ethnic group, but more frequently they belonged to neighboring indigenous groups better placed for trade in terms of access to riverine transport links. The primary traders sold on the gutta-percha to the secondary traders located in the more major sedentary settlements along the rivers or coasts. Many secondary traders were Malay in origin, but an increasing number of migrant Chinese traders began to establish themselves, pushing up rivers and along coasts as the market began to expand (Rutter 1929). The secondary traders sold on their gutta-percha to tertiary traders, who were the established exporters in the major ports. Predominantly migrant Chinese, these same tertiary traders had established themselves while the market in jungle products was still small, dealing mostly in sago and edible bird nests for the Chinese market. They were well placed both economically and geographically to capitalize on the boom in demand for gutta-percha. The network—like the Chinese tertiary traders—was well established before the boom, and indeed before any British presence was established in the area. As export volumes grew, existing trade capillaries became arteries as an increasing number of indigenous groups turned to collection. Secondary trading settlements expanded or pushed further upriver, and professional traders moved in until the jungle products network became well established. The British ports at Singapore, Malacca, and Penang on the Malay Peninsula and those on the island of Borneo at Labuan and Kuching acted as entrepôts, receiving consignments of gutta-percha from the smaller, secondary trading ports and funneling them into the world market in vast quantities. From the 1850s, gutta-percha began to be listed in the Singapore and Straits Directories as one of the major exports from the region. What is notable about the spatial dimensions of the jungle products network is its irreverence for international boundaries. The primary collecting groups of the interior were for the most part itinerant and had little contact with the outside world. They relied on infrequent contact with better-connected neighbors to move their products out and bring in trade goods. Imperial allegiances and national politics had little impact. The gutta-percha of the forests of Borneo and Sumatra made its way to the coast by the most expedient river route, respecting neither the ownership of the land on which it was collected nor the notional nationality of the collecting or trading groups. The long arm of the British

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(or indeed the Dutch, Chinese, or Bruneian) government was not to be seen in the depths of the jungle or the smaller ports. British involvement in the network began at the ports of Sarawak and of the Straits Settlements, where it raised duties on the import and export of gutta-percha and negotiated its final destination in the world market. This observation stands in stark contrast to the views of some commentators, notably Tully (2009), who cite the case of gutta-percha as one of textbook colonialism and hold the British Empire wholly responsible for the extinction of Palaquium gutta on the Malay Peninsula and Indonesian islands. They describe it as a human-made ecological disaster of unprecedented scale whereby the imperial center ruthlessly exploited the resources of the colonial periphery to exhaustion. When this temptingly easy narrative is unpicked, traditional understandings of empire appear crass and blunt. Notions of imperial control evaporate when the social, material, and geographical convolutions of the supply network are considered. Ideas such as responsibility, culpability, and exploitation become diffuse and contingent. Where exactly is the control in the gutta-percha network? Private (and in many cases multinational) telegraph firms created and sustained demand for gutta-percha. Exporters, mainly Chinese tertiary traders based in British or Dutch ports, fed this demand, trading freely with whomever they wished. Secondary and primary traders based deep in the ungovernable forests bought raw gutta-percha from indigenous residents collecting ever larger quantities of a free local resource. The gutta-percha network displayed autonomy, flexibility, and informality. There was no debt, no landowner, and no coercion in the jungle products market.7 It respected no borders, looked to no authority, and continued with only the barest minimum of external orchestration.

ADDICTION The British authorities were at the time acutely aware of exactly how little control they had over the supply of one of their most vital raw materials. The government, one of the greatest beneficiaries of gutta-percha products (especially undersea communications), found itself increasingly addicted to a product over which it had little influence. Cable companies complained that they were constantly faced with variations in supply and quality, including deliberate adulteration of the pure gutta-percha with bark or poorer gums that had then to be cleaned on arrival (see discussions of purity in Oxley [1847] and Gamble [1907]). One of the first patents taken out by Hancock in 1847 was for a machine to clean raw gutta-percha. Shipments were also subject to extensive petty fraud whereby weighty objects, such as pieces of heavy wood, stones, or metal, were wrapped in thin layers of gutta-percha and shipped alongside solid gutta-percha bars. (Charles Dickens himself, while on a tour

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of the Silvertown gutta-percha works, recalls being shown the manager’s sizeable collection of gutta-percha blocks that had been so doctored; Dickens 1875.) Headrick notes that the fraud was compounded on every step of the convoluted supply chain, with every pair of hands further adulterating the material (Headrick 1987). Worries were also voiced constantly and from the inception of the export industry about the unsustainable nature of the local collecting industry, the lack of foresight, and the unmanaged and unmanageable forest system. For example, Oxley, writing in 1847, just a few short years after gutta-percha’s introduction to the West, pointed to immanent future supply problems “if some more provident means be not adopted in its collection than that at present in use” (Oxley 1847: 24). The boom in the cable industry in the 1870s exacerbated the situation, leading to calls to action from many writers, including Collins (1878), Sérullas (1891), Brannt (1900), and telegraph engineer Séligmann-Lui (1888) (who, importantly, had firsthand experience of the situation, having led the first Western gutta-percha expedition into the forests of Sumatra in 1881). The problems with collection methods, purity, and the supply network could all be improved by establishing better access to the primary resources (something that would certainly not harm other British trade interests in the region either). Attempts to improve access to raw materials were made on several fronts. The British Government first sought to increase their presence in the growing region, and in 1846, they negotiated the transfer of ownership of the island of Labuan off the Sabah coast from the Sultan of Brunei. The island was established as a Crown Colony in 1848 and placed under the governorship of Sarawak’s White Raja, James Brookes. In 1874, Pangkor Island, the Dindings, and Province Wellesley on the Malay Peninsula were also ceded to the British. The British North Borneo Company was formed in 1881 with lands of 30,000 square miles encompassing the present-day area of Sabah. Sarawak, British North Borneo, and Labuan would become British protectorates in 1888. The most promising approaches to increasing the supply of gutta-percha were, however, emanating from an altogether different source: the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.

PROVINCIAL The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew were established in 1759 as a physic or exotic garden devoted to medicinal plantings (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 2010). In 1772, Joseph Banks took over the running of the garden and, under the enthusiastic patronage of “Farmer” King George III, began to cultivate an economic role for Kew. Banks sought to exploit native and exotic plants in order to advance the British Empire. Under Banks, Kew became a world center for economic botany, and it was said that no ship sailed from any colony

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without a specimen on board heading for Kew. In 1820, both Joseph Banks and King George III, died leaving the future of Kew in the balance. After nearly two decades of decline, its fate was decided in 1838 when John Lindley published his “Report on the Future of Kew,” in which he stated that from a garden of this kind, Government would be able to obtain authentic and official information on points connected with the founding of new colonies: it would afford the plants these required. (Lindley, cited in McCracken 1997: 76) This new, clarified mission statement was formalized in 1841, and by the time gutta-percha was entering European consciousness in the 1840s, Kew was experiencing a drive toward becoming more scientifically oriented. In 1848, Sir William Hooker established a Museum of Economic Botany at Kew with the aim of cataloging and showcasing potentially useful botanic specimens from around the world (Desmond 1995: 191). In order to do this, the directors at Kew began to build upon the existing colonial connections established by Banks in the late eighteenth century and to establish new connections around the world. It once again began to actively collect specimens, augmented its communications with other botanic gardens abroad, trained staff, and encouraged the setting up of new gardens. This botanic proselytizing paid off, and by the closing decades of the nineteenth century, 113 botanic gardens (or from 1883 their more economically geared offshoot, the botanic stations) were in operation (McCracken 1997: 27). These international gardens would send specimens and seeds of newly discovered or promisinglooking plants, such as gutta-percha, to Kew. Kew would propagate these, experiment with their yields and growing conditions, and send them out to other botanic gardens in the colonies, where they might be propagated and profitably harvested through plantation-style agriculture. Kew quickly became established as the center of an extensive international landscape of economic botany, a world-leading research center, and import/export hub for new and useful plants. The global landscape created by Kew was an informal one, held together by enthusiastic amateurs, local horticultural societies, friendly mail ships, and Colonial Office favors. Specimen collectors were most usually British administrative staff, missionaries, and colonists (many desperate to discover a new species and to be allowed the ultimate accolade of being able to name it) (McCracken 1997: 85). These collectors would most often be allied to one of the local botanic gardens, which would in turn have been run by either by a local society or by the local colonial government. The specimens would be sent (largely for free) with any willing ship captains who happened to be going in the general direction of Kew or with either the Royal or Merchant Navy, the Crown Agent (an autonomous Colonial Office official) having quietly arranged for free passage for all freight destined for Kew (McCracken 1997:

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102). This global landscape was enabled by the movement of an interesting array of smaller objects, from the “plant cabins” and poop-deck greenhouses of the pre-steam era to the technologically innovative Wardian case, a kind of portable, hermetically sealed trunk-cum-cucumber frame arrangement (McCracken 1997: 102). There was also great individual experimentation with seed containers and shipping media, with almost every packing and packaging material seemingly tried at some time (McCracken 1997: 102). In this way, McCracken estimates that a staggering 10,000 specimens were shipped to Kew annually (McCracken 1997: 78). The landscape of gutta-percha is very much intertwined with that of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. As gutta-percha was first coming to the attention of the telegraph companies in Europe, Kew was taking its first steps into the (literally) terra incognita of economic botany. The first contact between Kew and the gutta-percha tree was in the central forests of Singapore, Bukett Timah, where Mr. Thomas Lobb collected the original gutta-percha specimens and shipped them home to the Kew Herbarium (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 1891). The specimens were then sorted, identified, cataloged, and named by William Hooker, Director of Kew (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 1891: 231). This obsession with ordering typifies Kew’s early role in economic botany. In the case of gutta-percha, it allowed the collation and dissemination of information concerning which of the numerous species of gutta-percha-producing trees were suitable for which use. It also reduced the amount of inferior gums accidentally entering the export market, allowing for identification and assessment of imported gutta-percha samples in terms of their purity and likely properties. This information-gathering exercise was accomplished through frequent (and quite stringently enforced) communication with the “men on the ground” at international botanic gardens. Singaporean interest in agri-horticulture began with Sir Stamford Raffles in the 1820s.8 The local horticultural society could boast both of the gutta-percha-introducing doctors—Almeida and Montgomerie—as members. Botanic gardens were officially established at Singapore in 1859, and from that time exchanged over 500 different species a year with the gardens at Kew (McCracken 1997: 101). In 1875, a dedicated Gardens and Forests Department was formed for the island, run by Henry Murton, who was also the director of the Botanic Gardens. The Gardens and Forests Department took a great interest in gutta-percha trees. The impact of identifying the correct tree for gutta-percha collection brought with it more selective felling, further impacting the Palaquium gutta. Kew’s attention then turned to the search for new sources of the rapidly disappearing plant. Expeditions were sent to forests throughout the region. These sketched out the boundaries of the known growing area to include the Malay Peninsula and Archipelago; Borneo, Sumatra, and the southern Malaccan Peninsula; and the islands of Java, Celebes, and Sulu. The extremely limited ecological band in which gutta-percha trees grew naturally

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was very quickly established, and this sent waves of panic throughout the guttapercha industry (Terry 1907: 272). Faced with a finite and rapidly shrinking natural resource, the scientists at Kew turned to other, more imaginative means of continuing supply. The network of botanical and experimental gardens was galvanized into action. Seeds of the Palaquium gutta were packed into tins and envelopes and sent out to the far reaches of the Empire. Saplings were propagated at Kew by the thousand, tucked into their Wardian case incubators and stacked onto steamers bound for the tropics. The attempt to introduce the gutta-percha tree to British territories was exhaustive. In its List of Economic Plants Native to or Suitable for Cultivation in the British Empire, the Kew bulletin notes how widely gutta-percha plants had been distributed to British colonies in the tropics (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 1917). All, it would seem, to no avail, for in the same publication, gutta-percha is still listed as suitable for growing only in the British territory of Malaya and the foreign territories of Sumatra and Java. Unlike the India rubber plant and the Cinchona tree—the great success stories of the botanic network—gutta-percha was not destined to be well traveled.9 Solutions to the gutta-percha supply problem would have to be sought locally. With no easy solution to the issue of territorial sovereignty in the growing areas, establishing plantation-style cultivation for the gutta-percha tree was not straightforward. Furthermore, the unsuitability of the tree to less invasive tapping methods and the slow-growing nature of the plant ensured that any gutta-percha plantation would not realize any profit on the initial investment until the trees were mature, a delay of at least thirty years. Investors were understandably slow to appear while there existed an exploitable supply in the wild (Terry 1907). While, as McCracken notes, “one of the most important but least appreciated functions of colonial botanic gardens was their impact on forestry” (McCracken 1997: 141), there was little Kew could achieve if the growing region did not fall under British control. Export was briefly prohibited from Perak in 1881, and passes for felling were introduced in 1887 (Gamble 1907), but Kew’s efforts for the next few years would largely be focused on finding a suitable substitute for the scarce Palaquium gutta, Burckii, which could be grown in British-held territories. Plants were trialed around the world, including Bassia parkii in British Africa, Mimusops balata in the Guianas (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 1891), and Dichopsis elliptica in India (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 1892). The Kew bulletin notes that, without exception, these plants failed as potential electric insulators—the largest market for gutta-percha (Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 1891: 230). Having explored and exhausted all available options, Kew was forced to admit that gutta-percha was not to be the next quinine. Despite the best efforts of British botany, the landscape of guttapercha would continue to be one characterized by the steady and practically unchecked exploitation of wild supplies. There would be no regular rows

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of plantation trees, no management in the wild, and no towering stands of Palaquium gutta trees in the far-flung corners of the Empire.

CHEMISTRY When change finally did come to the problem of gutta-percha supply in the 1890s and 1900s, it was driven by the properties of the material itself. Guttapercha was not simply a component used in the cable industry; rather, it made the industry possible, and without it, cables may not have crossed the oceans for several decades. There were no available alternatives, and gutta-percha was the world’s only effective submarine cable insulator. Once methods of manufacture and handling were perfected, the cable industry experienced a massive surge in construction, with lines being laid to satisfy the latent demand for swift communications. Prices were driven up as the world market expanded, and it was this relative increase in the cost of materials that finally drove changes in the landscape of gutta-percha production. This change took place on several fronts. Plantations became an economically viable prospect for first time, and in 1895, the first (though very nearly only) attempts at genuine, large-scale guttapercha plantations were implemented by the Dutch in Java (Tully 2009: 578). The first gutta-percha was to come out of the Dutch plantation in 1908.10 Guttapercha plantations were, however, never to become even remotely successful at meeting demand—a case of too little, too late. The need to actively manage natural forests was also finally taken seriously. A 1900 report on the subject compiled by Mr. Hill, Inspector General of Forests in India for the Colonial Office, advised the long-overdue measures of appointing a formal Forestry Officer, reserving lands on which the gutta-percha tree might be grown for plantations, active management of the existing stock, and a prohibition on the felling of gutta-percha trees. The timing of the report is telling, and it reflects the formalization of British political influence in the region. The forming of the British North Borneo Company in 1882 and the ceding to Britain of the Federated Malay States in 1895 enabled direct access to the primary products of the jungle for the first time. The heavy hand of high imperialism finally wrenched control of the forests from the Chinese traders and indigenous collectors. Perhaps the most important agent for change was a drive to understand why gutta-percha was such an amazing insulator at a molecular level. Guttapercha was on every lab bench, this time not to discover new and promising applications, but instead to understand exactly what it was composed of and how this might be manipulated or indeed substituted. Early fruits of this work came, for example, from Sérullas, who patented a process to recover guttapercha from fallen leaves and twigs that were macerated and treated with acid to recover the gum (Sérullas 1892). Attempts were also made to replace gutta-

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percha as an insulation material entirely. Thomas Christy, for example, patented a bandage of animal glue and glycerin (Christy 1891) that could be used to replace gutta-percha in the insulation of cables. And Purcell Taylor invented Purcellite, the artificial gutta-percha (Taylor 1890). Both of these substitutes sank without a trace. These studies of gutta-percha did, however, nurture a nascent chemical industry (see Headrick 1987 for an excellent discussion). Engineers at places such as TELCON (Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company) slowly identified the individual chemical compounds comprising true gutta-percha in order to provide the perfect recipe of resins, gums, and plasticizers. Engineers could then use this recipe to manipulate lower-quality (and therefore cheaper and more abundant) guttas, removing unwanted elements and substituting the missing ingredients with ones derived from petrochemicals. More sophisticated understandings of the properties of both vegetable and—importantly— petrochemical compounds rapidly developed, and it was a short journey from manipulating existing materials to the synthesis of entirely new ones. In the same TELCON labs, in 1898, the first human-made plastic, polyethylene, was created. It would go on to replace gutta-percha as an electrical insulator and ease the dependence on wild gutta-percha. The Malaysian and Indonesian rainforests having been selectively plundered, natural plastics began a slow decline. The days of gutta-percha were over, a victim of its own success.

CONCLUSION Perhaps more than any other material, gutta-percha can be said to be the economic object of the nineteenth century. Its singular properties afforded dry boots, infection-free dentistry, and batteries that did not explode. Vitally, it sparked a revolution in international telecommunications on which our contemporary interconnected world is founded—a revolution that would transform international trade, politics, and warfare, but one that also could bring reassurance, reunite loved ones, and forge new identities. A most singular material, gutta-percha was a lowly jungle product that became the most desirable substance on Earth. Gutta-percha shaped empires, inspired unparalleled levels of greed, and stubbornly resisted any attempt at domestication. A gifted teacher of petrochemistry, gutta-percha coaxed forth the breakthroughs that took us from natural gum to synthetic plastic, ushering in what was to be the defining economic material of the twentieth century.

CHAPTER FOUR

Everyday Objects DAN HICKS

One distinctive and problematic conceit of archaeological thinking is that periods of time in the human past might be delineated and even characterized according to the physical materials on which technology, but also perhaps wider aspects of society and culture, rely: Stone Age, Bronze Age, Copper Age, Iron Age, perhaps Plastic Age even, or the Age of Light Metals, in which plates, rods, tubes, and powders are used in the manufacture of tin cans, aluminum foil, windows, cutlery, and bicycles, of magnesium-alloy aviation and automobile engine parts, or titanium dental implants or orthopedic joints. The new monuments of such an age might range from the iPhone in your pocket (24 percent aluminum) to the titanium cladding of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (inaugurated 1997). But there is the feeling today, in a world of environmental disaster in the face of corporate colonialism, that such a supply-side account of time might need to be flipped to accommodate a sense of what has been not produced but taken, of extractivism rather than mere creativity. How should we understand “everyday” objects from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Occasionally in an archaeological career, fundamental shifts in timegeography take place, and this certainly feels like one of them. The five-year genesis of this chapter, between my first conversation as one of the two General Editors of this series with our editor at Bloomsbury in 2015 about its six books, and the completion of this chapter in March 2020, has been witness to such a change: a conceptual movement in how we think about objecthood during the period from 1760 to 1900 CE. That change is about the ongoing effects of European colonialism and the centrality of the idea of objecthood in that process. But perhaps the most famous example of such a temporal

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phenomenon, archaeologically speaking, or at the very least one with which I would like to begin by drawing an analogy, was the invention of radiocarbon dating immediately after the Second World War. The emergence of radiocarbon dating as a method meant that the study of materials for the purpose of understanding time-depth—sampling organic remains and measuring the decay of the isotope carbon-14 within it—could yield absolute, rather than purely relative dating. Two consequences flowed from this for archaeologists’ conception of the past. First was the end of “short chronologies,” where the sequences of later prehistory in the Old World, from the Mesolithic through the Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age, were seen to have taken perhaps twice as long as had been previously imagined. Second was the ability to match up chronological sequences from disconnected regions of the world, making possible the kind of “world” prehistory envisioned by archaeologists such as Grahame Clark. The archaeological vision of Vere Gordon Childe, based on the so-called “revolutions” of Neolithic farming and Bronze Age urbanism, was shattered—one factor in the suicide of the famed archaeologist in October 1957, not just in the face of his loss of faith in a progressive theory of social organization after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 took an apparent reverse step (as with the temporal reshuffling felt by so many three decades later when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989), but also in the recalibrating of Egyptian, Near Eastern, and European date lines, changing the sequence of his model of social change. The conjunctures that led to this sudden falling-away of the bottom of the temporal barrel, a doubling of time-depth that scrambled and restrung previously unconnected cultural sequences, from Mesoamerica to Mesopotamia, brought together the science of mass destruction with the measurement of radioactive decay after the end of the lives of animals and plants over tens of thousands of years. The creation of “world prehistory” from the conditions of world war, the replacement of revolutions seen in the past with the so-called “radiocarbon revolution” in the disciplinary present (Hicks 2010: 43), were reminders of how the long-standing connections between militarism and archaeology during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not simply vanish, but carried on in new forms—forms of knowledge, of worldview, of a colonialism of global history rather than the settlement of land or the extraction of goods. The measurement of archaeological time at a global scale came, at the beginning of the de-colonial process, to be made through half-lives: atomic mensuration. In this chapter, I want to suggest that something comparable in scale and scope, in geographical reach and in temporal significance, is happening today with our conceptions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and specifically our understanding of the possession of objects during that period of time. It is as if the half-life of the nuclear age, now seventy-five years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and August 9, 1945,

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could be looked at in reverse, part of the ongoing degradation of an ideology of objecthood at its peak at double that distance into the past, in 1870. The fault line begins with the title of this volume, one of six in the format of Bloomsbury’s Cultural History series. All of the themes in the series run across three thousand years of history, from “Antiquity” (1000 BCE–500 CE), via “the Medieval Age” (500–1400 CE) and “the Renaissance” (1400–1600 CE), up to “the Modern Age” (1920 CE to the present). At my initial meeting with Bloomsbury, in the cafe of the National Gallery in London, the first topic of conversation was the sheer Eurocentrism of the concept for the series. Clearly, while the periods of time might fit some partial, art historical vision of the Western canon, they are meaningless for many parts of the world and many people. Or, worse, they are one part of a set of unequal economies of meaning: reducing, for example, histories of South America to a Euro-American conception of modernity, or suggesting that Great Zimbabwe or the Rapa Nui (Easter Island) moai stone figures are in any sense “medieval.” Or, worse still, they project a temporal regime built to occlude certain places and times: no space even in Europe for the Neolithic, or in South America for the Formative, or in Japan for the Jōmon, or in China for the Shang, or in Australia and many other places for the centuries of the human past before European arrivals. There are clearly problems in describing Walter Raleigh’s abortive settlement at Roanoke in 1587, or the events leading up to the chartering of the English East India Company in 1600, the defeat of the Songhai Empire by the Sultanate of Morocco in the Battle of Tondibi in 1591, or even Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of Peru decades before as part of a period of something called “the Age of Renaissance.” But these problems are as nothing when compared to the naming of two periods between 1600 and 1900 CE, which are in this series called “the Age of Enlightenment” (1600–1760 CE) and “the Age of Industry” (1760–1900 CE). This fundamental shift, then, concerns the falling away of any possibility of the period of the final four decades of the eighteenth century and the whole of the nineteenth century, these fourteen decades, to be adequately contained by the term “Age of Industry.” Other series editors have tackled this in different ways. Some of the other themed collections in this series have adopted the alternative descriptor “Age of Empire,” offering titles including A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Age of Empire, A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Empire, A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Age of Empire, A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Age of Empire, and A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in the Age of Empire. The volume titled A Cultural History of Peace in the Age of Empire moves the start date forward to 1815–1920 CE. This moves forward another five years for A Cultural History of Money in the Age of Empire to 1820–1920 CE. In one case, “empire” is made plural, offering A

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Cultural History of Marriage in the Age of Empires. Some mix the terms, such as with A Cultural History of Furniture in the Age of Empire and Industry, and even potentially the forthcoming A Cultural History of Alcohol in the Age of Industry, Empire and War (1850–1950). Another takes the option of A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Nineteenth Century. The option of “Age of Industry” appears to be used in forthcoming volumes, including A Cultural History of Sport in the Age of Industry, A Cultural History of Color in the Age of Industry, and A Cultural History of Insects in the Age of Industry (1820–1920). How to navigate these epochal confusions? What do they mean? “Everyday objects”—What kind of conception of times is invoked in such an idea? Here in Chapter 4 of Volume 5, the thirty-sixth of a story of fortyeight chapters, in the unlikely event that someone were to read these from start to finish, this problematic temporal framing of A Cultural History of Objects reaches a kind of crunch moment, if not a crisis. My conversation with my editor had run quickly from the Eurocentrism, to the implication that there might be no objects prior to 500 BCE, or 1000 BCE as we shifted the limits of Volume 1, to the question of the Western invention of an idea of objecthood as distinct from subjecthood. Clearly, the parochial belief that there are objects and there are people, the technologies for turning things into objects, as in a museum, for example, the ideology of the commodity as distinct from the gift, the nature of evidence in empirical, material form—of shifting notions of objectivity as distinct from subjectivity—has both a history and a geography, which is perhaps centered on Europe and perhaps matches the time frame offered by this series. When did things become objects? If the Bronze Age of southwest Asia brought money five millennia ago as a form of memory of a transaction in material form, a kind of portable memorial to debt, was it the Iron Age that brought objecthood as a combination of knowledge and material form? Or is it more probable that such a beginning, rather than some great transformation from substantive to formal economics or some proto-Cartesian intellectual gesture, as with the etymology—obiectum, that which is presented to the senses, thrown before the mind, some kind of knowledge that presents itself (an “object lesson”), an interposition between the world and the eyes, an opposition, an intervention of some kind even, an objection—instead involved a gradual emergence, the construction of subjecthood and objecthood over generations and centuries, as if what is manufactured could be pulled apart from personhood? If the generation of objecthood is some kind of Western ideology of materialism, gradually wrought, constructed, if you will, over two or three millennia, then the period of time at stake in this chapter represents a crucial zone. And here what has changed, since that conversation back in 2015, is clear: the problematic nature of maintaining the epochal organizing structure into the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries CE, under the headings

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of Enlightenment and Industry. These years, between 1600 and 1900 CE, witnessed the active, knowing, and interested confusion of European categories of humanity and chattels when it came to the treatment of the wider world: through the assault on humanity in the form of industrial slavery, through the demolition of authorship through the mass production of commodities, through the taking of lives with new technologies of warfare, through the seizure of land from Indigenous people, and through the attempted annihilation of the inalienable, the sacred, in the name of the fetishisms of capitalism and colonialism that attached to relations that appear to come about between things rather than between people. How to sketch out the infrastructure, the technologies that were involved in transforming of things into objects, devices for the instantiation of fungibility? The glass vitrine of the shop front and the museum display, for example. Or technologies of mining, from the steel pick to the Newcomen engine pumping water, which brought about a transformation of geology— minerals formed over hundreds of millions of years—into raw materials opened up for extraction. Technologies of shipping, from the sloop to the bulk carrier and the supertanker, for the movement of drug–foods—tea, sugar, tobacco, and coffee—from colony to metropole, and for the movement of human cargo, exchanged for copper wire and Manchester goods on the Guinea coast. The coming of the canal barge and the freight train. The new spaces of the plantation, with crushers and boiling houses and stills for semirefining cane into sugar, molasses, and rum, and the warehouse. Refrigeration, containerization, packaging, from the amphora to the wine bottle. And the creation of the timber- or stone-built space of shared domestic rooms of the house, with hearth and cuisine, as the primary space, the household, in which objects are made and used and consumed—an innovation that parallels the hold of the ship. The transformation of some humans into producers, others into consumers, others still into mere objects as slaves. What does any of this mean for “everyday objects”—in an age of industry, of empire, of industry and empire, or perhaps of some other description? *** In spite of the richness and diversity of the historical record, there are things we want to know that are not to be discovered from it. Simple people doing simple things, the normal, everyday routine of life and how these people thought about it, are not the kinds of things anyone thought worthy of noting. We know far more about the philosophical underpinnings of Puritanism than we do about what its practitioners consumed at countless meals. But all left behind the material residue of their existence and it, too, is worth study. (Deetz 1977: 8)

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As Carolyn White points out in her introduction to this volume, the potential literature to be surveyed here is vast; the network needs to be sketched and cut somewhere. For the question of “everyday objects,” the usual point of departure for historical archaeologists on these questions, in this time frame, is the influential structuralist study by James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life (Deetz 1977). Can that study, now well into its fifth decade, still offer any kind of lens through which to address the matter at hand? Picking up that small and slender volume in its first edition, it is not really much larger than my iPhone. The second, 1996 revised edition saw the addition of a chapter on African American lives and material culture, of course, but as well as the Euro-ethnocentrism, it is the sheer modernism of Deetz’s Americanist study, derived mainly from his time in Harvard in the 1950s and 1960s, that shines through: reinventing ethnohistory, through the influence of folklorist Henry Glassie, by taking a step further in his blend of literary and structuralist approaches to the material world of everyday things. The debates in historical archaeology in the 1970s contrasted this “dreamdust” with “realism,” applying the structuralist idea of reading unwritten languages to the ordinary world, more like the vernacular structuralism of Roland Barthes on modern mythologies than the formal model of literal constraint, the literally structural model of structuralism, in Michel Foucault’s interest in prisons and hospitals—looking past surfaces to see depths and patterns, to see thought behind objects, so to speak, as if reality were constructed through hidden rules. The appeal to the archaeologist was evident—in ordinary objects, unimpressive fragments of pottery or bone received from the past, it might be possible to witness thought, cultural systems, modes of understanding, or immaterial knowledge, rather than just detritus. In this respect, Deetz operated against the definition in the foundation of historical archaeology in the late 1960s as historical, as opposed to anthropological, by looking to a more humanistic kind of anthropology than had been represented by the para-scientific modeling of patterns from the past. Central to this was an appreciation of “small things forgotten”—the everyday— “standing in contrast to the study of history or the decorative arts” through “its analytical approach.” An appreciation for the simplest details of past existence, which escape historical mention, and for simple artifacts, not deemed significant in arthistorical terms, viewed from the perspective of a broad social-scientific base, characterizes historical archaeology. (Deetz 1977: 25) But Deetz’s paean to the everyday was grounded in a story of whiteness, driven not even by culture-contact studies, but by a nostalgic account of the changing logic of belief systems. Six opening vignettes run from Plympton, Massachusetts,

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in 1765 and Portsmouth, Rhode Island, in 1745 to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1795, forward to Independence, Virginia, in 1932, back to Kingston, Massachusetts, in 1765, and all the way to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1658. These introductory stories of timber house building, gravestone carving, the purchase and breakage of domestic ceramics, banjo playing, and the listing of probate inventories along the eastern American seaboard were used to present an account of the gradual emergence of what Deetz, following Henry Glassie, called “the Georgian world view” (Deetz 1977: 43). Where Glassie has studied the geometrical order of Georgian architecture as it replaced and transformed “vernacular” housing, Deetz applied this to a much wider range of material culture as it is used in the household and the lived landscape, from the hearth to the churchyard, all the way to probate inventories listing clothes, linen, spare beds, domestic utensils, books, glass windows, and chimneys, the increase in function-specific rooms: parlors, dining rooms, nurseries, studies, and sleeping quarters, and the divisions between the family and domestic “hands” and slaves. Ethnic groups, not least through architectural historian David Hackett Fischer’s motto “Albion’s seed,” were central to studies of vernacular houses in this region, from African American shotgun shacks to Dutch barns, Rhenish houses in Virginia, and French pieux-en-terre structures. The domestic colonial architecture of tidewater Virginia represented the prime example for Deetz of a wider pattern of material “folk life.” In Deetz’s account, the first half-century of permanent English settlement, up to around 1660, saw that “Anglo-American colonial culture is essentially that of old England” and “the establishment of the English rural tradition on New World soil” (1977: 36–7). A second phase, from c. 1660 to 1760, saw “American colonial culture move away from its English parent,” as “strong regional cultures developed, with great regional diversity” (1977: 60). Finally, from c. 1760 to 1800, a “re-Anglicization of American culture” occurred, central to which was the emergence of a new “Georgian worldview,” presented by Deetz as something akin to what literary theorist Kenneth Burke called a terministic screen—visible in changes in the forms of material culture “in ways great and small, gravestones, grave pits, houses, refuse, cuts of meat, recipes, ceramics, furniture and cutlery,” and so on (Deetz 1977: 127). This fundamental shift from “traditional” to modern involved new kinds of “order and control” across these diverse forms of material culture: Order and control: the eighteenth century is called the age of reason, and it saw the rise of scientific thought in the western world and the development of Renaissance-derived form, balanced and ordered, in the Anglo-American world. By 1760 significant numbers of American colonists partook of this new worldview. Mechanical where the older was organic, balanced where the older had been asymmetrical, individualised where the older had been

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corporate, this new way of perceiving the world is the hallmark of our third period, which lasts to the present and accounts for much of the way in which we ourselves look out upon reality. (Deetz 1977: 40) Thus, Deetz’s “structural analysis of historic artifacts” presented a broad historical narrative of a fundamental shift from a “medieval” to a “Georgian” worldview spreading from metropolitan centers from c. 1710 and becoming widespread between c. 1760 and 1800. The transition in thought across time seen by Deetz as the emergence of a Georgian worldview found its most famous expression in his analysis of the form of grave markers, reading changing patterns of attitudes to death into a seriation of memorials during the long eighteenth century. Inspired by the work of Peter Benes and Edwin Dethfelsen on “folk gravestone carving,” Deetz presented a kind of evolution of styles in cemeteries from Worcester County, Massachusetts, to the Atlantic coastline, and from New Hampshire to Cape Cod: a transition taking place between around 1680 and 1820 CE, documented in the field by pencil, paper, and camera—a kind of experimental archaeology, as if cemeteries could be imagined as archaeological laboratories. The sequence that moved around the middle of the eighteenth century from death’s heads (usually a winged skull, sometimes with bones, hourglasses, coffins, and palls) to cherubs (winged human faces), and then from the turn of the nineteenth century to urns and willows decorating stones with square rather than round-shouldered outlines—from “Here lies” to “In memory of” being shifts in epitaphs marking changing conceptions of the body in death. The chronological shift at the Stoneham cemetery to the north of Boston was represented as three battleships viewed from above, showing “a stylistic succession” over time (Deetz 1977: 67–70). Along with Lewis Binford’s famous early 1960s study of pipe-stem dating, which was based on the narrowing bore width of the stem and the growing size of the bowl, Deetz’s battleship curves for everyday material culture operated to build an archaeological model of timelines and epochs based on the idea of the “series” as developed in the nineteenth century, providing stock material for discussions of dating techniques in undergraduate textbooks ever since. Material culture, so the argument went, operated as indexes to changing early American “worldviews,” read through “mental templates” of design, cognitive traces in material form, fragments of thought and belief rather than just stone, clay, or steel. The neoclassical aligned with the Puritan, the death’s head with the “Great Awakening” of the 1730s–1740s, but this account of the reshaping of everyday life through changing style in everyday objects and decorative arts in “old-time” New England and Virginia was deeply nostalgic. Deetz’s doctoral research had focused on cultural change seen through stylistic change in Arikara ceramics in central South Dakota between the 1690s and the 1780s, examining thousands of rim sherds from salvage excavations undertaken by the Missouri

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Basin Project in 1957 and 1958 at the Talking Crow/Medicine Crow site, four miles to the west of Fort Thompson, using an IBM 704 computer to produce statistical analyses of stylistic attributes of the ceramics to seek out the intangible world of ideas beyond the tangible field of things—inferring residence patterns from archaeological data. Now he applied similar thinking to the history of white America on the east coast: seeking to work from patterning to nonmateriality, from ceramics to social structure, from the known to the unknown. Emerging from doctoral research at Harvard between 1955 and 1960, Deetz’s approach developed in the context of the work of A. V. Kidder, Earnest Hooton, Clyde Kluckhohn, Ross Montgomery, Leslie Spier, J. O. Brew at the Peabody Museum, Gordon Willey, Clifford Geertz, and, above all, the “ethnopoetics” of Dell Hymes’s conception of linguistic anthropology as the anthropology of communication. His was an ultimately Malinowskian account of “culture change” that reduced European colonialism and history not so much to an anthropological account of culture contact (as, in the parallel vision of Meyer Fortes, a dynamic process) as to a more diffusionist, unilinear and “internal” process of Euro-American cultural-cognitive development seen in stylistic waves, in which Indigenous and African American experiences were marginalized and where the New World operated as a receptacle for the transmission of Old World thinking, as if it were a movement from olde England to New England that laid the foundations for “the true character of colonial Anglo-America” (Deetz 1977: 39). Deetz’s book is important because it remains one of the most influential accounts, following the work of Henry Glassie, of the connections between “cognition and material culture” (Deetz 1977: 165), and thus the permeabilities that lie between human understanding, everyday things, and the practice of everyday life, seeking to align a structuralist approach with a sense of historical change. It’s terribly important that the “small things forgotten” be remembered. For in the seemingly little and insignificant things that accumulate to create a lifetime, the essence of our existence is captured. We must remember these bits and pieces, and we must use them in new and imaginative ways so that a different appreciation for what life is today, and was in the past, can be achieved. The written document has its proper and important place, but there is also a time when we should set aside our perusal of diaries, court records, and inventories, and listen to another voice. Don’t read what we have written; look at what we have done. (Deetz 1977: 161). *** The importance of Deetz’s book for Americanist historical archaeology can hardly be overstated. It showed how three relatively mundane forms of

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material culture—houses, ceramics, and gravestones—might represent evidence of past ideas: windows onto past worldviews rather than simply the detritus of human behavior or technology. Deetz’s distinctive kind of processual structuralism replaced any binarism of mind and matter with a tripartite scheme of historical change in ideas of symmetry and possession, and made analogies across diverse forms of material and immaterial culture. Above all, this was a theory of the everyday and the centrality of “commonplace activities” in understanding eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought, and an archaeology of the endurance of English ideas in American things. But it also represented a resurrection of some elements of colonial revivalism, not least in its celebration of the Great Awakening. However, today, any such Deetzian vision of the everyday in inseparable from the variety of possessive individualism that drove his analysis, in which the everyday could narrative the individual, and where material things could be gathered together as “traces” of human life from which a certain historical consciousness could be generated in which it is not just that African Americans and Indigenous people were absent, to be added back in as he sought to do with the 1996 second edition, but where a whole swathe of material practices were actively erased: dispossession and the horror of chattel slavery and the reduction of humans to objects. “Ownership of slaves and the more elegant kinds of dishes are both characteristic of the more elite members of a community,” reflected Deetz (1977: 147). In probate inventories, “slaves were included with other taxable property” (Deetz 1977: 139). So, too, discussing the flooding of land in South Dakota for the Big Bend Dam in 1957, Deetz described the forced relocation of people from the Crow Creek and Lower Brule Reservations in neutral and even positive terms, reflecting on discussions between the Corps of Engineers and the Sioux community about the layout of towns, making no reference to the wider question of the dispossession of tribal land (Deetz 1977: 160). “The threat of attack by hostile Indian groups” is offered as an explanation—an “environmental factor”!—for the vernacular architectural tradition of jettied, steep-roofed, log-built dwellings (Deetz 1977: 107). The problem is not, then, simply Deetz’s neglect of Indigenous and African American lives, histories, or worldviews, which could be simply added in as an additional chapter. Rather, the idea of everyday objects in this period, the wealth of brass, wood, textile, and other goods in houses across the emergent Global North, serves to erase the dispossessions of New World colonialism and the increasingly violent forms of extractive imperialism across Africa and the Global South, the ongoing history of underdevelopment, and what Marx called “primitive accumulation.” The history of everyday objects in this period, then, was a naturalization of dispossession. Deetz’s remembrances served to make erasures and silences in the lives of others, as if Western philosophy were witnessed in Virginian clay pipes and New England gravestones as white

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infrastructure, with no mention of what was taken from slaves on the plantations on which the tobacco was grown, and the deaths and dispossessions wrought through colonialism across the world. *** And so here comes that watershed, that change in any prospect for a history of everyday objects in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then, as “reflections of lives” (Deetz 1977: 120). The figure–ground reversal necessary here is to see the ongoing presence of each object, as the trace and fragment documented by the archaeologist, as an ongoing absence, a loss, the product of a taking, the blotting out of a gap through the foregrounding of a thing. Here is one part of the answer to that question, with which I hoped this six-volume set of books might help us begin to grapple: What can be said about the history of the idea of objecthood? In the period in question here, which was a period of slavery and of imperial violence and of the growth from mercantile capitalism to the beginnings of corporate colonialism, and thus above all of extraction—from mining to looting, from the river systems of West Africa and human cargo to indentured Indian labor on Caribbean plantations—in this period we see the emergence of a particular form of objecthood. Northern Hemispheric houses filled with goods; museum vitrines filled with colonial loot; the technology of the shop window. There are so many ordinary objects to be studied by archaeologists working in Deetz’s tradition because the ideology of EuroAmerica at this time was an ideology of naturalizing privilege through material things and presenting a worldview through things. Our job as anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and excavators of material things of this period is not to trace the worldviews, but to follow the fragments to those broken worlds on which they relied, which they sought to justify: the dispossessions felt across the Global South. One place to start for such work is the Euro-American museum. Another is with spaces of commerce, of secondary production, and of consumption. It remains to reflect on why this change in the time-geography of “everyday things” has taken place now, between say 2015 and 2020. Why, when we read the Deetzian tradition, do we now see failure where once we saw hope of writing the subaltern, the prehistories of the historical period, the intimate or more real lives of ordinary people not captured in history books? The archaeological record, just like the documentary record of history, it turns out, is written by the victor. Those people who had stuff left stuff behind. A kind of wealth in “everyday things” represented an ideology of superiority, in which white American culture enriched itself with those ordinary things with which it claimed some personal or family connection. The erasures of the banality of violence, of the everyday losses, the quotidian absences are the genuine unwritten history, the stories and lives that demand our attention today. This

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chapter, then, needs to serve as a kind of negative for the histories that we need to begin to write, beyond Euro-American stories about stuff. The unassuming, apparently harmless category of everyday objects represented, like any collection of Victoriana or New England bric-a-brac, a naturalization of theft. There is something about the ongoing colonial moment through which we have been living since the global financial crisis of 2008, which is in part the moment of Brexit and Trump, but also an African moment of a generation since the end of Apartheid, two generations since Windrush, a century since the loss of the German colonies, and so on, which means that what can and cannot be said have expanded as categories, but what must be said has come to the fore. What must be said here is that everyday objects index dispossession. Part of the history of the Western idea of the object, as distinct from the subject, is a story of the justification for taking, the ideology of extraction. As the climate crisis gathers pace, it is clear that such goods are not about “worldviews”—that was simply what they were intended to be through the idea of consumption. Instead, these everyday things are about the changing of worlds themselves—writing who has and who has not into nature as much as culture, mass producing stuff so it can be possessed. The pressing challenge, then, is to step up to the challenge of this temporal recalibration—not so much the end of short chronologies as the end of parochial Anglo-American archaeologies, as the decolonization agenda engages with questions of material culture, and thus with questions of wealth and inequality. Our conceptions of what counts as a “cultural object” have a history, in which so much of the world has been excluded and overlooked as a means of facilitating the fake “race science” that lay behind not just slavery, but ongoing dispossession after slavery. In this regard, perhaps the sheer ethnocentrism of the framing of this book series, which serves to write out so much of prehistory and to write out so much of the world beyond Europe and North America, can be interrogated and repurposed through being brought to light.

CHAPTER FIVE

Art MAGGIE M. CAO

There is an often-told tale concerning the nineteenth-century French painter Edouard Manet and the price of asparagus. In 1880, Manet sold a still life, A Bunch of Asparagus, to Charles Ephrussi for 800 francs, and when Ephrussi sent him one thousand francs in payment, the artist replied with a painting of a single spear (Figure 5.1). Manet accompanied his rendering of the lonely vegetable, shown hanging half off a marble tabletop, with a witty note declaring, “There was the one missing from your bunch” (cited in Armstrong 2002: 280). Manet’s attempt to “make change” for Ephrussi by substituting painted vegetable for excess payment highlights the ways in which art and commodity were allied but incongruous objects during the Age of Industry. As an artist particularly attuned to art’s uneasy relation to cultures of consumption—who infamously substituted an unabashedly naked prostitute in place of the nude Venus of art historical convention in his 1865 Olympia—Manet reveled in the perversity of elevating things (or people, as the case may be) marked for sale in the most shameful or humble of markets. In art historian Carol Armstrong’s assessment, the asparagus episode is one of illusionistic substitution that dramatizes the distinction between use value— experienced bodily and materiality through physical acts of consuming—and exchange value—the circulation of reality effects that define capitalism (2002: 278–80). Manet’s move to treat his pictorial subjects (here vegetables) as countable commodities rather than a singular, authored painting mocks the difference in price and market of exchange between art and comestible. For

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FIGURE 5.1  Edouard Manet, L’asperge (Asparagus), 1880, oil on canvas, Musee D’Orsay, gift of Sam Salz, 1959.

Manet, the joke is not so much about elevating asparagus, which was unarguably a legitimate subject of art, but in misplacing or downgrading painting to the produce market. This most expensive asparagus spear showcases the extent to which art in the Age of Industry was defined by an ever-troubling entanglement of art object and commodity object. While artists and critics regularly strived to separate these two object cultures into distinct ideological domains, there was little that could free art from the grasp of industry and commerce. Indeed, the growth of the art market, the expansion of global exchange, and the industrialization of artistic production led art objects to slip into precarious positions wherein their commodity status often reemerged with a vengeance. This marks an evolution from the Age of Enlightenment, when the artwork’s commodity status posed little threat. During much of the eighteenth century, art and commodity were linked with little contradiction by the cost of labor and materials. Their association was in the nineteenth century undone as concepts of value became increasingly arbitrary. This chapter will focus on artworks, like Manet’s asparagus, that actively negotiated their status as art and as commodity. Such artworks point to a significant shift in the cultural history of the art object that took place during the nineteenth century—one that inaugurated the ironic

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and self-conscious artistic engagement with exchange and commerce that would fully mature in the twentieth century. Certainly, the negotiation of art’s commoditization has been a perennial artistic problem under capitalism. Representations of exchange in the domain of art date back to the early modern period, when artists in Northern Europe produced portraits of moneylenders and genre paintings of markets in full swing. What distinguishes artworks about commoditization during the Age of Industry is their improper or absurd insertion of art into the marketplace. Whereas early modern painters depicted financial activity as negative foil for cultural practices such as religious devotion, artists in the Age of Industry engaged with the financial world in order to make sense of the transactions and valuations of the market. They presented viewers with far more ambivalent messages concerning the economic sphere and the commodity status of art. At the center of the emerging dialogue on art’s commodification in the Age of Industry were questions of artistic labor and aesthetic distinction, two categories undone by industry, whether by true mechanization or a fear of the industrial. The encroachment of industry and its resulting mass culture put pressure on the boundaries of art, leading to concerted efforts to recalibrate its confines. There was simultaneously a social impulse to rarify art as something independent from other forms of artisanal work, and thus freeing it from the taint of trade and mechanization, and a thrust to integrate art with the industrial, thereby bringing its refined world to an economically diverse and geographically dispersed mass audience. For much of the eighteenth century, both fine and utilitarian arts were understood as allied enterprises of commodity production since they both relied on craft labor. Painters and sculptors eager to elevate their practice found that such perceptions proved most stubborn at the geographic peripheries of the art world. In colonial North America, artistically remote from the urban centers of London and Paris, the English-born painter Benjamin West lamented in 1767 that painting was regarded as “no more than any other useful trade … like that of a Carpenter, tailor or shew maker” (West, cited in Lovell 2005: 210). Artistic success in early America was often measured by an artist’s ability to mimic other commodities of value. The American-born John Singleton Copley became the choice portraitist of Boston’s elite merchant class because he excelled at rendering the sensuous surfaces of the precious materials coveted by his patrons (Figure 5.2). The sheen of silk brocades, the smooth polish of mahogany, and the glittering of silver—all high-cost imported materials—enveloped and surrounded sitters in his large-format portraits. Copley’s patrons associated the artist’s work with artisanal trades like metalsmithing or tailoring, labor that yielded the luxury goods they deployed most readily to signal their wealth and good taste (Lovell 2005). On the walls of patrician homes, Copley’s paintings carried a similar commodity status as the objects he represented—luxury goods

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FIGURE 5.2  John Singleton Copley, Mrs. John Winthrop, 1773, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Morris K. Jesup Fund, 1931.

oftentimes manyfold costlier than the portrait itself. Copley, like West, was ultimately dissatisfied with the relatively low status of his practice in America. Upon immigrating to London during the American Revolution, he turned to more allegorical forms of painting and abandoned his highly descriptive mode of facture, which had made him overly servile to the materiality of consumption. The very same market revolution that brought luxury materials like mahogany and silk to elite Bostonians also expanded artistic circulation beyond urban settings like Copley’s in early America. The desire for portraiture and decorative goods in rural districts launched the careers of the so-called “folk” painters. Among the most prolific of these itinerant sellers of cultural goods was Ammi Phillips, an artist who produced over 800 portraits over the course of his

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career for markets spanning from the New York Adirondacks to Connecticut. Advertising his likenesses for a few dollars for painted canvases and even less for miniatures on paper, Phillips targeted provincial middle-class clients with a growing taste for objects marking their gentility and desire for luxury (Figure 5.3). Yet, unlike Copley, who labored long hours to recreate the textures of luxury goods in paint, Phillips and other itinerant artists used time-saving devices such as camera obscuras and technical strategies such as the repetition of costumes and other visual details to maximize their output (Jaffee 2010). The characteristic figural stiffness and saturated colors often celebrated as naive expression in “folk” practices were in fact often a result of ingenious forms of visual standardization that allowed itinerant artists to deliver more affordable

FIGURE 5.3  Ammi Phillips, Mrs. Mayer and Daughter, 1835–1840, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1962.

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products to meet the demands of their rural customers. These artists tended as well to supplement their income with decorating work of all kinds, from parlor walls and furniture to business signage, making little distinction between “fine” and “decorative” painting. Business matters were always on their minds: both technical innovation and decorative projects maximized income to labor expended. Unlike the academically minded artists who sought to distance themselves from certain forms of craft labor, itinerants proudly embraced their status as entrepreneurs peddling their goods. While many aspired to enter the circles of elite artists, their concern, as the artist Chester Harding expressed in comparing his work to those of Philadelphia painters, was “the labor it would cost me to emulate them” (Harding, cited in Jaffee 2010: 253). Indeed, the mobility of the artists themselves to reach potential clients distributed across the rural landscape mimicked that of commodities like their art, which likewise traversed the same terrain to reach provincial consumers. A somewhat parallel realm of artistic entrepreneurship taking place in the American Northeast was the indigenous souvenir trade—the Native production of artifacts using traditional materials or techniques for settler consumers. Like itinerant art, indigenous souvenirs were widely circulated, low-cost artifacts. Some of the earliest staples of indigenous souvenir art in the Northeast were mokuk. For sale to travelers, Obawa and Ojibwa makers miniaturized these rounded birchbark containers decorated with porcupine quills woven into the bark’s perforated surface. Unlike the larger utilitarian containers for indigenous use, the souvenir varieties were colorfully decorated and filled with samples of maple sugar. For these artists, the miniature both catered to the demand for decorated handmade artifacts and served to model the exotica associated with “Indianness.” The souvenir trade translated everyday objects used by a local community into artistic goods consumed by a regional, sometimes even national or global, audience. Indian artists peddled beadwork, baskets, and other wares door to door in rural areas and traveled to popular summer resorts and national and international fairs and exhibitions as far afield as Europe. Like their itinerant artist counterparts of European descent, indigenous artist–entrepreneurs utilized time-saving methods of replication, including miniaturization and mass production, and developed effectively organized systems for the sale and promotion of their work across vast geographic networks (Phillips 1998). Both the souvenir trade and rural itinerancy could be associated with mass production, despite their reliance on artisanal methods. In the early nineteenth century, actual mass-produced art also entered the American market. Tapping into the growing rural demand for pictures was the lithography firm of Currier & Ives, whose inventory of prints ranged in subject matter from rural scenes of leisure and sentiment to political satire and newsworthy events (Figure 5.4).1 With a catalog that eventually boasted some

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FIGURE 5.4  Currier & Ives, Four-in-Hand, 1861, hand-colored lithograph, Metropolitan Museum of Art, bequest of Adele S. Colgate, 1962.

7,000 works by dozens of artists, the firm’s production accounts for 95 percent of all lithographs purchased nationwide (LeBeau 2007). Nathaniel Currier, the firm’s founder, was able to lower the cost of a print to just five or ten cents each by streamlining production. Self-described as “Publishers of Cheap and Popular Prints,” the company offered their lithographs to consumers through a wide variety of sales outlets: peddlers, pushcart vendors, bookstores, and by mail order, a strategy that ensured their work’s availability in both urban and rural markets. Unlike art printmaking that preceded it, Currier & Ives celebrated the mechanical aspects of their enterprise. They utilized the new technology of lithography, which yields far less tactile prints, and introduced an assembly line-style process of hand-coloring to their print production. They transformed artistic production into a form of factory work by separating the steps of print production, de-skilling the image-making process, and anonymizing it such that even the original print designer—the person usually giving credit as the “artist” of a print—remained unnamed. During the nineteenth century, suspicion that objects made for the mass market were not “art” at all, but rather bric-a-brac or trinkets of little value, grew in the art world. In France, the term “bibelot” emerged to describe such artifacts associated with commerce and industry. According to Rémy Saisselin, the democratization of consumption recast the acquisition of art as a pastime

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associated with nobility and elite leisure rather mass consumerism (1984). There was no doubt that art was a commodity, but it had to be maintained as a rarified one, difficult to access and out of reach for the masses. Attempts to maintain the distinction between art proper and easily obtained artifacts of little value also led to a devaluation of the decorative arts in general during the nineteenth century—a reversal of collecting patterns of the past. Whereas the decorative arts—furniture and ornamental objects—had once taken pride of place in collections as the priciest items, nineteenth-century collectors shifted their favor toward paintings, a medium less implicated by the taint of mass production (Higonnet 2009). The task of distinguishing art proper from the more nebulous field of supposedly nonart trinkets and bibelot became a central preoccupation of the cosmopolitan elite in the nineteenth century. In the USA, an increasingly influential bourgeoisie made successive efforts in the first half of the century to establish municipal art museums in American cities. While it would take until the later part of the century for these institutions to take hold and cement, the early efforts nevertheless reveal the extent to which class was central to defining the parameters of art proper through purchase and public display (Wallach 1998). By the mid-nineteenth century, even high art—paintings shown by Europe’s official art institutions—maintained an unstable status threatened by the taint of trade. In 1848, the French academic painter Jean August Dominique Ingres, a member of the government-sponsored Standing Commission on the Fine Arts, argued for the abolishment of the Salon, the annual state-sponsored juried exhibition, for failing to encourage the advancement of art. “The Salon stifles and corrupts all feelings of greatness and beauty,” Ingres argued. “[A]rtists are impelled to exhibit for the lure of profit, by the desire to be noticed at any price … The salon is, literally, the merest shopful of pictures, a cheap store offering an overwhelming number of items. In the Salon, industry reigns in the place of art” (Ingres, cited in Harrison et al. 1998: 470). The same complaint was leveled by critics across the Atlantic concerned with the association of art with industry, particularly the close ties between landscape painting and commercial enterprise. In 1859, the important art critic James Jackson Jarves warned landscapists against “partaking in the enterprise of commerce.” The American landscape school, he wrote, “sends its sons to Brazil, to the Amazon, to the Andes, beyond the Rocky Mountains … it pauses at no difficulties, distance, expense, or hardship in its search of the new and striking. The speculating blood infuses itself into art … if pushed to excess, it will reduce art to the level of trade” (Jarves 1865: 238). Jarves’s worries stemmed from the well-established fact that rapid territorial expansion had fostered symbiotic relationships between painters and their industrialist patrons such that the commoditization of landscape pictures reinforced financial

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projects of land development. For instance, to celebrate the completion of the transcontinental railroad, Collis Huntington, president of the Central Pacific Railway, commissioned landscapist Albert Bierstadt to paint the oversized and triumphal canvas Donner Lake from the Summit, which shows a locomotive traversing a historically treacherous pass by tunneling through a rock precipice (Figure 5.5). Bierstadt’s earnings, for this and other paintings, were assiduously reported in the press, forging fast but ambivalent links between the value of American land and the price of its representation. “Who does not remember,” wrote a critic in 1881, that “‘Rocky Mountains—Lander’s Peak,’ … sold to Mr.  James McHenry for $25,000; and the ‘Valley of the Yosemite,’ … was exhibited the country over, and seen by thousands of American citizens at twenty-five cents a head?” (The Independent 1881). American landscapists were supremely aware of the commodity status of their production, such that financial language often entered into their artistic negotiations with patrons. Monetary terms, for instance, dominated the correspondence between American pre-Raphaelite painter William Trost Richards and his patron, the railway magnate George Whitney. From the 1860s to Whitney’s death in 1885, Richards sent him highly detailed, postcard-sized miniature landscape watercolors in their correspondence, which the two men referred to as “coupons.” Whitney selected those coupons he wished to have reworked into larger oil paintings and circulated the remaining among friends and associates, encouraging them to do the same (Marley and Ferber 2012).

FIGURE 5.5  Albert Bierstadt, Donner Lake from the Summit, 1873, oil on canvas, New York Historical Society, gift of Archer Milton Huntington.

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“Coupon” was then a technical term in the world of finance. It referred to detachable tickets used to redeem interest on bonds by the owner. Using the term as they do, Richards and Whitney established the art object as a thing bound to the contractual obligation between producer and consumer. Extending the financial metaphor of the coupon, Whitney wrote to Richards in 1868 about a forested landscape he had commissioned, joking, “It occurred to me yesterday that you might be nearly out of leaves for my picture so I have torn a piece of one from our check book,—made a few line drawings upon it and sent it with the hope that if used at the right time of day upon the right bank in Phila[delphia] you will have a yield of at least 500 green things!” (Whitney, cited in Marley and Ferber 2012: 25). Not only does the financial rhetoric exchanged between artist and patron here confirm that art is subject to the “lure of profit” and “enterprise of commerce” that Ingres and Jarves lamented, but it also suggests that landscape painting inhabits a financial logic. The miniature “coupons” functioned like a currency in its patterns of circulation and its potential to be exchanged for a valuable commodity, the full-size painting. Whitney’s play on words, staging the semantic equivalence between greenbacks and painted leaves, also hints at the possibility that a work of art is no different from currency— subject, like banknotes, to symbolic procedures of representation and spatially oriented systems of exchange. It may be far-fetched to read so much into a bad artistic joke were it not for the fact that Americans and Europeans during these very decades seemed quite content to acquire art through speculation, with all of its attendant concepts of risk and return. The middle decades of the nineteenth century were marked by the rise of art unions, which fostered new types of art market transactions that replaced traditional forms of patronage. The art union business model, which involved distributing works of art among subscribers via lottery, introduced financial speculation into the art world. The Art Union of London, established in 1837, proclaimed to “give Encouragement to Artists beyond that afforded by the patronage of individuals” (Report from the Select Committee on Art Unions 1845: 11). For the price of one guinea per year, subscribers received a yearly engraving that was said to be of equal value to their membership fee. Their dues also guaranteed the contributor a raffle ticket, granting that member a chance to win paintings worth many times the value of their small contribution. Art unions distributed art among broader audiences by eliminating the financial barrier of collecting paintings (Sperling 2002). High art could now be had for the cost of a print. An immensely successful American art union was established using the same model in 1838 as the Apollo Association for the Promotion of the Fine Arts. Under its managers, a group of merchants, artists, and businessmen, it was renamed American Art-Union in 1844. The group based their operations on European models, but introduced to its art transactions the financial vocabulary

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of Wall Street banking. Paintings purchased by the Union to be raffled off—often landscapes by what we might call brand-name artists—were dubbed “deposits” or “specie,” against which paper “notes” in the form of engravings were distributed to subscribers (Brownlee 2007: 40). An 1850 broadside announcing the annual prize drawing proclaimed, “The subscriber … has an unequalled opportunity for achieving the triple purpose of obtaining a valuable return for a small investment.” By this time, the Union’s membership had extended well beyond its headquarter city of New York. Roving agents dispersed themselves across the countryside to recruit new members eager to exchange their fivedollar membership tickets for an impressive return at the annual lottery—an event that soon became a major spectacle of consumerism. It was not long before the New York courts deemed the operation illegal and made efforts to curtail what P. J. Brownlee has called the “speculative art economy” (2007: 41). One of the Union’s founding members, who also happened to be the one tasked to settle its affairs following its fallout, was the banker-turned-artist Francis Edmonds, whose genre paintings offered an ambivalent image about the distribution of art in rural America (Brownlee 2007). His The Image Pedlar of 1844 depicts a traveling salesman showcasing his artistic wares to members of a farmer’s family in their modest parlor. In turn, each abandons his or her domestic task to curiously gaze at the peddler’s goods (Figure 5.6).

FIGURE 5.6  Francis Edmonds, The Image Pedlar, c. 1844, oil on canvas, New York Historical Society, gift of The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts.

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The “images” being peddled are in fact small tabletop sculptures; and while they have a magnetic effect on the multigenerational grouping of admirers, it seems clear that the salesman’s goods, balanced precariously on his head, would hardly constitute art of high value. The painting visualizes the kind of artistic consumption without discernment then associated with rural and middle-class populations and their desire for cultural goods—something the Art-Union with its democratizing message encouraged. Acquiring art through the Union, after all, relied entirely on chance rather than taste or judgment. It transformed art acquisition into an economic decision rather than an aesthetic one. By the final decades of the nineteenth century—a period of extreme economic volatility both in the USA and Europe—aesthetic judgment became increasingly important, though it was often practiced as a kind of smart shopping. In this era—one that art historian Sarah Burns has dubbed “the age of surfaces”—artists and dealers borrowed retail strategies for the display of art, while idealistic critics continued to express their fears that the taint of trade would lead to art’s spiritual bankruptcy (1996: 46–76). The latter were quick to admonish the treatment of artworks as luxury goods without deeper meaning, a problem Life magazine dramatized in a cartoon parodying the annual Academy of Design exhibition in New York City. Entitled “Reminiscences of the Academy, Where Frames Are so Much Better than the Pictures,” the Life cartoon shows paintings of lowly subjects, from newspaper boys to washerwomen, hung snuggly side by side in elaborately ornate frames that severely mismatch the subject matter depicted. Such display practices took full advantage of the reflectivity of glass, the plushness of velvet, and the shimmer of gold leaf to lure customers interested in art’s objectness—its existence as gleaming treasure—rather than its deeper, often symbolic meanings. In this climate of mistrust around art market commercialism, certain artists like Winslow Homer, famous for his rugged surf-heavy seascapes, strategically cultivated personas of asceticism by turning away from cosmopolitan life and popular pastimes (prominent subjects of his early work) to scenes of rural life and wilderness. He went so far as to work at a physical remove from the art world’s economic centers, choosing to live year-round at his family compound at the relatively isolated isthmus of Prouts Neck, Maine. While Homer meticulously tracked his sales and reveled in the high prices of his work, he vocally disparaged materialism in his interaction with gallerists and the public, even deeming elaborate frames “robbery boxes” (Burns 1996: 187–217). On the other end of the spectrum were artists that embraced art’s association with materialism. Whereas Homer managed a modest studio in rural Maine, his peer William Merritt Chase designed and ran “one of the most notable studios in the world” in New York City (Smithgall 2016: 4). Chase commandeered two

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adjacent rooms in the Tenth Street Studio Building, where many of the city’s best-known artists took up residence. There, he created a multisensory space filled with not just paintings and prints, but a vast collection of objects from across the globe that a visitor might hold and touch or even listen to. “The easels … were but a small part of the attractions,” wrote one observer, “the ladies spent hours in talking to the artist’s birds, and petting his spaniel, which lay stretched out lazily upon a couch of brilliant upholstery” (New York Times 1882). Over the course of the nineteenth century, many cosmopolitan artists had transformed their studios from plain rooms meant for artistic labor to “show studios,” veritable galleries for social life (Blaugrund 1997). Reminiscent of the department store, a type of establishment also born in the nineteenth century, studios became showcases of the artist’s skills not just as painter or sculptor, but also as a consumer, collector, and curator of worldly goods. Just as the department store enwrapped commodities in narratives of exotic, romanticized leisure through smart display, so too the artist sold their wares by surrounding them with sets and props to match. Landscape painters, for instance, regularly outfitted their studios with potted plants and taxidermy, while Orientalists favored exotic goods from the Near East and Asia.2 While his strategies were akin to his peers, Chase demonstrated greater awareness of his self-branding through display by making his studio the subject of several paintings. In his painted studio interiors, Chase blurs the lines between aesthetic contemplation and shopping. Chase approached his studio as a space in need of composition. “A wall should be treated as a canvas,” the artist maintained, “[r]eal objects take the place of colors” (Chase, cited in Smithgall 2016: 4). His studio paintings emphasize the fact that all objects are equivalent as material goods, from glassware and textiles to paintings and prints. In Chase’s 1882 Studio Interior, the represented paintings are given the same weight as the bric-a-brac assembled around a heavy wooden chest (Figure 5.7). At the center of the composition, a bonneted young woman is engrossed in looking. Seated at a bench next to a metallic plate propped up for display, she admires the pages of an oversized book of prints. On the floor at her feet are smaller printed volumes left open as if just cast aside. There is little privileging of the medium that Chase himself works, oil on canvas. The framed paintings in the composition are rendered with the same loose brushwork as the other objects such that it becomes nearly impossible to make out their details. One painting, in the lower right corner, is even shown leaning haphazardly on a chair in front of draped textiles and on top of sheets of paper. The glint of gilt frames is upstaged by the shimmer of metallic goods and textiles like the yellow silk hung from floor to ceiling and the woman’s satin dress—objects associated with a gendered consumerism. In other renderings of his studio, Chase similarly featured the female figure engaged in aesthetic contemplation.

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FIGURE 5.7  William Merritt Chase, Studio Interior, c. 1882, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Museum of Art, gift of Mrs. Carll H. de Silver in memory of her husband, 13.50.

Indeed, the casual organization of objects and the broad array of textures and colors make Chase’s studio closely resemble a scene the artist painted while traveling in Spain around the same time, not of a studio, but a jammed-packed and eclectically arranged antiquarian’s shop. Though Chase surely never aligned his own labor with that of the dealer of bric-a-brac, he nevertheless regarded the ceramic, glass, and metal decorative objects he collected to be part of a culture of perusal that he had adapted to the painter’s studio—a culture in which the female shopper rather than the male connoisseur takes center stage. Judging the art object’s aesthetic value shifted correspondingly away from a deep knowledge of art’s history, the domain of the connoisseur, toward engagement with the surface of things and their sensorial allure. Chase’s studio-as-store thus places art in the category of objects encompassing all seductive goods. It is in this context of aesthetic consumption that Manet’s asparagus painting also finds its place. It took part in transforming the practice of still life into a genre of critique centered on the commodity status of art. Yet the most thoughtful and developed iteration of such criticism in the late nineteenth century was not Manet’s move—staged as an inside joke—but that of American trompe l’oeil painters, artists who adopted a hyperrealist style designed to trick spectators into believing that represented objects are real things. As David Lubin and others have shown, trompe l’oeil still life appears both to celebrate deceptive practices in commodity culture, by depicting objects in

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extreme tactility, and to denigrate it by staging such sensuousness as a deception (Lubin 1994: 273–319; Leja 2007: 125–52). The objects usually favored by trompe l’oeil artists were not shiny and new, but quaint and personal artifacts of sentimental value—a correlate to the antiques and collectables featured in Chase’s studio interiors. William Harnett’s The Faithful Colt, for instance, represents a specific type of Colt brand revolver popularly known as the gun that won the Civil War and tamed the American West (Figure 5.8). When Harnett painted the gun hanging from weathered wooden panels in 1890, it was already a nostalgic memento rather than a utilitarian weapon. Indeed, the model used was Harnett’s own, which in a later inventory of his possessions was named “a genuine old Gettysburg relic” (Whiting 1997: 253). The gun’s

FIGURE 5.8  William Harnett, The Faithful Colt, 1890, oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1935.236.

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cracked and discolored handle and rusty barrel signal its singularity as a personal and priceless thing. To paint guns and other collectables with such attention to its material features is to place emphasis not an aesthetic encounter, the kind of passive contemplation that Chase made the subject of his paintings, but on holding and physical manipulation. It is touch that trompe l’oeil solicits but then foils. This emphasis on an object’s imagined history and tradition may seem to run counter to the world of shiny commodities, promoted for their modernity and newness. Yet such artworks were particularly popular with dry goods merchants who hung them in shop windows, which were just beginning to be conceptualized as a space not just for straightforward displays of goods for sale, but for capitalist-minded forms of deception (Leja 2007: 125–52). Thus, trompe l’oeil’s de-commodified subjects was precisely that which made it such a commodifiable form of art. Furthermore, trompe l’oeil paintings depict the world of masculine leisure distanced from the tasks of shopping and spending, which were constructed as feminine and impulsive (Lubin 1994: 273–319). Their emphasis on the social lives of things like the revolver (to borrow from Igor Kopytoff’s notion of an object’s shift between singularization and commodification) further paralleled new models of marketing that capitalized on relationships between persons and things to reinforce masculine conceptions of the object (Kopytoff 1986). Trompe l’oeil has always been a particularly self-aware genre, with artists not just acknowledging but highlighting the status of their paintings as portable goods meant for sale. As Johanna Drucker has argued, the shallow space and erasure of facture in trompe l’oeil still lifes call attention to the image as a sign system rather than a means to deeper intrinsic meanings (1992). The trompe l’oeil artist John Haberle, for instance, painted a series of canvases simulating landscape pictures whose brown paper and string packaging were damaged on route from artist to consumer. In each version, partially visible C.O.D. or “cash on delivery” stickers as well as other shipping labels originating from New Haven, Connecticut, the artist’s place of residence, ask the viewer to imagine the painting not so much as a landscape composition (now mostly visible behind the torn wrapper), but as a circulating package of fixed value, not unlike other pieces of damaged mail. Haberle was also known for painting trompe l’oeil pictures of other circulating goods, such as the 1887 Imitation, which depicts a random assortment of money, stamps, and photography, dirty, crinkled, and ripped by their movement from hand to hand (Figure 5.9). Haberle’s paintings about circulation align the pathways of art and currency, recalling the rhetorical games of William Trost Richards and George Whitney of several decades earlier. Both, Haberle seems to say, are mobile goods on the market, moving from place to place and slowly crumbling in the process.

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FIGURE 5.9  John Haberle, Imitation, 1887, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, New Century Fund, gift of the Amon. G. Carter Foundation.

Artists who painted monetary trompe l’oeil pictures were also taking part in serious economic dialogue apart from art market concerns. Illusionistic paintings of American banknotes such as Haberle’s Imitation emerged in the 1880s and 1890s, coinciding with political debates about the proper use of paper money. During the Civil War, the government issuance of greenbacks, a fiat currency with no backing in specie, precipitated the longest-running economic debate in American history. Conservative bullionists advocated for the resumption of a gold reserve for all circulating paper currency, which they saw as a “natural” standard to insure economic stability. Meanwhile, their liberal counterparts, the “greenbackers,” and allied free silver advocates in later decades, maintained that fiat circulation would stimulate the economy during periods of cash scarcity. Even though the gold standard was officially restored in 1879, debates about hard and soft money persisted in subsequent years, reaching their peak around the Panic of 1893.3 As Marc Shell has argued, these debates resonated with artistic practice as each political faction sought to make their case by drawing upon theories of representation. Both sides imagined paper currency as a sign within a system of value signification: to bullionists, banknotes were false symbols, while to greenbackers, they were true substitutes (Shell 1995: 56–117). In popular culture, paper money was frequently compared to artistic mimesis in political

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satires and cartoons. In the 1876 Robinson Crusoe’s Money, writer David Wells recounts a fictionalized economic history of Daniel Defoe’s island, documenting the evolution of its economic system from simple barter to a one based in paper currency, or “bluebacks,” parodying the American system. At a key turning point, the island’s government, following the logic of paper money, begins to employ artists to make pictures as substitutes for real things: drawings of cows were sent to heathens stealing livestock, milk tickets were given to feed hungry babies, and painted overcoats were charitably distributed among the poor in winter (Wells 1876). The absurd narrative aligns a monetary system built on symbolic paper (rather than gold) to the artist’s work of creating deceptive imitations. To critique paper money’s representational ambivalence, Wells depicts financial transactions as the traffic of mere images and inadequate substitutes (Shell 1995: 66–117). As participants in monetary debate, trompe l’oeil painters utilized their mimetic skills to create artworks about money’s representational properties. By deceiving the viewer into mistaking painted bills for the real thing, they seem to confirm the bullionist fear that money is indeed made “real” by artistic imitation. At the intersection of art and economics, Haberle’s Imitation comments doubly, not just on the symbolic system of banknotes, but also on the monetary status of paintings. It is worth noting that Haberle and other artists painting money in the late nineteenth century favored small bills, even shinplasters— the common name for fractional currency, the lowest-denomination notes that circulated during currency shortages. In doing so, they likely recognized that trompe l’oeil paintings circulated in idiosyncratic markets. Displayed in spaces generally associated with middle-class leisure such as shops and saloons, trompe l’oeil was rejected by those prominent collectors and institutions focused on distinguishing high art from mass culture. These elite tastemakers were quick to label tromp l’oeil painting mechanical and superficial. Such a pronouncement assumes that the skill required to mimic the look and feel of other materials was but unthinking execution—the kind of labor associated with the industrial process, despite the fact that such hyperrealism could only be the result of the most time-consuming handiwork. Such pronouncements were characteristic of an age in which both artistic production and consumption were contested processes. The distinguishing of craft from mass production, art from bric-a-brac, and so on, relied as much on the policing of artistic display and marketing as it did on the redefinition of artistic labor. Artistic labor took center stage most famously in an 1878 legal battle between nocturne painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler and critic John Ruskin. Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold, The Falling Rocket (Figure 5.10) had been subjected to a particularly cruel assessment by Ruskin, who, upon seeing

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FIGURE 5.10  James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold, The Falling Rocket, 1875, oil on panel, Detroit Institute of Art, gift of Dexter M. Ferry, Jr.

it the year before at the New Grosvenor Gallery in London, had denounced the piece as unworthy of its 200-guinea price and its painter as “a coxcomb … flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face” (1877). Ruskin wasn’t the only spectator perplexed by Whistler’s most abstract painting to date. Although the artist described the piece as a representation of nighttime fireworks at the Cremorne Gardens, the picture was described in Punch as resembling “all fog … all inky flood”; the writer concluded that “for subject—it had none” (cited in Merrill 1992: 35). Though technically a libel suit, the trial centered on the relationship between aesthetic labor and monetary value. In his testimony, Whistler admitted that

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his nocturnes were quickly painted (he could “‘knock one off’ … in a couple of days”), but he pointed out that “the proper execution of the idea depends greatly upon the instantaneous work of my hand,” and so the lofty price registers not physical labor but “knowledge … of a lifetime” (Whistler, cited in Merrill 1992: 147–8, 154). What made his paintings valuable commodities, then, was their intellectual rather than material content, wholly reversing the traditional markers of value: manual effort and craft skill. As a critic, Ruskin championed the meticulously finished and elaborate narrative canvases of the British Pre-Raphaelites, who, in the very same exhibition review, he praised for paintings “wrought with utmost conscience of care” (1877). At trial, Ruskin’s counsel simplified the critic’s complaint as an economic one: an artist should always give “good value for money” (Ruskin, cited in Merrill 1992: 292). Yet Ruskin’s concerns extended far beyond the financial one of being tricked into overpayment. In a written defense of his assessment of Whistler, he regarded the nocturne as symptomatic of a more troubling evolution in the relationship of art and commerce. “The nineteenth century may perhaps economically applaud itself on the adulteration of its products and the slackness of its industries,” he wrote, “but it ought at least to instruct the pupils of its schools of Art, in the ancient code of the Artist’s honour” (Ruskin, cited in Merrill 1992: 291). Art, in other words, should sanctify itself as an object untainted by the slapdash mode of work associated with industry. While art, too, is undeniably a commodity, it must nevertheless strive for philosophical and practical segregation. Ironically, Ruskin’s effort to dignify the art object as a commodity removed from the broader market of goods was not so far removed from the aesthetic ideologies of Whistler himself, the great champion of “art for art’s sake.” Both artist and critic were ultimately invested in isolating art objects from the commodity sphere’s industrial taint. Furthermore, they both wanted to do so through re-figurations of aesthetic labor—as handcraft for Ruskin and as conceptual for Whistler. In the end, the judge ruled in Whistler’s favor, but awarded the artist a mere farthing in damages. Though his monetary gain was minimal, Whistler’s win quietly heralded a new era in which definitions of art drifted from one tied to skilled craftsmanship to conceptual practice. Yet, the problem of art’s commodity status and the labor embedded therein would continue to resurface at key moments of controversy in the twentieth century. When Marcel Duchamp and other Dada artists inaugurated store-bought things like the infamous urinal signed “R. Mutt” as capital-A Art, they did so against the backdrop of modernist abstraction—a style theorized as deeply linked of the artist’s mind and hand. The same might be said about Pop Art, the assembly-line, mass culture-inspired movement championed in the USA by Andy Warhol, which followed on the

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heels of Abstract Expressionism. The Age of Industry, we might say, inaugurated the discomfort we still experience with the confusion of art and commodity. We like to believe that, surely, when artworks too closely resemble commodities in their process of making or mode of display and sale, they cannot be art in the full sense of the word. We are much more comfortable calling them novelties, baubles, or souvenirs—until, that is, such objects have been embraced by the proper institutions of high culture. Only then can the activities of the commodity space—mass production, exchange, and speculation—be celebrated as integral to the artwork in question.

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CHAPTER SIX

Architecture WILLIAM WHYTE

Published almost exactly at the midpoint of the Age of Industry, in 1836, the Anglo-French architect Augustus Pugin’s polemical work, Contrasts, did exactly what it set out to do: contrasting the horrors of the present day with the delights of the medieval past. In its first edition, this meant a fierce and often bitingly satirical text accompanied by a series of diptychs juxtaposing modern and medieval building types: town halls, parish churches, colleges, even “public conduits.” The whole volume was concluded with a finely wrought image, depicting Veritas—the eye of truth—assessing the architecture of the nineteenth and the fourteenth centuries. Placed in a set of scales designed to measure excellence—the Libra Excellentiae—the lightweight buildings of contemporary architects do not compare with the more substantial work of their Gothic forebears. “They are,” writes Pugin, quoting the Book of Daniel, “weighed in the balance and found wanting” (Holliday 2012). A second edition, of 1841, went still further, inserting two new plates, as well as some additional text. One plate drew a contrast between the glories of a “Catholic Town in 1440” and the degradation of “The Same Town in 1840.” The other, with which this chapter opens, depicted “Contrasted Residences for the Poor.” The topmost image shows a “Modern Poor House”: a utilitarian, astylar neoclassical building (Figure 6.1). It is a forbidding edifice, set down in a barren, unproductive landscape that contrasts with the verdant agricultural scene behind it. In the margins, scenes from within show a poor man in his cell; the master equipped with whips and chains; a diet of gruel, gruel, and yet more gruel; the corpse of an inhabitant being taken away for dissection; and discipline imposed by the separation of husband and wife. The “Antient Poor House” is,

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FIGURE 6.1  “Contrasted Residences for the Poor,” A. N. W. Pugin, Contrasts (1841). Author’s collection.

in stark contrast, a large, elaborate, Gothic building surrounded by gardens and orchards: a fruitful institution that is truly part of its environment. The inhabitants are robed in honor; the master doles out money instead of meting out punishment; the diet includes beef, mutton, bacon, ale, and cider; death is marked by a requiem mass; and discipline means confession and absolution in the chapel. Pugin’s vision was all-encompassing and idiosyncratic. He dreamed of recreating Gothic churches, colleges, houses; he even rejoiced at marrying “a first rate Gothic woman’ (Hill 2007: 407). But he was influential. The eminent Victorian George Gilbert Scott, who dominated the mid-nineteenth-century English architectural world, recalled that Pugin’s writings “excited me almost to fury, and I suddenly found myself like a person awakened from a long feverish

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dream, which had rendered him unconscious of what was going on about him” (Scott 1995: 88). Contrasts has, as a consequence, been described as one of the “very few books by architects that have changed architecture altogether” (Brittain-Caitlin 2003: i). Contrasts, moreover, is just as important for what it represents as it is for what it actually achieved. In this one book—indeed, in the single image of “Contrasted Residences for the Poor”—Pugin presented a distillation of many key contemporary themes and thus offers us an excellent way of approaching the development of architecture in this period. Not least of the factors so evidently present is an apparent paradox, one that puzzled people at the time and has preoccupied historians ever since (Macleod 1979). How was it, we might ask, that in this Age of Industry—of industrial progress, modern materials, and global capitalism—architects and their clients were so keen to recreate the architecture of the past? Critically linked to this historicist sensibility was a debate about style (Crook 1989). For Pugin, as Contrasts makes clear, stylistic choice was not just an aesthetic decision. Style communicated: it meant something—it mattered (Levine 2010). The question asked by the German architect Heinrich Hübsch in 1828—“In what style shall we build?”—resonated throughout this era (Hübsch 1828). What linked this debate about style and this revivalist approach was a belief—one powerfully evoked in Pugin’s engravings—that ethics and aesthetics, morality and architecture went hand in hand (Watkin 2001). In Contrasts, the modern poorhouse was ugly, neoclassical, and bad. The Gothic poorhouse, by comparison, was intended to be both beautiful and good; indeed, in a classically Romantic conflation, it was drawn to demonstrate that there was no real distinction between the two. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,— that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” the English poet Keats opined in 1820 (Keats 1841: 201). In this plate, Pugin applied that principle to architecture. Pugin did not simply exemplify the influence of Romanticism on architectural thought; he also revealed the high claims being made for architecture in this era: ideas about the social and political importance of buildings. In truth, the octagonal, radial modern poorhouse he depicted looked little like the workhouses that were springing up all over England as result of the 1834 New Poor Law (Morrison 1999). Rather, like the octagonal, radial “New Jail” he drew in his accompanying depiction of a degraded modern town, it aped model prison architecture. It especially evoked the ideal penitentiary—the Panopticon—published by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1791 (Foucault 1995). “More a contraption than a building,” in the words of one historian, the Panopticon was a utopian structure intended to reform its inhabitants (Evans 1982: 198). A committed convert to Roman Catholicism, Pugin could not accept Bentham’s materialist philosophy, but he evidently shared a similar set of assumptions about

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architecture. His “Antient Poorhouse” was shown achieving an equally powerful— and more beneficent—effect on those who dwelt within it. For him, and for many others in this era, architecture mattered because it was an instrument of reform. Yet if Bentham and Pugin agreed on the importance of architecture, they differed in how they believed it worked. The word “Panopticon” is derived from the Greek for all-seeing—and this was precisely how Bentham’s building was intended to operate. Assuming that its inmates were not so much morally degraded as wrongly trained, the building was designed to enable a process of education: what we might now call “reprogramming.” To that end, prisoners would be segregated and watched continually. Good behavior would be rewarded; infractions would be punished. The goal was to internalize the rules of the Panopticon. The ideal was that each inhabitant “at every instant … should conceive himself” to be observed and to behave accordingly (Bentham 1791: 3). Pugin’s vision was even more extraordinary and ambitious than this. As his illustrations reveal, he assumed that buildings themselves had agency: that they acted in their right. Bentham’s Panopticon achieved its ends when its managers were doing their job. Pugin’s structures operated on their own account. The effect of the modern poorhouse can be seen in the way that it destroys its surroundings as well as damaging its inhabitants. The effect of the “Antient” building can be traced in the productive, pastoral landscape that surrounds it, as well as in the high ideals it inspires in both its master and the poor men who are his charge. These themes—the emphasis on historic architecture, on debating style, on the moral and ideological significance of buildings, and on the agency of architectural forms—help define this period. They also helped define architecture itself. For, of course, the concept of architecture is always highly problematic— and it was never more so than in the Age of Industry. This period saw the profession of architect emerge for the very first time in history (Saint 1983). Yet it remained the case that most buildings were not designed by architects, and that the place of the architect was socially and professionally insecure. Not least, the rise of other potential rivals—engineers, planners, and urban reformers more generally—presented architects with what could seem at times an existential crisis (Saint 2007). “By delimiting architecture to buildings that drew on past practice, deployed the supposedly appropriate style, and performed an approved function, architects like Pugin helped articulate their own importance, as well as delineate the nature of architecture itself.” Architects like Pugin helped articulate their own importance, as well as delineate the nature of architecture itself.

MODERNITY In a recent publication, the historian G. A. Bremner has argued that the “ontology” of nineteenth-century architecture—its “essential being as an object”—is both unique and uniquely related to changes in the material conditions of production.

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For him, the critical point is the permanent transformation of the economy from “an organic fungible one, to a mineral-based consumptive one, driven and dictated by coal-fired industries” (Bremner 2018: 184). Bremner’s claim focuses only on Britain, and only on Britain after about 1830. But it is a hypothesis with broader implications because the British experience of industrialization was, of course, soon shared by other nations. Indeed, as Jürgen Osterhammel has observed, as early as 1851 it had become clear “that the United States had overtaken Britain in machine-building technology” (Osterhammel 2014: 647). Moreover, the notion that the architecture of this era was somehow essentially distinct from what came before, and that this change was somehow related to the rise of modern industry, is a commonplace of textbooks on the subject. For that great pioneer of architectural history, Nikolaus Pevsner, the Sources of Modern Architecture and Design can be traced to the first use of iron in architecture by French designers of the 1780s (Pevsner 1968). If we take seriously the suggestion from some historians that we should see industrialization as a process that began around 1760, we might conclude that Bremner’s claims can similarly be projected back to this earlier moment in time (Mokyr 2018). That industrialization had architectural consequences is hard to deny. Industrial societies were urban societies, and the scale of urbanization was remarkable. The population of Berlin, for instance, increased from around 172,000 in 1800 to more than 2 million by the start of the twentieth century (Evans 2016: 307). Industrial societies were expansive societies, exporting settlers all across the globe. The population of what has been called the Anglosphere—the Englishspeaking population of the globe—grew from something like 12 million in the late eighteenth century to around 600 million in the early twentieth century. This was not just because of imperial conquest; it was also, as James Belich has put it, because in the long nineteenth century “Anglophones … bred like rabbits” (Belich 2009: 4). Access to new forms of energy, to an economy that had escaped the threat of Malthusian crisis, enabled them to do so. These new populations required housing, education, and places to work. By 1890, the Australian city of Melbourne, which had been first surveyed as a prospective state capital only in 1837, could proudly announce that it was the twentysecond largest urban agglomeration in the world (Proudfoot 2000: 23). Industrialization brought with it new materials. Iron in particular had a long—if hidden—history in architecture (Saint 2007: 65–206). But the use of coal and coke transformed conditions of production. “Coal technology,” observe Chris Evans and Göran Rydén, “made iron available in abundance.” Only 61,000 tons of pig iron were produced in Britain in 1785; by 1850, this figure had risen to 2.25 million. In 1788, the output of British bar iron was a mere 32,000 tons. Sixty years later, this figure had risen to 2 million tons (Evans and Rydén 2005: 2). The first ever iron bridge, constructed at Coalbrookdale in England, was built in the 1770s. The first iron-framed buildings were erected

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in the 1790s. In 1851, the Crystal Palace was opened in London: an epochal event in architecture—the centerpiece for the Great Exhibition and a structure entirely built of iron and plate glass (Auerbach 1999). Four decades later, for another great exhibition—the World’s Fair of 1889—the Eiffel Tower would be set up in Paris (Figure 6.2). Together with the Crystal Palace, it would be celebrated as a sign of modern—almost futuristic—design; “the right kind of architecture for the twentieth century,” as one German architect observed in 1902 (Pevsner 1968: 149). Hermann Muthesius, the author of this enthusiastic endorsement of iron architecture, included within his list of approved buildings the Library of Ste-Geneviève in Paris, built between 1838 and 1850, which was supported on exposed iron columns. He also commended the Eiffel Tower’s neighbor at the 1889 Paris Exhibition: the Halle des Machines, another iron building, with a

FIGURE 6.2  The Eiffel Tower. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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span of 110 meters across. Revising his text in 1913, however, Muthesius added more utilitarian constructions: train sheds and grain elevators. And well he might (Pevsner 1968: 149), for this period saw the creation of new building types as well as new building materials. The first railway station was opened in 1830; the first department store in 1852 (Pevsner 1976). Modern, urban life necessitated new sorts of structures, not least the extensive sewers and pumping stations, which took away waste material and provided clean water (Halliday 2001). Inside buildings, too, the advent of new technologies enabled increasingly sophisticated climate control: heating, lighting, what the historian Reyner Banham once termed “The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment” (Banham 1969). Constructing the new British parliament in the mid-nineteenth century, for instance, designers competed to install the latest technology, providing pure air and clear light. They also sought to make the palace of Westminster the first public space where every room would have electrically controlled time (Gillin 2017). All of this indeed amounted to a new sort of building world, one that has recently been termed the “technosphere.” It is well described by the historian Chris Otter. “The tapping of the ‘subterranean forest’ of coal deposits was a fateful event in the physical history of urban space,” he writes (Otter 2017: 150). It enabled tightly packed cities to extend their metabolisms over much longer distances by importing raw materials, water, and food from multiple, disconnected locations. These carbon ecologies generated various environmental issues (soot, smoke, acid rain) and catapulted elites out of cities into a new urban space—suburbia—where they could reconnect with the bucolic (Otter 2017). The technosphere was a global phenomenon. Patterns of supply and demand linked far distant communities. By 1900, “London’s slaughterhouses had in effect moved to Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Wellington” (Edgerton 2018: 91–2). Building materials likewise crossed the sea. When Manchester town hall opened, its three great staircases were lined with stone from England, Scotland, and Ireland (Whyte 2011: 206). When erecting the church of St. Saviour’s in Newfoundland, “Every brick and every slate and every piece of timber” was imported from England (Bremner 2013: 402). Architects also traveled widely. Working in the mid-nineteenth century, Ewan Christian claimed to have journeyed 27,000 miles a year (Whyte 2014: 224). Plans and other architectural publications voyaged further still. The King of Bavaria commissioned churches in California; the King of Prussia established others in America, in Rome, and in Jerusalem (Whyte 2017a: 472). It is important not to exaggerate this. Some economic historians have counseled against an overemphasis on the importance of coal (Wrigley 2010). The extent to which these technologies—and the architecture associated with them—proved inadequate, or simply failed, also needs to be recognized. The new sewage systems of Hamburg were faulty, scanty, and fatally flawed. They

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did not prevent the spread of disease (Evans 2006: 133–44). In Hong Kong, too, the sudden growth of the population outpaced the authorities’ ability to provide clean water. In the late nineteenth century, the city’s inhabitants received only one tenth of the daily water consumed in London, and no water was available for sewage disposal (Lees and Lees 2007: 273–4). Little wonder that nineteenth-century towns would become famous—notorious—for the squalor of their living conditions. In 1863, a survey of St. Petersburg found that of 8,242 buildings, which housed 90 percent of the population, only 1,795 had running water (Evans 2016: 308). The process of change was often slow, never uniform, and incomplete even in 1900. Some parts of the world were far more integrated within the technosphere than others. Even in Britain, there were areas with an ambiguous and contested relationship with this new, networked, modern world. On the Isle of Lewis, tenant crofters fought off “housing reform,” and insisted on remaining in their long, low “black houses” inherited from ancient Norse models and in which humans and their cattle shared the same single space (Mackie 2014). In London, too, change often had surprising effects. The new estate of Notting Dale was laid out in the 1860s and 1870s and, despite the best efforts of its builders, who hoped to make a smart, modern, middle-class enclave, it almost immediately formed the home of petty smallholders, becoming known as “The Piggeries” because of the prevalence of pig farming they brought with them. Becoming a desperately poor area, with a staggeringly high population density and a tragically steep level of infant mortality, Notting Dale illustrates the unintended consequences of development (White 2016: 88). Nonetheless, the impact of new technologies, new forms of urban life, new networks of communication, and—perhaps most obviously—new materials and new building types was considerable. Even those architects, like Pugin, who disapproved of and violently rejected all that the technosphere stood for took advantage of the improved printing processes and faster forms of transport that it brought with it (Hill 2007). Other architects diligently debated what became known as the “iron problem”: the question of how to make this modern material conform to ancient ideals (Muthesius 1970). And by 1847, the classic work on structures, Jean-Baptiste Rondelet’s Theoretic and Practical Treatise on the Art of Building, first published in 1805, was updated to include chapters on iron, ensuring that architectural students would be equipped to deal with the new dispensation (Bergdoll 2000: 182).

FORM All of which makes it all the more remarkable that so many of the buildings designed and erected in this period sought their inspiration in the past. Hermann Muthesius may have seen the future in great iron constructions, but the single

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most influential theorists of the period saw no real value in modern materials. The English critic John Ruskin came to believe that iron was a snare and a delusion, one that “changed our merry England into the Man in the Iron Mask” (Ruskin 1903–1909, vol. 8: 66). The German architect Gottfried Semper’s injunction that iron was incapable of creating monumental forms continued to be quoted until the end of the nineteenth century (Muthesius 1970: 61–2). Indeed, although they often utilized iron, plate glass, and other modern technologies, many of the most expensive and prestigious projects of the Age of Industry employed styles that had been developed long before. Perhaps the single biggest building project in nineteenth-century Britain was George Gilbert Scott’s monumental Gothic home for Glasgow University (Figure 6.3) (Frost 2014). In Vienna, by the same token, the power of the state and of the Hapsburg monarchy were each equally celebrated in the rebuilt Ringstrasse, which brought together Baroque, Byzantine, and Greek Revival edifices (Watkin 1986: 422). Nor was it just these grands projets that looked back. Increasingly, domestic architecture and interior design evoked the Old English, Altdeutsch, Oud-Hollandsch, Old Colonial, and other revivalist trends (Muthesius 2009: 212–95). Such was the appeal of historicism, indeed, that undeniably modern buildings often disguised themselves in ancient forms. The first new scientific laboratory at Oxford was, as a result, modeled after the fourteenth-century kitchen at Glastonbury Abbey (O’Dwyer 1997).

FIGURE 6.3  Glasgow University. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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The attractions of the past were several—and sometimes seemingly contradictory. There were those, like Pugin, who simply recoiled from the present, seeing the modern world as immoral, irreligious, and inhuman. Nor was this a purely reactionary move or one confined to the early part of this period. The arts and crafts movement of the second half of the nineteenth century was a global phenomenon, and one that was “linked,” in the words of Rosalind Blakesley, “to the rise of socialism, with its agenda of shifting systems of power and means of production from private hands to the community as a whole” (Blakesley 2006: 53). Certainly, this was true of such pioneers as Philip Webb, who combined a fervent egalitarianism and a “revolutionary” approach to planning with a singleminded, almost dictatorial insistence on traditional craftsmanship, the use of local materials, and the revival of Gothic forms (Davey 1995: 40). On the other hand, there were those who believed that modern life and even the most modern materials were entirely compatible with the revival of ancient architecture. The influential French architect Viollet-le-Duc experimented with plate glass and iron and envisaged new Gothic forms using contemporary metal bars (Mouton 2014: 60–7). There were also those, especially Anglophone architects, who argued that a modern architecture using modern materials would eventually develop, but could only really grow out of existing styles (Michael Hall 2000). As the British architect and author Thomas Graham Jackson put it in 1873, the goal was to incorporate additions until they had produced a Gothic that “suits the altered circumstances of modern life,” even if this meant that it “may lose all those features by which we know it” (Whyte 2006: 35). Similar thoughts can be found in texts produced by more prominent theorists, too. Indeed, the dilemmas of historicism can perhaps be best illustrated in the work of Gottfried Semper, whose publications and buildings would each be equally influential. What Semper called “the crisis afflicting contemporary artistic production” was, he maintained, “a crisis wrought by the twin agencies of poor artistic education and an abundance of technical or industrial means.” Writing in his foundational study of Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, he developed this point, diagnosing a fundamental problem with the modern industrial capitalist conditions of production: With its discoveries and inventions, science enriches everyday life and expands the sphere of influence of a business world bent on profit. Such inventions used to be the daughters of necessity but now they help to create need artificially in order to create sales and acceptance. Products scarcely introduced are removed from the market as obsolete before they can be developed technically, let alone artistically. Something new, but not necessarily better, always takes their place. (Semper 2004: 75) Such a world, he insisted, could create only chaos. “Consumption and invention,” Semper averred, “have been handed over to practitioners and

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industrial capitalists to mediate as they please, but without a millennium of popular custom to cultivate a suitable style” (Semper 2004: 18, 75). Overabundance, ill education, a lack of time, and a superfluity of innovation: these factors were, he contended, undermining the arts in general and architecture in particular. For Semper, as Mari Hvattum puts it, “the solution to the contemporary crisis lay neither in the invention of a new style nor in the uncritical adaptation of past styles, but rather in the modification of traditional motifs according to forces active in the present” (Hvattum 2004: 159). What that meant in practice was harder to say—and, as Harry Mallgrave notes, “this delicate issue of architecture’s present and future course” was one that “Semper was unable to resolve”; a fact made plain in the abandoned manuscript of a text which he promised would answer just that question (Mallgrave 1996: 306). Nonetheless, Semper’s own buildings give a sense of how he hoped to address the problem of “poor artistic education and an abundance of technical or industrial means.” Using Renaissance architecture as a basis, he constructed utterly modern buildings—filled with modern technologies and serving modern purposes—that drew on familiar styles. His proposal of 1861 for the main station in Zurich deployed iron trusses, but concealed them and had them spring from colossal statues, as though a series of Greek gods was supporting the roof. His plan for another archetypally nineteenth-century building, the Opera House at Dresden (1870–1878), deployed High Renaissance forms to achieve an imposing and theatrical mass, and one larded with statuary, intended to communicate the purpose of the place. Indeed, communication was the key to Semper’s advocacy of historicism. Architecture as communication was his solution to the crisis of the industrial era. In a world of unceasing innovation and social dislocation, he looked to the past for a legible architectural language. He was far from alone. As Neil Levine has shown, this period was one in which architects and authors of all sorts came to understand architecture as a kind of text or language (Levine 1984). For John Ruskin, the highest ideal was an architecture that would leave the viewers “reading a building as we would read Milton or Dante” (Ruskin 1903–1909, vol. 10: 206). For the German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, architecture was nothing less or more than “purified symbolic speech … poetry in stone” (Toews 2004: 143). In choosing an architectural style, therefore, architects were believed to be choosing a language. Some, like Viollet-le-Duc, thought this meant cleaving to a single style: “[W]hy seek to compose a macaronic language when one has at hand a beautiful and simple language of our own?” (Bergdoll 2000: 230). In search of an architecture that would “say what it means, and mean what it says,” other advocates, like the English critic and patron Alexander Beresford Hope, would come to call for eclecticism in architecture (Crook 2003: 94). All, however, shared Semper’s sense that in a period of rapid change, historic styles possessed the most capacity to communicate with the widest possible public.

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Such assumptions placed the architect in a powerful position. He—and it was almost always he—was assumed to be articulating ideas as well as providing more practical solutions to particular problems. This was a critical move for the profession and for the discipline as a whole. It enabled architects to distinguish themselves from other designers. Most buildings, especially small-scale, relatively inexpensive projects, did not involve any sort of architect. There remained a strong tradition of vernacular architecture and a world of jobbing builders and enthusiastic or impoverished amateurs, who built without the advice of any expert, much less an architect (Summerson 1973). Many other edifices—including, after all, the Eiffel Tower and the Crystal Palace—were designed by engineers (Saint 2007). By asserting the communicative role of architecture, architects claimed a higher ground, and by insisting on the role of historical styles to achieve this, they played to their strengths. In the Age of Industry, architects may not have been the most expert on how structures stood up or how modern materials could best be deployed, but they remained unparalleled guides to the architecture of the past (Buchanan 2013: 280). This assertion likewise had consequences for how architecture itself was understood. Clear distinctions began to be made between “architecture” and “building”: between simple structure and the rhetorical affects it was intended to achieve. “Architecture,” John Ruskin asserted, “concerns itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its common use” (Ruskin 1903–1909, vol. 8: 29). “Architecture,” argued Henri Labrouste, whose Bibliothèque Ste-Geneviève would of course be seen by Muthesius as one of the great modern buildings of the age, “is nothing but the decoration of construction” (Levine 2010: 144). With this, the nature of architecture as well as that of the architect was sharply redefined.

FUNCTION Architecture was not only intended to communicate to people. It was also intended to change them. Buildings thus became vehicles of reform. This is a process that can be traced back to the eighteenth century—and it is one that, in the form of the Modern Movement, would continue to shape architecture well after this period ended. As a recent study notes, the pioneering Dutch modernist H. P. Berlage was one of many who inherited ideas from nineteenthcentury theorists like Viollet-le-Duc and who believed that the right sort of buildings would “generate moral standards” and help create communities (Crinson 2017: 99). Other writers and architects went further still, imagining that social reform, religious revival, national unity, and other virtues could be inculcated by architecture. Indeed, the Age of Industry began to understand buildings as active agents, capable of exerting an influence on their inhabitants. This emphasis on the moral power of architecture helps to explain why debates about style became so heated—especially among the promoters of what became

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known as the Gothic Revival. Drawing on arguments made by Pugin, advocates of neo-medievalism, like the German Catholic politician August Reichensperger, maintained that only a return to Gothic forms could create a genuine national and authentically Christian community (Lewis 1993). And it was not only the neo-Goths who operated in this way. The French architect Charles Garnier used neoclassical forms to achieve something of the same effect. His Paris Opera House (1861–1875)—not unlike the Semperoper in Dresden—represented an attempt to communicate and to generate community (Figure 6.4). It was planned as “a vast spontaneous theatre where the public performs to itself,” in the words of Christopher Curtis Mead (1991: 127). Indeed, advocates of almost all styles shared a similar understanding. In the multinational Hapsburg Empire, Italian Baroque and French Gothic, Renaissance revival, and orientalist forms were thus all deployed at different times and in different places to essentially the same effect. They were intended to articulate and shape identity, whether national, denominational, or individual (Alofsin 2006). Underlying this belief in the power of architecture were a number of common assumptions about human nature. In particular, commentators and practitioners alike often drew on associational psychology as they sought to explain how buildings achieved their effects. Associational psychology maintained that our understanding of the world amounted to a web of associations. There was no intrinsic meaning to anything but, rather, on encountering an object, an individual

FIGURE 6.4  Paris Opera House. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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would inevitably seek to make sense of it by drawing on the associations it evoked. The Scottish philosopher Archibald Alison explained this process in architectural terms. Imagine, he wrote in 1790, that an individual encounters a commonplace scene. It may strike that spectator as “little beautiful,” until he or she learns that it is “the residence of any person, whose memory we admire.” At that moment, a stream of associations would emerge, and the delight with which we recollect the traces of their lives blends itself insensibly with the emotions that the scenery excites; and the admiration that these recollections afford seems to give a kind of sanctity to the place where they have dwelt, and converts everything into the beauty that appears to have been connected with them. Buildings, in this schema, could also generate new associations. They did this by shaping the emotions of those who experienced them, whether by impressing with scale and magnificence or by delighting with “simplicity” and “gaiety” (Hersey 1972: 10–11). The actual effect of these ideas is especially evident in the work of late eighteenth-century French architects like Etienne-Louis Boullée. His staggeringly sublime projects—not least an unbuilt and, frankly, unbuildable monument to Isaac Newton of 1784—represent an attempt to affect the emotional experience of the observer at the deepest level. An enormous 150-meter-tall perfect sphere, it would be entered through dark tunnels, with the spectator eventually emerging “as if by magic, transported through the air, carried on billows of clouds into the immensity of space” (Levine 2010: 88). Its form was designed to evoke Newton and the universe alike. The experience of visiting was intended to be inspirational. Boullée’s contemporary Claude-Nicholas Ledoux provides an even more compelling example. His proposed new town of Chaux, designed between 1780 and 1804, was a utopian scheme. Planned around “an immense circle” whose shape was “as pure as that described by the sun,” its ambition was best expressed in his ideal of the Oikéma: a public brothel intended for the adolescent boys of the town. The Oikéma expressed its function in its form— an erect phallus—and achieved its purpose by exposing impressionable minds to the worst excesses of human sexuality. In Ledoux’s words, “viewed from nearby, vice influences the soul no less strongly; by the horror it instils, it causes the soul to react towards virtue” (Vidler 1990: 266, 358). An erotic equivalent of Bentham’s idea—a penile rather than penal Panopticon—it drew on precisely the same sort of associational psychology to achieve its effect. Increasingly, these assumptions were bolstered by other developments. The belief that buildings might have psychological effects led late nineteenth-century theorists to investigate the impact of architecture on the whole body and not just the mind. This approach became known as Empathy Theory and had a particularly important effect on the development of German architecture at the turn of the twentieth century (Çelik Alexander 2017). The industrialization

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of production combined with the pervasive influence of ideas derived from Romanticism to highlight the importance of building materials as well as architectural design. This was not just a question of faithfully representing the purpose of a building—what became known as “truth to function.” It also necessitated “truth to materials”: if built of brick, they should reveal that; if ornamented, the ornamentation should grow out of the fabric of the building and not be applied afterwards. The key term was “reality,” and the call to arms for the “real” was best expressed in the campaigning neo-Gothic writer Benjamin Webb in 1844. “Let every material employed be real,” he wrote, “let deal [an inexpensive softwood] be seen to be deal, not painted to resemble oak; let brick be known to be brick, not stuccoed to imitate stone” (Crook 2003: 56). In this way, every aspect of a building came to be seen as morally, politically, and psychologically significant. Their plans and their facades, their structures and their materials, the way they were built and the forms on which they drew: all of these were understood as consequential. Small wonder, then, that definitions—and thus experiences—of architecture changed, too. This is a development that can be traced most easily by examining how attitudes toward an architectural type of great antiquity were altered in the Age of Industry, for this was indeed one of the great eras of ecclesiastical architecture. Huge numbers of churches were erected all across the globe: thousands in England, tens of thousands in the USA, and many hundreds in the colonial possessions of the great European empires. The various denominations commissioned some of the greatest architects of the age, employed the latest materials and technologies available, and made free use of a range of historic styles. “One might almost say that the entire world is covering itself with a vegetation of churches in the style of the middle ages,” observed the French journal Annales Archéologiques in 1853 (Cleary 2007: 76). More significant even than the scale of this enterprise was the terms in which it was undertaken. The church of the eighteenth century had been conceived of as an essentially inert container, what the Swedish called “the Sermon Church”: an edifice designed to maximize the preacher’s voice and the comfort of the worshippers (Cinthio et al. 1989: 288). As the architect W. F. Pocock put it in the first ever English pattern book on the subject, when designing a church, “the principal point for consideration is, the most convenient method of seating the greatest number of persons to hear distinctly the voice of the reader and preacher” (Pocock 1835: 9). Equipped with a new understanding of architecture itself as consequential—as causal—the architects and patrons of the Age of Industry built very different sorts of churches. No longer inert vessels, only activated when filled with the human voice, churches were designed as active agents— missionaries—in their own right. “In a rightly-ordered Church,” declared one advocate for this view in 1842, “spiritual truths are embodied under sensible images, and impressed on the minds of those who are taught their meaning with the utmost force and perspicacity” (Lowe 1842: 21–2). Hence the revival

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of stained glass; hence the statues and ceramics, the ornaments and fine fabrics, which filled the new churches of the period. “There is not a single article of Church furniture,” wrote one enthusiast in 1855, “which does not teach its special lesson; which is not a sign of some deep, full, abiding truth;—which is not a ‘messenger’” (Skinner 1855: 15). From the church building to church fittings, all were assumed to affect the viewer, to shape his or her spiritual life. It was not just churches that were changed by this, of course. Nineteenthcentury architecture as a whole embraced this understanding. Prisons, poorhouses, factories, schools, even private homes were reimagined as instruments—technologies—for forming and reforming their inhabitants. A whole new architecture of mental health arose, with asylums erected on the assumption that “the agency of landscape” would heal the minds of their patients (Edginton 2007; Hickman 2013: 57). By the same token, it became a commonplace that buildings could cause sickness and that poor architecture would result in bad health (Kenny 2014: 121). “The almighty wall,” observed one Victorian headmaster, “is, after all, the supreme and final arbiter” (Thring 1887: 75). Architecture both looked different in this era and was understood in profoundly different ways.

OBJECTHOOD The redefinition of both the architect and architecture was linked in complex and sometimes contradictory ways to other developments. The notion of the architect as legislator, communicating with and shaping for good the society around him, owed much to ideas about the need for an educated elite—a clerisy or caste of technocrats—articulated by such divergent figures as the radical Positivist August Comte and the Romantic reactionary Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Kent 1978; Knights 1978). But professionalization was also a social and commercial reality. Architects, in the words of one critic, sought to delimit their profession in order to ensure social status: to guarantee that “the architect’s wife might go down to dinner before those of the apothecary and the attorney” (Jackson 1892: 220). Given the rise of other, rival groups of experts—especially the engineers—it was particularly necessary to define and defend an architectural profession (Saint 2007). By the same token, new ideas about architecture also drew on concepts articulated outside the architectural world. The comparison between architecture and language, buildings and books owed much to contemporary interest in philology. Indeed, it has been argued that such analogies were simply not conceivable until the publication of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s On Language in 1836 (Bordeleau 2014: 133). The rise of intellectual movements like Romanticism also had an effect. That English seer Samuel Taylor Coleridge is, again, an important and exemplary figure here: he argued at one and the same time that the material world was

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intelligible, legible, and also that aesthetic matters were infused with morality. It was an ideal encapsulated in his much-quoted description of an ancient church as “petrified religion”; and it was one that helped shape architectural debate and experience for decades (Stanton 1968: 9) This was a global phenomenon. As the technosphere expanded, so the architectural effects it made possible could be felt throughout the world. To be sure, there was never an uncomplicated absorption of ideas or techniques developed in Europe. Even the architecture imposed on colonial possessions was undeniably, necessarily hybrid (for an excellent example, see Chopra 2016). Building forms and styles—not least the bungalow, a single-story residence with origins in the Bengali peasant hut—could, and did, migrate from colony to metropole (King 1984). But it is true to say that many elites outside Europe and North America were attracted by the sorts of advantages that industrialized architecture seemed to offer. By the early twentieth century, for example, modern materials like concrete were seen as emblematic of wealth and status, and cement was sometimes used to plaster West African mud houses in imitation of European concrete construction (Adeboye 2003: 286–7). In the Chinese intellectual Kang Youwei’s Book of the Great Community, begun in 1884, the technological utopia of the future is likewise embodied in “great hotels” with “moving rooms” (Crinson 2017: 42–3). More importantly still, the conceptual changes we have been exploring had a wider effect. In Russia, for instance, the rivalry between architects and engineers would find expression in the competition between the Imperial Academy of Arts and the School (later Institute) of Civil Engineers. Graduates of the latter became known as “architect–engineers”; graduates of the former were “architect–artists” (Shvidkovsky and Chorban 2003: 111). In Turkey, this division was also institutionalized, with architecture becoming a civil occupation and engineering a military profession (Pamir 1986: 134). The notion of the architect as not merely an artist, but also a moralist was equally widespread, and debates about the relationship between architecture and identity, buildings and ethics could be found almost everywhere. Inspired by the arts and crafts movement, British writers would celebrate the authenticity of the handmade products of India (Bryant and Weber 2017). In turn, Indian nationalists would evolve the Swadeshi movement, seeking to replace the material traces of the colonizer with an indigenous art and architecture (Bayly 1986). In Persia, too, resistance to perceived Westernization took the form of a conscious, and sometimes violent, attack on buildings. In the early 1890s, “droves of madrasa students … ransacked elementary schools,” seeing the “new classroom arrangement, with chairs, desks, and chalkboards” as an insidious subversion of traditional Shi’ teaching spaces (Amanat 2017: 324). At the same time, the indigenous rulers of Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, and Persia would seek to advertise their states’ distinctive identities by employing “oriental” styles in

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pavilions at successive world’s fairs, even if they employed European architects to do so (Çelik 1992: ch. 3). Nor was this a process that was confined to newly built structures. The importance of historicism and the ethical claims of architecture helped heighten the importance of older buildings, which were defended in terms derived from contemporary architectural analysis. The Italian architect Camillo Boito summed up a generation’s debate in 1893 when he declared that ancient monuments should be seen as “living” documents that could be “read” for their meaning (Glendinning 2013: 155). It was in these terms that Cologne Cathedral, left unfinished in the sixteenth century (Figure 6.5), was celebrated by Schinkel as “a religious monument,” a “historical monument,” and “a living monument for the nation” (Germann 1973: 91). As completed after 1842, it was also intended to be a monument to the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV (Lewis 1993).

FIGURE 6.5  Cologne Cathedral. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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Equally, the restoration of Ottoman and early Islamic architecture was seen by the Turkish nationalist architect Mimar Kemalettin—and by his clients—as an important part of restoring faith in the Ottoman Empire (Yavuz 1996). Vernacular and indigenous architecture—so long as it was respectably ancient and conformed to some rather fixed assumptions about what was worth noting and preserving—also came to be the subject of serious attention in similar ways. Colonial housing in America, Buddhist stupas in Sri Lanka, medieval sea defenses in Cyprus—all of these were preserved (Sharp 2005; Hall 2016). They were also increasingly the subject of scholarship. Indeed, as Victor Buchli has noted, the study of architecture—especially the study of the home, habitations, and dwellings—formed a central part of the creation of anthropology as a discipline (Buchli 2010: 504). In foundational works like Lewis Henry Morgan’s House and House-Life of the American Aborigines of 1881, architecture is treated as a text, with buildings read for evidence of a common culture at different stages of development. The “dressed stone of the civilised man” is contrasted with “the ruder stone of the mason in the condition of barbarism.” “The degree of their advancements,” Morgan argues, “is more conspicuously shown in their house architecture” than in the political or linguistic systems of the Native American peoples (Morgan 1881: 135, 180). Historic buildings, in other words, took on many of the same attributes as the work of contemporary architects. They were imbued with the same qualities and understood in the same way. Not least, they also became agents. They “ceased to be extras in the background and became protagonists themselves,” as Astrid Swenson has observed (Swenson 2013: 63). This played to the professional interests of architects, who established themselves as the experts best able to deal with ancient monuments (Miele 1995). But it also provoked many furious rows about the proper treatment of these edifices. If an old building was “an absolutely trustworthy historical document,” then, argued campaigners, any change to it amounted to the “effacement” of this “social, racial document” (Whyte 2006: 72, 77). If ancient structures had the capacity to move—to shape emotion and to elevate the spectator’s spirits—then any alteration risked depriving them of their power (Whyte 2017b: ch. 2). Indeed, for some, honest decay was a preferable state to restoration. “Better the fate” of the ruined abbeys “of Melrose, Tintern, or Rievaulx,” observed the art critic Sidney Colvin in 1877, “than the fate” of the restored cathedrals “of Worcester or Durham” (Colvin 1877: 463). What mattered, as Chris Miele has observed, “was the psychic charge generated by the brute antiquity of things” (Miele 2005: 35). Such a conclusion reflected the growing value attributed to ancient architecture, as well as the highly moralized and moralizing tone with which it came to be discussed. It also reveals a real change in how these monuments were understood. Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Viollet-le-Duc had spoken for his whole generation—and several generations before—in seeing

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the process of restoration as one that involved returning a building to its ideal form. “To restore a building is not to preserve it, to repair, or to rebuild it;” he observed, “it is to reinstate it in a condition of completeness which may have never existed at any given time” (Viollet-le-Duc 1854–1868, vol. 8: 14). George Gilbert Scott, writing in 1850, said much the same, arguing for “conservative restoration,” but then concluding that “even entire rebuilding … may be effected conservatively” (Scott 1850: 29). By the latter part of the nineteenth century, by contrast, restoration was seen as a process of uncovering not the ideal form of a structure, but of preserving its existing fabric (Miele 1998). So great was their commitment to this principle that campaigning groups like the English Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) even argued for the retention of admittedly “inferior” work as an integral part of a building’s structure (Reynolds 2011: 141). Speaking to SPAB in 1884, its founder William Morris summed up many of these themes when rhapsodizing on “the beauty of the weathered and timeworn surface of an ancient building.” He extolled its evocation of the past, its authenticity, and its power to move. And he went further still, arguing that this untouched relic [b]ears witness to the development of man’s ideas, to the continuity of history, and so doing affords never-ceasing instruction, nay, education, to the passing generation, not only telling us what were the aspirations of men passed away, but also what we may hope for in time to come. (Morris 1884: 561–2) For Morris, a recent convert to revolutionary socialism, this meant that these ancient buildings were an inspiration for radical social reform. Not all would have agreed with this particular conclusion, but his approach to ancient architecture—not least his sense that in some way the very stones of a structure somehow exerted an influence—was widely shared. Morris’s comments also bear witness to a pair of even more critical developments in how architecture as a whole was defined and experienced. For one thing, it is striking that his focus was on the facade of the building: the “weathered and time-worn surface” that moved him so much. Committed to textual analogies—to the idea that buildings could be read—architects and critics of the Age of Industry were indeed more preoccupied with surfaces than with space. Not until the very end of the nineteenth century would it be suggested, in Barry Bergdoll’s words, “that space rather than style was the fundamental link between the formal qualities of architecture and the overall character of any given moment in civilization” (Bergdoll 2000: 277). Still more significantly, it is notable that Morris in this speech—and in his other work—tends to concentrate his attention on a single structure, or even just a part of a structure. Decontextualized, detached from its surroundings, isolated from its environment, Morris’s ideal building is envisaged as a representative

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artifact. Here was a critical development in architectural analysis: the growth of what Joseph Rykwert has described—and condemned—as the idea of “objectbuildings,” structures seen, designed, and experienced in isolation, cut off from the world around them (Rykwert 2008: 371). It was an approach Morris learned not least from Ruskin, and, in particular, from his depiction of such buildings as St. Mark’s in Venice: the “central building in the world,” as Ruskin once declared (Ruskin 1903–1909, vol. 9: 38). Envisaging the chapel as “less as a temple wherein to pray, than as itself a Book of Common Prayer, a vast illuminated missal, bound with alabaster instead of parchment, studded with porphyry pillars instead of jewels, and written within and without in letters of enamel and gold,” Ruskin obsessively focused on the building as an art object in his texts and in his drawings of the place (Ruskin 1903–1909, vol. 10: 112). His influence in this respect could be seen in a surprisingly broad range of other writers, too. Indeed, Marcel Proust was one of many who would learn from Ruskin and evoke this approach in his own accounts of architecture (Autet 1987). Ruskin also set an example in the field of architectural photography, which similarly encouraged an emphasis on the building as a thing (Harvey 1984). “A photograph of landscape is merely an amusing toy,” Ruskin enjoined in 1855, “one of early architecture is a precious historical document; and that this architecture should be taken, not merely when it presents itself under picturesque general forms, but stone by stone, and sculpture by sculpture” (Ruskin 1903– 1909, vol. 8: 13). Although he would become more skeptical of photography’s value, other writers took up this call, criticizing amateur photographers who, because of their “unwillingness to lose a pleasing setting,” disregarded “the real objects of interest”: the architecture itself. “We find quite frequently,” complained one enthusiast in the early years of the twentieth century, [t]hat places of interest, such as cathedrals, castles, old cottages, etc. are allowed to take an entirely subordinate and distant position in their respective pictures, while an enormous amount of foreground space will be occupied by an attractive rendering of a flower garden, a vista of altogether commonplace cabbages, or even an expanse of bare open common. (Edwards 2012: 95) True architectural photography, it was implied, focused on the building and the building alone. In a sense, as soon as buildings became compared to books, as soon as they were seen as individual actors, as soon as architecture was understood as the province of the architect—a lone designer charged with overseeing a single site—the idea of the building as object was almost an inevitability. The emphasis on the unique importance of individual historic buildings helped entrench these attitudes, as campaigners sought to defend singular structures from development. Nor was this a purely atavistic, reactionary move. It was

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encouraged by developments in contemporary technology and found its expression in the most fashionable places of resort. Buildings like the Eiffel Tower were the centerpieces of world’s fairs and great exhibitions: the clou (or clue) “designed to provide … a central, clarifying perspective” in the present and to “reach out into the future”; not unlike Morris’s “ancient building,” in some respects (Geppert 2010: 95). Architecture was also exhibited in modern museums and galleries. Indeed, the fact that it appeared alongside other objects of industry and the decorative arts helped confirm, as Alina Payne puts it, “that architecture came to be thought of as an ‘object’ too” (Payne 2012: 94).

CONCLUSION Published in 1832, just four years before the first edition of Pugin’s Contrasts, Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris shared many of the same sensibilities in its treatment of the cathedral. Here was an evocation of a lost medieval world, one embodied in its buildings. Here was a celebration of a historic style: of Gothic, an architecture in which “everything coheres … self-generating, logical, and well proportioned.” Here, too, we can see an enjoyment of the effects of time on stone—“for it is time which has spread over the façade that sombre colouring of centuries which makes the old age of monuments the age of their beauty.” It is an enjoyment that also leads to a passionate criticism of restoration: those “countless acts of barbarity of every kind.” “Fashions,” writes Hugo, “have done more harm than revolutions. They have cut into the living flesh, attacked the bone-structure of the art underneath, they have hewn, hacked, dislocated, killed the building, in its form as in its symbolism, in its logic as in its beauty” (Hugo 2009: 120–2). As this suggests, Hugo also provides insights into some of the deeper, more conceptual changes this period witnessed. His emphasis on symbolism is significant, for, as Neil Levine has shown, Notre-Dame de Paris contains within it a clear account of architecture as a form of communication (Levine 1984, 2010). His moralizing tone is equally notable—as are the terms in which he links the concept of communication with ideas about truthfulness and honesty. “It is the rule,” Hugo declares a third of the way through the text, “that a building’s architecture should be so adapted to its intended function that that function should be self-evident simply from the appearance of the building.” His fear that modern conditions of production prevented the creation of good buildings is also noteworthy. Just like Semper, indeed, he worried that the pace of progress, combined with the development of new techniques and materials, threatened to destroy all worthwhile architecture, replacing it with the flimsy and insubstantial. “At the rate Paris is going,” he exclaimed, “it will be renewed every fifty years … Our fathers had a Paris of stone; our sons will have a vision of plaster” (Hugo 2009: 149). This is a vision of the ever-expanding

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technosphere, of course, but it also evokes the set of scales depicted by Pugin, where the lightweight work of the present age was “weighed in the balance and found wanting.” Above all, we should note that Hugo spoke for his age in two further, critical respects. In his novel, the cathedral is as much a character as it is a setting. It has “living-flesh,” a “bone structure.” Through its symbolism and through its bells, it speaks. For Quasimodo, the tragic almost-hero of the story, it is a “maternal building,” “a docile and obedient creature.” “Between the old church and him there was an instinctive sympathy.” This is architecture as agent: an active force and not merely a passive vessel. This is also, secondly, the building as object. In a much-cited short chapter, pregnant with thought, Hugo compares the building to the book. It is a story of decline, with a new technology—the invention of printing—destroying the power of architecture. “Architecture is dead,” Hugo opines, “killed by the printed book, killed because it is less durable, killed because it costs more” (Hugo 2009: 163–70, 204). It is a striking claim—and one that very neatly reinforces the relationship between architecture and communication. But it is also revealing of a basic assumption—the same assumption that led Ruskin to compare St. Mark’s to “a vast illuminated missal.” Both became objects: things that could affect and things that could be read. This was a development of crucial importance in this period, and in the century that followed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As always, I am extremely grateful to Zoë Waxman for reading and advising on many versions of this text. Some parts of this chapter draw substantially on Whyte (2017a, 2017b, 2018a, 2018b).

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Bodily Objects DIANA DIPAOLO LOREN

BODILY OBJECTS IN THE AGE OF INDUSTRY In an 1867 advertisement for shoe polish, a fashionably dressed mother and daughter remark on a man’s shiny boots (Figure 7.1). The Woodhead & Company is in the background of the advertisement, located at on Market Street in Philadelphia. The daughter states, “there is nothing like patent leather,” suggesting that the boots are of the finest quality. The mother counters, stating that the boots are not made from patent leather, but rather polished with Woodhead and Company’s blacking polish to give the appearance of finer leather. This evocative image speaks to the Industrial Revolution as a major turning point in society: the mass production of consumer goods and new technologies to produce them, the growth of factories and urban centers, and the emergence of modern consumerism (see the Introduction in this volume). While the women illustrated are of a higher class, as evidenced in their dress, posture, and their ability to recognize objects of quality, the man is presumably from the growing middle class. He does not have the means to buy patent leather, but can purchase an item that simulates better goods. Unseen in the image are the working class laboring in factories; the men, women, and children in dirty and sometimes dangerous working conditions and their crowded and often disease-ridden living conditions. The Industrial Revolution had its roots in the creation of colonial empires, the emergence of capitalism, and the transatlantic trade of goods (Heath 2017a). Almost every aspect of daily life was influenced in some way during this period. As Goloboy (2008: xii) notes: “it reshaped American identity, dividing laborers

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FIGURE 7.1  Advertisement for Woodhead & Company’s Diamond Jet Blacking shoe polish, showing two women discussing a man’s shiny boots, with the Woodhead factory in the background, 1867, LoC 2005682833.

from owners, the working class from the middle class, and Americans from foreigners.” It changed the nature of work from handmade to factory-produced. Local markets became integrated with global ones as factories and workshops in Europe and North America transformed raw material from colonial outposts into manufactured goods that were then transported around the world. The working class grew, as did cities around industrial zones. Automated production and widespread advertising brought mass consumption to new consumers around the globe (Goloboy 2008; Heath 2017a). During this period of progress and change, bodies were viewed and understood differently in the confluence of changing scientific understandings, innovations in medical science, newly redefined class differences, and Darwin’s theory of evolution. Bodies were disciplined in specific ways through lessons in manners of posture and comportment, in factories, schools, and prisons (Harris et al. 166–7). McClintock (1995: 5) highlights the “dangerous classes” that formed in the Age of Industry: “the working class, the Irish, Jews, prostitutes, gays and lesbians, the militant crowd and so on” that existed in contrast to the middle and upper classes. Comparisons between different bodies and the discourse of what constituted “us” from “them” codified difference, were used to strip individual dignity and to subjugate and enslave (Chaplin 2001; White

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2003, 2012; Loren 2007, 2010, 2015; Stoler 2009). The legacy of colonial categories was found in anti-immigration sentiments expressed in media and text and in the erasure of people and their stories from history. Social differences were codified through visual media. For example, casta paintings produced in the Spanish North American colonies of the late eighteenth century depicted social differences that resulted from the union of people of different races. In the paintings, the race of their offspring was defined, as was the family’s place in colonial society, as well as their mannerisms and behavior (Figure 7.2). Race and status dictated appropriate diet, occupation, and dress for each group, while at the same time allowing one to visually discern another’s place in colonial society (Katzew 2004; Loren 2007, 2015; Lafont 2017). These paintings depict artists’ imaginings of how individuals should look and how they would live, dress, eat, and adorn themselves. Bodies and attending bodily objects were broadly implicated in this period. As new consumer goods were available at cheaper prices due to automation,

FIGURE 7.2  From Spaniard and Morisca, Albino Girl (De español y morisca, albina), Miquel Cabrera, LACMA, M.2014.223.

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wardrobes were transformed for more reasons than just changing fashion. The growing working class, as an example, required a different kind of uniform suitable to factories. Yet clothing is just one kind of bodily object to be considered here. The kinds of foods and the nature of mealtimes changed as well, impacting cuisine, and dining practices, as well as ceramic production. Health and disease also implicated bodily objects. As cities became more populated and people lived in closer quarters, the opportunity for infectious diseases like tuberculosis to spread increased dramatically, as did concerns regarding sanitation, waste and water management, and overcrowding. These changes were also written in bone as repetitive tasks performed on the new machines took a toll on operators’ joints and left a mark on skeletal remains. Fashion, diet, disease, and cities are just some of the concerns of bodies during the Age of Industry. Given this, bodily objects as the archive of material culture related to bodies are broadly conceived in this chapter. Bodily objects are more than just clothing, although it is certainly a central category of bodily objects. To capture the nuances of these issues as well as the well-trod topics of class, race, and gender during this period, it advantageous to consider bodily objects as items related to bodily concerns; that is, items needed to attend to the physical and mental body (Loren 2018). Bodily objects, while often rare numerically in the archaeological record, are quite robust in terms of scope. Bodily objects were used and needed for practical purposes, as well as those needed for the intangible bodily concerns, which together include objects for hygiene, health, spirituality, appearance, cleanliness, and fashion. They include “small finds”: closures for clothing, such as buttons and buckles, jewelry and personal adornment, and needlework tools, such as thimbles and needles (White 2005, 2013; Beaudry 2006a; Galke 2009; Muraca et al. 2011; White and Beaudry 2009; Loren 2010, 2013, 2016). They also include items needed for bodily care and presentation: toothbrushes, medicines to heal the body, medallions and amulets that speak to spirituality, and even lice combs to clean the scalp. For example, numerous bodily objects were recovered from Fort Independence, a military site located on Castle Island in Boston Harbor (Clements 1993). While Castle Island had been home to previous forts, excavations conducted at the site recovered bodily objects related to the mid-nineteenth century married and single officer’s household assemblages, including numerous plain bone and ceramic buttons, military buttons, and lice combs (Figure 7.3). While there are a multitude of different narratives on bodily objects that can be explored during the industrial age, in this chapter I focus on two aspects of bodily objects: those related to covering the body and those related to caring for the body. In the first section, clothing and clothing fasteners (more commonly found than clothing in the archaeological record) are discussed, as are the bodily objects implicated in the making of clothing. Bodily objects related to caring for the body include those items needed for hygiene, medical items, and amulets

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FIGURE 7.3  Buttons and lice comb from Fort Independence, Boston. © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, PM 974-24-10/52386.2.1, 974-24-10/52445.2.1, 974-24-10/52448.1, 974-2410/52472.2.1, 974-24-10/52476.3.

for protecting the body. The majority of examples are drawn from North American contexts, but other regions, including Australia, are also highlighted. Examples are also drawn from different communities, such as Native American and Anglo-American, in an effort to address bodily concerns in the everyday lives of people largely overlooked, forgotten, and erased during this period due to their status, race, gender, and ethnicity (Beaudry 2006a: 2–3). As Beaudry (2006a: 3) notes, “insight into their lives leads us to broader insights into the human condition at particular moments in history.” Thus, the discussions on covering and caring for the body included in this chapter serve as grounding for further investigations of bodily objects in the Age of Industry.

COVERING THE BODY: WEARING AND MAKING CLOTHING In December 1759, John Page noted in his diary that after studying his bible in the morning, he traveled to residence of one Mr. Wallen. Page paid Wallen fifteen pounds for his first great coat, a new pair of breeches, a pair of knee buckles, and half a cake of soap. From there, he returned to Harvard to conclude his studies on “an exceedingly cold day.” Page was twenty-one years old upon purchasing his new coat and in his second year of study at Harvard. He received

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his Master of Arts degree in 1764 and later became a minister in Danville, New Hampshire. His diary includes bits of intriguing detail about his daily life as a student—the amount he owed to the college butler for his consumption of coffee, tea, and chocolate; medicines used for alleviating his sore throat; his time spent attending lectures; and the nine shillings he paid to a Mr. Merrill for a pair of curling irons for styling his wig. Dress was a notable part of Page’s life, as much as it is often notable in our own. We all wear clothes: to survive the environment, for bodily comfort, to distinguish “self” from “other,” for modesty and allurement. Clothing communicates numerous aspects of individual and community identity, including status, gender, occupation, civilization, and religion (Martin Hall 2000; Hansen 2003; White 2005, 2013; Loren 2010; Haulman 2011; Horning 2014). Yet, bodily objects do more than just sit on the surface of the skin; rather, they are part of one’s lived experience that was constituted with and through material culture (Fisher and Loren 2003; Joyce 2005; White and Beaudry 2009; Crossland 2010). Dress is personal, symbolic, and multifaceted; it is tied to taste, emulation, production, and consumption. How one covers and adorns the body is a powerful statement of political and personal identities. Page’s great coat must have been a welcome sight after trudging through the streets on that exceedingly cold day, but it also marked him as a young scholar in Cambridge, where a modest uniform was prescribed by college rules that reflected the institution’s Puritan beginnings. Archival texts, such as Page’s diary and historical images, provide rich detail about colonial American fashion; enough so that just the right kind of military button or shoe buckle needed for any historical reenactment can be accurately crafted and employed. The bits of information about Page’s daily life that come through the document—the way he clothed and cared for his body by keeping clean (or as clean as one could be at the time) and fashionably curling his wig— connect us to his life as a student at late eighteenth-century Harvard. But there is more to add to this story that comes from the study of the archaeology of clothing and adornment. Those infrequent finds in the archaeological record—a lost button, a loose glass bead—provide a material and sensory link to the past in ways that word and image cannot. It is in the archaeological record that we learn about the details of the colonial body: what was fashioned and put on the body in relation to sumptuary laws, how fashions were manipulated or not, and how a student at eighteenth-century Harvard curled his wig. Only in the most favorable environmental conditions are whole pieces of clothing preserved in archaeological contexts. What is most often found by archaeologists, then, are “small finds,” the remnants of the fashioned body: fasteners, buttons, and buckles; jewelry and amulets; and fragments of cloth or clothing as well as objects used to fashion the body, including hair combs and wig curlers, spectacle lenses, cosmetics, and the tools

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used for making and mending clothing, including thimbles, needles, and lead fabric seals (White 2005; Beaudry 2006a; White and Beaudry 2009; Loren 2010). When attached to cloth or leather, fasteners provide a more complete picture of how individuals covered their bodies within specific social contexts. When found in archaeological contexts unattached from clothing, fasteners provide evocative suggestions of the kinds of clothing worn, as well as suggestions of loss—the loose button that drops from a coat, unnoticed until too late. The Style and Shape of Fashions Fashions changed dramatically and varied significantly by area between 1760 and 1900. The availability and costs of handmade and manufactured goods dictated aspects of consumer behavior, but dress was so much more than the display of fashion (Eicher and Evenson 2014). Clothing and one’s taste in clothes communicated status, class, ethnicity, gender, and more during the industrial age. For example, in late eighteenth-century revolutionary contexts, clothing was often a political statement (Roche 1994). For example, during the French Revolution, “sans culottes” was a term used to refer to working-class men who did not dress in the fashionable, silk culottes or knee breeches popular among the nobility (Roche 1994: 139–49). Rather, their fashion of wearing trousers marked their place in society and their role as revolutionaries. In other contexts, dress demarcated ethnicity and status. In her examination of clothing in late eighteenth-century New Orleans, Sophie White (2003) discusses dress and sumptuary regulations for freed and enslaved African Americans. She notes that dress, even those items supplied by masters, was one arena in which enslaved individuals could express agency, exert control over appearance, communicate status, and even “facilitate or disrupt interracial and intra-racial power relations” (White 2003: 532). The ways in which freed and enslaved African Americans participated in the city’s market economy threatened white colonists, especially with regard to how they wore certain clothes viewed as inappropriate to whites: the enslaved girl wearing a red skirt or male runaway slave who wore more than one kerchief around his neck. These sartorial expressions challenged existing ethnic and gendered differences expressed through dress. They eroded and at times mocked boundaries of social distinction while also allowing for new sartorial expression that communicated nuanced identities in that community. For archaeologists, the ways in which we consider bodily objects in any context must take into account these nuanced aspects of dress to counter existing narratives or to explore new ones. Recent work on presence and persistence in diasporic and African American communities attends to this kind of work (e.g. Franklin 2001; Agbe-Davies 2007; Ogundiran and Falola 2007; Orser 2007). An example of new narratives related to dress can be found in interpretations

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of material culture from Boston’s African Meeting House. Constructed in 1806, the African Meeting House became a center of the city’s free black community during the nineteenth century (Landon et al. 2007; Landon and Bulger 2013). The meeting house was a central gathering place: it was a Baptist church, a place for the education of black children and community celebrations, and a central location for the abolitionist movement (Landon et al. 2007; Landon and Bulger 2013). Excavations at the site took place in the 1970s and early 2000s. As Landon and Bulger (2013: 121) note, the site “was a manifestation of community-based initiatives and achievements more than just a reaction to racism and oppression,” and artifacts represent the materiality of freedom in a strong, independent community. Bodily objects related to dress recovered from the site include shoe parts, military buttons, a gold hoop earring, a necklace chain, a fan strut, and a wig curler (Landon et al. 2007; Landon and Bulger 2013). The shoes parts, including one well-worn in the sole, were of a finer quality and speak to the prosperity of members of the community. While military buttons may suggest class, masculinity, and citizenship, the hoop earring and the fan strut are more indications of African American gentility at the site. White (2005: 121–4) has described fans as symbols of gentility and sexuality and, along with the gold earring, visible signs of affluence (Landon and Bulger 2013). Overall, bodily objects from Boston’s African Meeting House suggest the diverse ways in which community members created tasteful appearances in the nineteenth century. Yet taste was not always behind the motivation of fashions, as was exemplified in the popularity of women’s corsets during the industrial age. During this period, fashion defined femininity, and corsets fashioned a certain kind of female figure with a miniscule waist. As Kortsch (2009: 59) notes, “corsets fashioned a figure that embodied social etiquette and class status. More than any other garment, the corset guaranteed a woman’s respectability, and it became a mandatory article of dress for women of all classes.” Any woman of a certain class who appeared in public without stays was subject to scandal and scrutiny (Summers 2001; Kortsch 2009). It was a bodily object of medical and moral necessity, as it not only shaped an ideal body, but affected movement (Shapiro 2010: 8). However, corsets were also seen as creating sexual desire, as it emphasized a woman’s figure (McClintock 1995; Summers 2001). It is not surprising, then, that corset stays have been recovered from numerous nineteenth-century sites, some less respectful than others. Seifert (1991) examines artifacts from Washington, DC’s nineteenth-century red-light district known as Hooker’s Division. She argues that the assemblage from the brothel context can be viewed as a distinctive type of household, where women who were not related by blood lived and worked together under one roof.

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Artifacts recovered from the site include plain glass and ceramic buttons, as well as more fanciful black glass buttons and glass beads used on more elaborate clothing (Seifert 1991: 98–9). Also found in the assemblage are corset stays used in this context to create a sexually desirable form. Similarly, Luiz (2014) has examined archaeology related to the lives of women who participated in sex work in the mid-nineteenth century at Endicott Street Brothel located in Boston. Luiz argues that artifacts from the site— including buttons and corset stays—suggest the personal etiquette, household ambience, and daily lives of the working women (Luiz 2014). Additionally, bodily objects related to feminine care, including toothbrushes, patent medicine bottles, and thirty glass vaginal syringes, were recovered from excavations at the site (Figure 7.4). Syringes were used to inject liquid douches into the body, including mercury, vinegar, and arsenic used for cleanliness, disease prevention, and as abortifacients (Luiz 2014; see also Bagley 2016). In this context, corset stays fashioned the surface of the body, while syringes were used to care for the interior of the body. The goal was to create and maintain a body that was healthy, clean, and free from disease inside and out.

FIGURE 7.4  Glass vaginal syringes recovered from 27/29 Endicott St., Boston. Originally published in Bagley (2016: 140), reproduced with permission of the author.

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The Work of Making Archaeological evidence of making clothes includes needles, straight pins, thimbles, bodkins, scissors, and awls. It also includes the raw materials used in the making of clothing: buttons, clasps, hooks and eyes, and beads attached as fasteners or used as adornments for clothing. With the exception of Mary Beaudry’s Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing (2006a), however, little has been written from an archaeological perspective about the tools used in the production of clothing. Bodily objects related to clothing are everywhere. For example, one of the most ubiquitous buttons produced during the nineteenth century was the Prosser button, a small molded ceramic button that is often mistaken for glass because of its glossy surface (Sprague 2002). Manufactured after 1840, the most common Prosser button was plain white with four holes; however, calico and gingham varieties were produced later in the century and into the early twentieth century (Barber 1909: 444; White 2005: 72). It is a utilitarian button, for use on underwear, work shirts, or other garments, which can usually be determined by the size of the button. For example, very small buttons approximately a quarter inch in diameter were attached to cotton in petticoats, hoops, nightgowns, chemises, and bloomers, while larger, patterned buttons were sewn onto blouses, shirts, and waistcoats (Marcel 1994). Prosser buttons have been recovered all over the world, including Harvard Yard (Figure 7.5),

FIGURE 7.5  Nineteenth-century ceramic Prosser button excavated from Harvard Yard. © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, PM 2009.9.32.

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homesteads in Arkansas, and Ranch Petaluma in California (Silliman 2008: 118; Kwas 2009). In several instances, Prosser buttons were also employed as decoration rather than for their utility as a clothing fastener. For example, a late nineteenth-century Nanai women’s hat collected in Siberia features Prosser buttons sewn as a decoration onto the side of the hat, suggesting the spread of this ubiquitous button around the globe. Prosser buttons also provide archaeological evidence of clothing production. Excavations at the Boston Industrial School for Girls have recovered hundreds of Prosser buttons (Figure 7.6). Built in 1859 and in operation until 1880, underprivileged girls aged six to fifteen years attended the school to receive an education and training for future work in domestic service (City of Boston n.d.). Other artifacts recovered from the site included sewing equipment, buttons, writing slates, and pencils; all tools needed for instruction. As noted in the 1860 report for the school, “There have been made at the School since May 1st, 422 garments, and 49 pairs of stockings knitted” (Dorchester Industrial School for Girls n.d.). The variety and amount of buttons recovered, then, is indicative of this work in training for domestic service. Bodily objects related to making in the industrial era, then, include more than what is found in industrial sites, but also the small tools used in households and communities for different kinds of handwork (see Beaudry 2006a). For example, in her classic volume What This Awl Means, Janet Spector (1993) uses a bone awl handle recovered from a Wahpeton Dakota village as a touchstone object to create a narrative about female Dakota life and work in the nineteenth century.

FIGURE 7.6  Buttons recovered from Boston Industrial School for Girls. Courtesy of the City of Boston Archaeology Program.

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The awl was used to pierce hide, and Spector suggests that it was owned by Mazaokiyewin, a skilled leather worker in the community. For Spector, the awl was a way to create a narrative on women’s work that went largely unnoticed in archaeological interpretations and contemporary narratives of Dakota people. Similarly, other objects used for making provide insight into work sometimes hidden in historical narratives or overlooked in archaeological interpretation: the work of women, children, and even men laboring in factories or at home for family and community or learning a trade to ensure an income.

CARING FOR THE BODY: TREATMENT AND MEDICINE In 1832, Sir James P. Kay-Shuttleworth, doctor and educator, published The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester, portraying a grim picture of health and sanitation at the time: In Parliament Street there is only one privy for three hundred and eighty inhabitants, which is placed in a narrow passage, whence its effluvia infest the adjacent houses, and must prove a most fertile source of disease. In this street also, cesspools with open grids have been made close to the doors of the houses, in which disgusting refuse accumulates, and whence its noxious effluvia constantly exhale. In Parliament-passage about thirty houses have been erected, merely separated by an extremely narrow passage (a yard and a half wide) from the wall and back door of other houses. These thirty houses have one privy … it is impossible for the health to be preserved. (Shuttleworth 1832: 23–4) Public health was a civil problem. As urban areas become more crowded, outbreaks of smallpox, cholera, typhoid, and tuberculosis were rampant among the English and American working classes. In the mid- to late nineteenth century, prior to the adoption of germ theory, miasmic theory argued that diseases were the product of environmental factors such as contaminated water, foul air, and poor hygienic conditions (Figure 7.7). Additionally, it was believed that immoral behavior—licentiousness, drunkenness, and sloth—made one susceptible to ill health (Hamlin 1992). Cleanliness was thus a central component of nineteenthcentury social reforms on public health, which also aimed to educate the poor and working class on issues of personal hygiene and morality (Beemer et al. 2005; Hamlin 1992). Public works aimed at addressing the problem included the installation of sewers, plumbing, proper water drainage, and privy cleaning in congested urban areas (Howson 1993; Beemer et al. 2005). These efforts were combined with education on bodily hygiene and new medical practices aimed at healing

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FIGURE 7.7  “A Court for King Cholera,” Punch Magazine, October 1852. Wellcome Collection. CC BY.

ailing bodies. Toothbrushes, lice combs, powders for the face, soap dishes, and douche syringes (such as those recovered from Endicott Street Brothel) are just some of the bodily objects implicated in this movement. Bleeding, cupping, and leeches were in the arsenals of medical professionals. Apothecaries dispensed medicine, but the increase in patent or over-the-counter medicines available without consulting a physician were in the realm of self-help, especially for those without the funds or resources to seek professional medical care (Bonasera and Raymer 2001; Knehmens 2005). As Howson (1993: 145) notes, “The taking of any medicine is an active response to physical distress, and in the 19th century efficacy was certainly not the key distinction between the patents and the regular medicines.” Patent medicines, then, were for the masses eager to find a cure for what ailed them without the help of a doctor. Most “patent” medicines, however, were not actually patented, since obtaining a patent required the maker to disclose the formula for the product (Starr 1982: 128). Advertisements for patent medicines inundated popular media and were found in newspapers, journals, and magazines throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nearly any physical or mental illness, distress, or disease could be cured by taking patent medicines, or so it was proclaimed in print. By the late nineteenth century, the American Medical Association (established in 1847) took aim at the patent medicine industry in

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print, issuing warnings in popular publications such as Collier’s and Ladies Home Journal. They argued—and rightly so—that patent medicines were largely composed of alcohol and in some cases included morphine, cocaine, and opium, which would often do more harm than good when given to children or pregnant women (Starr 1982: 128–9). Hood’s Sarsaparilla, produced in Lowell, Massachusetts, was an extremely popular patent medicine consumed in the late nineteenth century. Advertisements for Hood’s Sarsaparilla (which could be purchased for $1) claimed to purify the blood and cure heart disease, dropsy, pimples, scarlet fever, typhoid fever, scrofula (a bacterial infection of the lymph nodes), and rheumatism (Figure 7.8). A 1916 study by the North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station stated that the mixture contained 18 percent alcohol, as well as glycerin and root extracts, but no dangerous substances such as mercury or arsenic, which is a relief, seeing as Dr. Greene’s Compound of Sarsaparilla contained formaldehyde (North Dakota Experiment Station 1916: 193, 222). They conclude their study by stating: In reading over the long list of ailments for which this medicine is recommended, one would expect to find a real panacea. In fact, a remedy

FIGURE 7.8  Advertisement for Hood’s Sarsaparilla, The Boston Globe, Boston, Massachusetts, March 30, 1895, Saturday.

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and medicine that would cure the list of diseases enumerated about would be almost beyond human comprehension, and would surely be a great boon to humanity. It would seem strange in this city of medical enlightenment that any firm or company would publish such ridiculous and deceptive literature. (North Dakota Experiment Station 1916: 194) Despite claims against effectiveness for treating illness, sarsaparilla was extremely popular during the nineteenth century. Fragments of sarsaparilla bottles have been recovered from numerous nineteenth-century sites, including Harvard Yard (Figure 7.9) and Five Points, Manhattan (Bonasera and Raymer 2001; Yamin 2005). These two locations could not have been more different. In the late nineteenth century, Harvard College was an educational institution, well-known for its wealthy, gentile male Anglo-American scholars. Five Points, however, was New York City’s most notorious nineteenth-century slum (Yamin 2000, 2005). At Harvard, sarsaparilla fragments were recovered from trash areas near to student housing, while at Five Points, sarsaparilla bottle fragments were associated with Irish American domestic structures and a “disorderly” house, likely a brothel (Bonasera and Raymer 2001; Yamin 2005). What connects them is their use of this common medicine. While Yamin (2005: 1) notes that sarsaparilla has been identified as a medicine specifically for use in

FIGURE 7.9  Fragments of a Hood’s Sarsaparilla bottle recovered from Harvard Yard. © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, PM 2016.29.61.

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venereal disease, it was likely used to alleviate other illnesses of both the poor and wealthy. Enslavement and Bodily Health In her stunning 2008 article “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman recounts the ubiquitous presence of “Venus” in the archive of Atlantic slavery, highlighting aspects of the pleasure, violence, and terror of the unnamed women (often known only as “Venus”) who were part of this history everywhere in the Atlantic world. We know little of her daily life; rather, the residue in the archive is of the violence that was committed against her. As Hartman (2008: 1–2) states, she is found everywhere, in “The barracoon, the hollow of the slave ship, the pest-house, the brothel, the cage, the surgeon’s laboratory, the prison, the cane-field, the kitchen, the master’s bedroom … no one remembered her name or recorded the things she said, or observed that she refused to say anything at all. Hers is an untimely story told by a failed witness.” The challenge for us is how to narrate the lives of those known primarily through violence found in the archive, so as not to reduce their existence to those terrifying moments of captivity and enslavement, but also not to dilute those experiences. Hartman argues for narrative restraint, stating that this kind of work is almost impossible, as telling these stories runs the risk of trespassing the boundaries of the archive. Yet I wonder: Can archaeology also provide another means by which to narrate part of the story and illuminate aspects of the everyday lives of enslaved African women in the Atlantic world? While certainly ripe with its own limitations, what can the archaeology of Atlantic slavery provide beyond moments of violence found in the archive? Lori Lee (2017) uses archaeological evidence from Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest plantation to examine health consumerism among enslaved Africans in mid-nineteenth century Virginia, highlighting issues of racialization, medicalization, and exploitation. She notes that, during this time, white Americans and enslaved African Americans had different conceptualizations of health and illness and different practices of treating the ailing body. African American healers, midwives, and root doctors played a central role in caring for those who needed care. Accounts of beatings, poisonings, infant mortalities, and pulmonary infections due to prolonged exposure to cold underscore the grim realities of daily life for enslaved African Americans in central Virginia, leading us to again contemplate Hartman’s cautions about creating narratives from archives. Ethnobotanical evidence from Poplar Forest slave quarter sites reveals different health and healing practices employed by enslaved African Americans. For example, carbonized seeds from jimsonweed plants recovered from the sites suggest the ingestion of the plant to treat respiratory problems, as well as the worms that were rampant because of poor sanitary conditions and the lack of

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shoes (Lee 2017: 146–9). Additionally, other items recovered from this and other enslaved African American sites, such as pierced coins and glass beads, suggest their usage as amulets and charms, with glass beads also being used to ease teething in babies (Wilkie 1995; Davidson 2004: Lee 2013, 2017). Bodily health was precarious in this context, yet the archaeological evidence provides another way to examine daily life in concert with an archive of suffering and violence: how enslaved laborers could engage in healing practices using material culture and traditional knowledge to achieve wellness outside of the treatment provided by white professional medicine. Miasmas and Perfumes for the Handkerchief The Casselden Place Redevelopment Archaeological Investigation Project has recovered a wealth of data relating to mid-nineteenth- to mid-twentieth-century working-class life in inner-city Melbourne (Murray and Mayne 2001; Davies 2006; Mackay et al. 2006; Murray 2006). At the end of the nineteenth century, Melbourne was one of the largest urban centers in the Southern Hemisphere and a key port city for the exportation of Australian agricultural and mining products around the globe. The area excavated by the project—the Casselden Place site—was decidedly working class at the time, consisting of an area that was largely residential, but also included work and commercial zones (Murray and Mayne 2001; Murray 2006). Historians and the public at large had regarded Casselden Place as a diseaseridden slum occupied by criminals, prostitutes, and the poor (Murray and Mayne 2001; Mayne 2006). Archaeological investigations, however, have afforded ways of reimagining the area as a vanished but vibrant, ethnically diverse, working-class community (Davies 2006; Mackay et al. 2006; Murray 2006). As Murray (2006: 404) notes, while life in Casselden Place was characterized by disease, hardship, and inequity, “These are also people with choices, time for leisure and family, and with sufficient funds to pursue and enjoy them.” Artifacts recovered from the excavations counter popular imaginings of how “poor” people in this community were avid consumers: wine and gin bottles, smoking pipes, Chinese porcelain and coinage, expensive teacups, ink bottles, perfume and cosmetic bottles, gold jewelry, toys, lace-making equipment, and knickknacks are all present in the assemblage (Murray and Mayne 2003; Murray 2006). Relief from bodily ailments was needed at Casselden Place. Approximately a hundred patent medicine bottles were recovered from the excavations (Davies 2006). As discussed in the previous section, nineteenth-century patent medicine was largely composed of alcohol and was advertised with broad claims toward the types of diseases that it could cure, allowing for self-medication. Yet perfume bottles are also indicative of how residents of Casselden Place cared for their bodies. Nearly twenty identifiable perfume bottles from British and

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FIGURE 7.10  Advertisement for Pinaud’s perfumes, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, February 9, 1877.

European perfumers are included in the assemblage, including French perfumes manufactured by Edouard Pinaud and Jean Marie Farina (Davies 2006). Advertisements for Pinaud and other European perfumes “for the handkerchief” were common in Australian newspapers at the time, such as the 1877 advert from The Sydney Morning Herald shown in Figure 7.10. Individuals could use handkerchief perfumes—commonly violet in the nineteenth century—to scent the body, but they could also be placed over one’s nose and mouth to veil the stench of the cities and protect one from miasmas. The miasmic theory of disease that touted that miasmas, or bad smells, caused illness was one belief that initiated the nineteenth-century sanitary reform movement common in urban areas (Crane 2000; Hutchinson 2016). Miasmic theory explained why cholera, typhoid, and other diseases were epidemic in poorer urban areas with overcrowding, poor water drainage, and overflowing privies, such as Casselden Place. Patent medicines were one way to alleviate bodily discomfort from illness, while perfume was another way in which to battle disease. The presence of perfume bottles in the Casselden Place assemblage suggests that fragrance was not only used to scent one’s body, but also as a prophylactic to protect the body from foul air and from diseases entering the body. Amulets and Pierced Coins Individuals commonly used a variety of strategies to protect their physical and mental bodies. These items used to protect the body, oftentimes worn on the

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FIGURE 7.11  Manofica ornaments in silver, bone, and coral. Verona, Italy, nineteenth century. Wellcome Collection, Science Museum, London. CC BY.

body itself, differ from religious medals or crucifixes in that they are not “used as intermediaries between their owner and a higher power” (Deagan 2002: 87). Rather, these items are invested with meanings and beliefs that imbue them with power, sometimes magical in nature, but always protective of the physical body, such as the nineteenth-century Italian manofica ornaments used to protect against the evil eye shown in Figure 7.11. Amulets and pierced coins, often referred to as touchpieces, were also employed in protecting against cholera and other infectious diseases. Linn (2014) discusses the use of touchpieces among Irish immigrants in New York during the nineteenth century to guard against scrofula. African Americans also employed coins as amulets in the nineteenth century as charms to ward off evil spirits or illness (Wilkie 1995; Davidson 2004: 23). Davidson (2004) outlines this kind of practice in his discussion of the presence of pierced coins at an African American cemetery in use in Dallas during the period 1869–1907. He notes (2004: 23) that pierced American coins were recovered from fifteen interments, usually from the neck or ankle region. To trace the origin of this practice among African Americans in the South, Davidson reviewed narratives of former slaves gathered by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s and folklore collections related to the use of coins as charms (Davidson 2004: 23–6). The practice was common among

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African Americans in Dallas and other areas of the South during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when coins were used as charms to ward off evil or to protect against health risks. Pierced coins were placed around the necks of young children for protection during teething and weaning, and adults apparently wore them to ward off rheumatism and other ailments (Davidson 2004: 37–45).

CONCLUSIONS Bodily objects were widely available during the Age of Industry. The growth of manufacture and advertising meant that items such as the humble Prosser button could make their way from their place of production in England to locations in New England or as far away as Mongolia (Sprague 2002). Bodily objects were useful as they attended to all kinds of bodily needs, both tangible and intangible. They were used to cover and heal the body, and also to protect it from spiritual and physical danger. Yet as the diverse examples in this chapter suggest, bodily objects were deeply nuanced items whose functions may or may not relate to meaning for an individual or community. To fully understand their relationship to the body, bodily objects must be understood in the context in which they were produced and used. Finally, bodily objects deserve our attention. Despite challenges of preservation, the archaeology of clothing and adornment is vital to historical interpretations of how sexuality, status, gender, desire, and identity were situated on and in the body during this period. A continually growing body of archaeological research employs different theoretical and methodological perspectives to consider bodily objects, from the gendered significance of dress to the meaning behind a pierced coin. The goal is to be attentive to the object and the body who wore it, and to consider these small finds in light of other forms of material culture and archival resonance.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Object Worlds The Object World of Cowries in Southern New England BARBARA J. HEATH

In 1802, the Reverend Thaddeus Mason Harris, a resident of the town of Dorchester, Massachusetts, made an unusual discovery in a pile of muck he had collected from a nearby “pond-hole” to spread on his garden. The pile attracted the attention of his children, who began “picking from it the small shells called pawpaws, or more properly cowries; and in raking open the pile, they gathered, I believe, more than a quart.” Harris and his family continued to find shells in the coming days, which he identified as Cypraea moneta,1 or as they are commonly known today, money cowries. His curiosity piqued, he visited the site where the mud had been excavated, and found many more cowries there. An elderly neighbor explained to him that the pond had been formed from the head of a creek that had been dammed and filled at some point in the last sixty years. What remained of the creek flowed into the Dorchester Flats, an expanse of tidal marsh separating the neck of land on which he lived from the port city of Boston. Arguing that the deposit was cut off from the sea, and that even when the creek had flowed freely it was only accessible by a small boat, he concluded, “I feel a hesitancy in pronouncing, that the shells were natives of the pond; and yet it is past conjecture how they should have been brought there.” In concluding his letter, which was subsequently published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he added the following useful information:

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The name pawpaw, I believe, is given to the shell, only when the convex part is broken or ground flat, that it may be used by the negroes among us in a game, which perhaps is original to their own country. In Africa and the East Indies, where it passes for money, it is called the cowry. Large quantities of these shells are said to be collected annually in the Maldiva Islands, for exportation to Africa, Bengal, Siam &c. for the purposes of commerce. (Harris 1809: 159–60) By publishing his findings, Harris placed himself as a citizen–scientist within the international discourse on natural history. With the rise of global exploration and trade in the sixteenth century, European mariners had begun to transport exotic seashells in bulk from the East and West Indies and coastal Africa back to Europe, where wealthy collectors purchased them for inclusion in cabinets of curiosities. In the seventeenth century, men of science began to collect, organize, describe, and classify plants and animals. The study of shells developed as a discrete area of interest by the close of that century and expanded in the eighteenth century as enthusiasm for science spread in Europe and among educated leaders of the colonial Americas. A community of scholars introduced the systematic study of mollusks, or “conchology,” facilitated the flow of knowledge on the subject, and published several influential books. People also valued seashells for their rarity and aesthetic value, and they exchanged them as luxury goods through a transatlantic network of collectors, dealers, and natural historians (Dietz 2006: 365; Douglas 2016: 165–7). Harris’s report should be read as part of this scientific discourse. Although mistaken in thinking that they might be native to coastal Massachusetts, his short statement identifies the shells he found to species, associates their use and alteration as “pawpaws” with Africans, alludes to their origins as trade goods, and calls attention to their commercial importance, contributing to conchological scholarship. From a modern perspective, his account complicates popular conceptions of historic New England as a white, Eurocentric, and Christian place, including Africans within his social sphere, exotic goods in his prosaic barnyard, and the commercial economies of the East within his store of knowledge. His account serves as a colorful introduction to the complex story of cowries generally, and it sets the stage for understanding the object world of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century southern New England, in which the stories of these small shells play an important role. Over the last thirty years, scholars have theorized about how people and the social worlds that they construct are dependent on things—broadly defined as “solid entities made or used by humans”—and objects, a particular type of stable, durable thing (Hodder 2012: 1, 7–8, 15; see also Thomas 1991; Miller 2005; Olsen 2013). People employ objects in many ways and assign meanings

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to them that are dependent on their varied physical qualities and contexts of use. For example, a metal button may be understood as an ordinary clothing fastener, a bone button as inexpensive and unfashionable, and a silver button as costly and desirable. However, within a different social group and context, the same metal button can fulfill different roles: due to its reflective qualities and shape, it can be used to conjure the spirit world; or because of its age, its association with a famous person, or the quality of its composition, it can be transformed into a treasure to be curated and displayed. Objects therefore have the potential to possess and communicate multiple meanings that are determined by not only their inherent qualities, but also by their users, the social contexts in which they operate, and their longevity (McCracken 1988; Douglas and Isherwood 2005). The accumulated evidence of use can be discovered on the objects themselves in the form of physical alterations to them incurred by wear, repurposing, or the effects of time, or through shifting associations with other objects with which they are found. We can infer the persistence or fluidity of meaning from these material qualities and relationships, and from socially constructed associations preserved in writing or through the memories of users. It can be said, then, that objects have histories and social lives, and that by studying their biographies or itineraries as they move through and between contexts of use, we can learn about past human behavior (Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986; Joyce and Gillespie 2015). The connections between things and people—based on common associations of use and the social and historical contexts in which they operate—create object worlds. These worlds arise from, and shape, lived reality through the harmony and tension that exist between people and things at particular historical moments (Meskell 2004: 2; Hodder 2012: 1). In this chapter, I reconstruct the social lives of objects that are products of the natural world but are deeply entangled in global and local histories— shells belonging to two species of Indo-Pacific snails, Monetaria moneta and Monetaria annulus, which I, like the Reverend Harris, will generally refer to simply as “cowries” or “money cowries.” I begin with a short description of their characteristics and native range and briefly trace their histories prior to the eighteenth century, turning then to a discussion of the importance of cowries to the transatlantic slave trade and the importance of that trade to New England. Within this frame, I explore their changing social contexts, uses, and values in southern New England from the mid-1700s to the turn of the twentieth century, to consider how they functioned in global and regional commerce; in the sacred realm as ritual objects connecting Africans to the spirit world and to each other; as profane objects of masculine gambling and feminine refinement; and as mnemonics, through which people connected with their personal histories and their collective past.

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COWRIES IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD To understand the social roles of cowries, it is first necessary to explore their natural properties. Monetaria moneta are quite small, ranging in size from ten to forty millimeters, with an average length of twenty-three millimeters (Hogendorn and Johnson 2003: 9–11). They are native to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, populating shallow reefs from East Africa to Southeast Asia and from Northern Australia to western Panama. Most M. moneta in circulation in the early modern world, when shells of small size were prized, were collected in the Maldive Islands, where significantly smaller shells predominate due to climatic conditions. These cowries are generally triangular to oval in shape and are characterized by a glossy surface and pronounced teeth on the ventral side. Shells often exhibit protuberances on the columellar callus—a thickened area around the edge of the dorsal side—on the posterior of the dorsum, and sometimes on the ventral surface. The range of M. annulus is contained within the range of M.  moneta, and this species only extends as far east as Samoa and the Cook Islands (Hogendorn and Johnson 2003: 7–9). In contrast to the bumpy texture of M. moneta, M. annulus shells are smooth and ovoid, and are characterized by the presence of a golden ring enclosing a grayish or purplish– blue dorsum (Figure 8.1). Their ventral side is concave, with less prominent teeth than are seen on M. moneta. The dorsal color fades as the shell ages and

FIGURE 8.1  Monetaria moneta and Monetaria annulus. Photograph: the author.

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weathers. M. annulus shells tend to exhibit less variability in size, and at twentyfour millimeters, they are slightly larger on average than M. moneta (Burgess 1970: 341–2, plate 41; York 1972: 95; Rosenberg 2013a, 2013b). Because of their qualities of color, smoothness, size, and, perhaps most importantly, ventral shape—in which various groups imagine eyes, mouths, or vulvae—money cowries served as ritual objects for thousands of years throughout Asia, northern Africa, and Europe, and as currency in parts of Asia. They were introduced through the trans-Sahara trade in the late first millennium CE to western Sudan, where they were monetized; to the Mali Empire, where they circulated as currency by the 1300s; and to the Kingdom of Benin, where they acquired monetary value through trade with the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century. Their movement prior to 1500 and their subsequent trade from the Maldives and coastal East Africa, through the entrepôts of Western Europe, to West and Central Africa where they circulated as currency during the era of the transatlantic slave trade, have been described in depth elsewhere, as have their non-monetary use and meaning within African societies (Johnson 1970: 22; York 1972; Lovejoy 1974: 569; Falola and Lawuyi 1990; Ogundiran 2002: 438–9; Hogendorn and Johnson 2003; Golani 2011; Yang 2011: 1–3; Heath 2017b; Walvin 2017; Christie and Haour 2018; Haour and Christie 2019). For the most part, the study of cowries in the modern world has focused on their economic role in the transatlantic slave trade and their subsequent adoption by West Africans for divination and propitiatory sacrifices, as symbols of wealth, fertility, abundance, and power, and as media for communication (Falola and Lawuyi 1990; Ogundiran 2002; Hogendorn and Johnson 2003). Scholars have explored their monetary value, specific networks of exchange, and local production of meaning within the Old World. Very limited attention has been paid to the involvement of the Americas in the distribution of cowries as commodities in the transatlantic slave trade and subsequent global exchanges, or to the use and meaning of cowries that arose within specific cultural and historical contexts in the New World. Yet Indo-Pacific cowries have been found in archaeological contexts dating from the late seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries along the eastern seaboard from Massachusetts to Florida, throughout the Caribbean, in the upland South, and across the Great Plains, and they clearly played a role in social and economic relations within the New World. Elsewhere, I have traced their distribution and meanings in Virginia and in the Great Plains (Heath 2016, 2017b). Here, I focus on their roles in the northeast.

COWRIES IN SOUTHEASTERN NEW ENGLAND From its inception, the economy of southeastern New England centered on maritime commerce. Following its settlement in 1630, Boston grew to become

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the largest urban center and port in the region and the seat of government for the Massachusetts Bay Company and, later, Massachusetts. To the south, Newport, Rhode Island, was settled in 1639. By the eighteenth century, the town had become one of the leading seaports in the British mainland colonies of North America. Many other coastal communities, including Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Marblehead, Newburyport, and Salem, Massachusetts; Hartford, New Haven, and New London, Connecticut; and Bristol, Providence, and Warren, Rhode Island, also became important centers of shipbuilding and regional and international trade, including the slave trade (Greene 1968). The systematic study of cowries in the northeast is just beginning. M. moneta, M. annulus, and a few other species of cowries and small gastropods from the Caribbean and Atlantic are present on archaeological sites in southeastern New England dating from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. An understanding of the extent of their use is presently elusive, as information about many shells is doubtlessly buried in unpublished technical literature, while the shells themselves remain forgotten in collections.2 The overview that I present here should be seen as a starting point. Indo-Pacific cowries are associated with archaeological deposits or historic contexts from at least six sites in Boston, one in Dorchester, and one in Nantucket, Massachusetts, and one site in Newport, Rhode Island (Table 8.1). Due to the highly disturbed nature of the urban lots where most are found and the relatively small scale of test excavations at most urban sites, it is difficult to assign precise dates to any of these finds.

TABLE 8.1  Archaeologically recovered cowries from Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Site

Location

Species

Count

African Meeting House

Boston, MA

M. moneta

1

Boston Latin School

Boston, MA

M. moneta

4

Boston Latin School

Boston, MA

Unidentified

2

Clough House

Boston, MA

M. annulus

1

Industrial School for Girls

Dorchester, MA

M. moneta

1

Mill Pond

Boston, MA

M. moneta

1

Pierce–Hichborn House

Boston, MA

M. annulus

5+

Revere House

Boston, MA

M. moneta

1

Revere House

Boston, MA

Unidentified

2

Seneca Boston–Florence Higgenbotham House

Nantucket, MA

M. annulus?

1

Wanton–Lyman–Hazard House

Newport, RI

M. annulus

1

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The Boston Latin School was the first public school in America, founded in 1635. Ten years later, a schoolhouse and a house for the schoolmaster were established. Eight schoolmasters and their households lived in the Schoolmaster’s House until it was razed in 1810. Four M. moneta and two shell fragments have been recovered from the site in deposits likely dating to the eighteenth century (Bagley 2015a: 10, elec. comm. 2018). One of the shell fragments, possibly a detached dorsum, may indicate that someone at the site was intentionally modifying shells. Schoolmaster Nathaniel Williams, who lived in the house from 1708 to 1734, is known to have owned an enslaved man and woman at the time of his death in 1737, and they may have occupied the Schoolmaster’s House during his years of employment. Whether other enslaved individuals lived there during its 165-year history is unknown (von Jena 2018). The Mill Pond, a tidal inlet on the northwest side of the city, was dammed in the 1640s to provide power for a variety of mills and later for rum distilleries. While trash accumulated in the pond throughout its history, the Boston Mill Pond Corporation began intentionally filling the pond in 1807 to create more land for urban expansion. The pond was completely filled by 1828 (Whitehill 1968: 78–84). The site contained one M. moneta that was probably deposited in the last decade of the eighteenth century prior to the large-scale deposition of intentional fill (Poulsen elec. comm. 2013). The Revere House, famed for its association with Revolutionary War hero and craftsman Paul Revere, was occupied from the 1640s to the early twentieth century. An M. moneta was found in topsoil at the site, while an unidentified cowrie was buried with an assemblage of late eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century domestic artifacts within the fill of a cistern. Another unidentified cowrie was found in fill deposited within the basement of a c. 1835 structure standing on the property (Heitert et al. 2014: 56, 70, 138, 162–3). The Pierce–Hichborn House, constructed in about 1711, is located adjacent to the Revere House and was owned for part of its history by a cousin of Paul Revere. Excavations there have yielded five or more M. annulus shells, with a final count awaiting laboratory processing of artifacts collected at the site (Bagley elec. comm. 2018). A single M. annulus was also recovered at the nearby Clough House, built by brick mason Ebenezer Clough c. 1711–1715 and occupied into the twentieth century (Bagley et al. 2016: 13–25). The Revere, Pierce–Hichborn, and Clough houses were first owned by affluent families and transitioned to multifamily tenements during the nineteenth century as the neighborhood became increasingly working class. The African Meeting House, constructed in 1806, was an important religious and community center for Boston’s free black population (Landon and Bulger 2013). An M. moneta lost or discarded sometime in the first half of the nineteenth century was found in a builder’s trench created in 1854 for an adjacent building. That trench intruded into the builder’s trench for the church and may have reincorporated fill from the earlier feature (Landon et al. 2007: 44).

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The Industrial School for Girls opened in Dorchester in 1859 as a place to train and provide moral guidance for orphaned girls or others who lived in poverty. A single M. moneta was recovered at the site in a privy that was filled with artifacts dating from the 1860s to the 1870s (Bagley 2015b: 10, elec. comm. 2018). A possible M. annulus was also excavated from the yard belonging to an African American household at the Seneca Boston–Florence Higgenbotham House on Nantucket (Bulger 2013: 93). Finally, an M. annulus was found beneath the floorboards in the attic of the Wanton–Lyman–Hazard house in Newport, Rhode Island. It is believed to have been placed there in the mid- to late eighteenth century (Taylor elec. comm. 2018). Although the sample of shells is small at this time, it provides clear evidence that cowries were owned by a racially and economically diverse group of people from the eighteenth century to the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. Through this growing body of archaeological evidence, combined with region-specific documentation and broader historical trends, we can begin to piece together the varied meanings of the shells within the object worlds of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century southeastern New England. Since most cowries found on the eastern seaboard are associated historically with the transoceanic networks of Africans, Asians, and Northern Europeans brought about by the slave trade and its aftermath (Heath 2016, 2017b), we will begin there.

SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE TRADE IN NEW ENGLAND The first enslaved Africans probably arrived in Boston in 1638 via the West Indies, carried aboard a ship from Salem, Massachusetts. Relatively small numbers of captives landed in New England over the remainder of the century, with Boston serving as the primary port (Greene 1968: 15, 18, 22). Approximately one in every four enslaved people who arrived in New England from 1700 to 1770 was transshipped from the British colonies of the Caribbean, with the majority of people being carried directly from Africa (O’Malley 2009: 159–65). From the 1700s forward, slave traders delivered a minimum of 1,200 bondspeople to the region each decade, with the largest numbers transported during the second quarter of the eighteenth century, after which importation diminished. The sale of Africans in the region virtually ceased by the 1770s (Piersen 1988: 14–18; O’Malley 2009: 165).3 Information about the places of origin for enslaved Africans brought to New England is sparse. The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database contains information for fifty-eight ships that arrived in the region from 1678 to 1802 directly from Africa. Nearly all disembarked in Rhode Island or Massachusetts.4 Slave traders purchased just over half of the 2,188 enslaved people carried aboard these ships at the Gold Coast; roughly one in five came from Senegambia, and the remaining

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captives were purchased at the Windward Coast, Sierra Leone, and Madagascar (Greene 1968: 22; Transatlantic Slave Trade Database 2016). During the 1720s and 1730s, the peak years in which Massachusetts imported slaves from the West Indies, most of the trade centered on Barbados. Historian Robert Desrochers (2002: 645, 647) estimates that from 40 to 70 percent of newly imported slaves advertised for sale in The Boston Gazette during this period arrived in the city from the Caribbean. If the origins of people transported north followed the general trends of slaves imported into Barbados during this period—and there is no reason to doubt that they did—the new arrivals contributed significantly to the ethnic diversity of the Massachusetts enslaved population, including among them significant numbers of people from the Bight of Biafra, the Bight of Benin, and West Central Africa (O’Malley 2014: 188; Transatlantic Slave Trade Database 2016). Although few in overall numbers, most Africans and their descendants lived in concentrated communities in the coastal cities, within major river valleys, and in southeastern Rhode Island, where numerous provisioning plantations operated in the eighteenth century (Piersen 1988: 14; Fitts 1996). The numbers of imported Africans—never more than about 3 percent of the total population—belie the profound impact that the slave trade had on the economy and regional culture of coastal New England (Fitts 1996: 55). In the  major ports of Boston and Newport, as well as in smaller centers,5 merchants invested heavily in transatlantic and Caribbean trade (Greene 1968: 27–8; Thomas 1997: 260–1; Transatlantic Slave Trade Database 2016). Boston and other port cities housed wealthy owners, investors, and ship’s officers, but also a large population who made their living facilitating the trade. Merchants hired shipwrights, cordwainers, and sailmakers to build and maintain their ships, longshoremen to load and unload cargo, and captains and mariners to man them. Distillers depended on the trade with the plantation colonies of the Caribbean to transform molasses into rum, which was then shipped to West Africa to trade for slaves (Greene 1968: 23–4). Farmers throughout the region, but particularly the plantations of southern Rhode Island, harvested cereal crops, prepared dairy products, raised livestock, and salted and packed meat to supply ships bound for the sugar colonies and West Africa. Fishermen along the coast netted, dried, and salted Atlantic cod, mackerel, and herring to sell as food for enslaved laborers in the southeast and Caribbean (Greene 1968: 24–5; Fitts 1996: 54–5; O’Malley 2014: 204). After the abolition of slavery in the New England states in the late eighteenth century and the end of the legal importation of enslaved Africans into the USA in 1808, trade to Asia flourished alongside existing fishing and whaling industries. Some Yankee merchants continued in the slave trade. Seven ships from Boston, three from New Bedford, Massachusetts, and two from Bristol, Rhode Island, delivered over 5,000 Africans to the Caribbean and Brazil from

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1810 to 1860, despite international efforts to end the trade (Transatlantic Slave Trade Database 2016).

COWRIES IN MOTION Set against this backdrop of global commerce and human suffering, the availability of cowries in southeastern New England becomes clear. The likely source of Reverend Harris’s unexpected deposit of shells in his muck pile was Boston Harbor, where ships regularly arrived and departed bearing quantities of goods imported from Europe and exported to the Caribbean and the African coast for sale in the slave trade. As currently no systematic studies of the volume of shells brought to individual ports are available, anecdotal evidence must suffice. In January 1734, Captain Samuel Rhodes sailed from Boston to St. Eustatius aboard the Africa. “Cowreys” were included among his cargo of “Fish, Candles, Madiera wine, Shoes, Desks, Silver Smiths ware, Pork, Oyl, Staves, Bricks, Lead, Brass, Steel, Iron, Pewter, Beads … Musketts and Dry Goods,” which he sold for rum and “dry goods” to trade in the Gambia (Ford and Rhodes 1930: 136–9). Although the quantity of cowries was not specified, they were typically packed in bags, casks, chests, or hogsheads by the hundred weight (cwt.) equal to 112 pounds, or by some fraction thereof, down to a quarter cwt. (twentyeight pounds) (Heath 2016: 36). At an estimated 200–400 shells per pound (Hogendorn and Johnson 2003: 114, 134), it is likely that, at minimum, the Africa carried 5,600–11,200 shells, and may have carried many thousand more. In 1795, The Columbian Centinel (November 25, 1795) advertised a “quantity of Cowries suitable for the West-India and African markets” for purchase at Foster’s Wharf in Boston. Ten years later, “a few thousand cwt. of Cowries” were advertised for sale at No. 6 India Wharf in the same city, translating at minimum to nearly 90 million M. moneta or about 45 million M. annulus in that single lot (New-England Palladium, October 22, 1805). The shells were so integral to New England commerce that even the poet–philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson noted the arrival of barrels of cowries in the coastal port of New Bedford in a collection of essays first published in 1860 (Emerson 1860: 11). Vast numbers of cowries must have arrived in Boston and Newport during the height of the city’s participation in the slave trade in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Most were transported outbound on Yankee ships en route to the Caribbean or made their way directly to Africa. Some doubtlessly entered circulation within the coastal port towns of New England, while others may have been lost overboard or discarded in and around their wharves and harbors. While it is impossible to know how the shells that Reverend Harris found came to rest in a pond in Dorchester, they may have been transported with other sediments dredged from Boston Harbor or collected from the Flats and used to transform wetlands into farm fields as the village expanded. There,

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as at the Mill Pond, discarded cowries were incorporated into the processes of earthmoving and filling that literally transformed the landscape of the city from a narrow peninsula in the seventeenth century to the sprawling landmass that took shape over the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Whitehall 1968: 84; Seasholes 1988). The shells used to fill Harris’s pond had the dorsal surface removed, transforming them into “pawpaws.” At least four perforated cowries have been recovered archaeologically in the region (Table 8.1). Historically, Africans who used cowries as currency valued and traded them in bulk, with shells circulating in bags or on bunches of strings. They created an opening by cutting, chipping, or grinding the dorsal side of the shell prior to stringing it. Eighteenth-century pawpaws may have originated through these practices (Basden 1921: 198; Polyani 1966: 181; Falola and Lawuyi 1990: 31; Hogendorn and Johnson 2003: 120).

COWRIES AND SPIRITUALITY In addition to being strung for currency, shells were worn on the body, used in architecture, and incorporated into ritual objects and actions. Evidence for such ritual action may have been preserved in an assemblage of objects that included a perforated M. annulus shell discovered at the Wanton–Lyman–Hazard House in Newport, Rhode Island. The shell was found with broken window glass, glass beads, fragments of Chinese porcelain, wooden buttons, a brass button shank, a wrought rosehead nail, eggshell, straight pins, unidentified shell fragments, and a piece of cording associated with locally made blue-and-white checked cloth believed to date to the mid- to late eighteenth century. Rodent bones, corncobs, a peach pit, and fragments of wood and plaster were found nearby. This group of objects has been interpreted as an nkisi—a spiritually charged bundle that can be traced to Kongo practices of spirit management and protection—made and used by an enslaved resident of the house (Garland 2013; Taylor elec. comm. 2018). If that interpretation is correct, the bundle’s placement in the attic, where Africans held in bondage might have slept, speaks to the strategies that they deployed to counter the oppressive intimacy and psychological and physical control that resulted from forced cohabitation with white masters (Fitts 1996; see also Leone 2005). If the M. annulus in Rhode Island is linked to spiritual practices originating in the Congo basin, accounts from Massachusetts suggest an association between cowries and enslaved people brought to New England from the Bight of Benin. The use of the term “pawpaws” to describe cowries, and the game in which they were employed, began at least as early as the mid-eighteenth century. “A Description of an Election Day, As Observed in Boston,” a poem written about 1760, satirized the behavior of participants in Artillery Day, a popular holiday

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at the end of May that was celebrated annually until 1831. The verses describe the mixing of “high, low, rich and poor; squaws, negroes, deputies in scores” who met on Boston Common, where “there all day long they sit & drink, Swear, sing, play paupaw, dance and stink, there Bacchus holds his court” (Morison 1917: 60–1). A later account of the holiday recounted the story of “a negro boy, William Read,” who blew up a ship in Boston Harbor in 1817 because he was not allowed to go to the festival and “shake paw-paw” (Shurtleff 1873: 46). A third account notes that African American residents of Boston walked the Mall and Common “to buy gingerbread and beer with the best of folks, and mingle in the mysteries of paw paw” (Hallowell Gazette, July 26, 1826: 2). The surviving language around the use of cowries by Africans and their descendants for gaming is the language of educated white Bostonians, who recorded the events with a privileged and condescending eye. While some white observers, including Harris, refer to gaming or “playing paupaw,” others describe shaking the shells and refer to their “mysteries.” Based on these sources, historian William Piersen (1988: 102) has suggested that the game originated among Africans brought to Boston from the ports of Popo, and that it had its roots in divination practices. The Popo Kingdom, located in present-day coastal Togo, was composed of the communities of Grand or Great Popo, Little Popo, and Agoue settled on the western shores of the Bight of Benin. During the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, regional warfare provided a steady source of captives who were sold to transatlantic traders, with the names “Popo” and “Pawpaw” given to these forced Atlantic migrants (Goodfriend 1992: 114). Within an already densely settled urban landscape, people of diverse religious beliefs and practices, experiencing the effects of warfare and involuntary displacement, came into frequent contact. Vodun from the Fon Kingdom of Dahomey, and Ifá from the Oyo Empire of Yorubaland, in addition to Catholicism introduced by the Portuguese, coexisted and shaped the beliefs and practices of this region (Kea 2015: 116–17). Both Vodun and Ifá were grounded in the belief in a Supreme Being and Creator who was served by hundreds of magical agents known as lwa among the Fon and the orishas among the Yoruba practitioners of Ifá. Each of these anthropomorphized natural forces was associated with a particular set of stories, places, objects, colors, and practices (Bascom 1980: 32–52; Fernandez Olmos et al. 2011: 39–40, 120, 124–8). Aspects of each cosmology survived the Middle Passage and were recombined with systems of belief from other areas of West Africa, Europe, and North America. In the nineteenth-century Caribbean and Brazil, shared beliefs became codified in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Regla de Ocho or Santería, and Brazilian Candomblé, all of which flourish to the present. Divination was, and remains, a widely practiced system of knowledge acquisition and communication that employs animals and objects as

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intermediaries between the human and spirit worlds. Through the manipulation of objects within set routines, the diviner and his or her client operate in liminal spaces to answer questions or interpret “cryptic metaphorical messages” (Peek 1991: 2). Among the Yoruba and other neighboring groups, diviners toss sixteen palm nuts or cowries, or chains of eight half-seed shells, to communicate with the orishas. Questions are addressed by the combination of positions—known as figures—that the objects assume when they come to rest and associated verses that interpret these figures. The figures share three basic qualities: four objects form the core group to be interpreted; each of the objects within the group can take two different forms; and the sequence of forms that results from the toss is meaningful (Bascom 1969: 10). Ifá divination, based on the casting of sixteen cowries or nuts, is practiced by a specialist on ritual occasions and addresses particular deities. Obi divination is also used among the Yoruba. It can be practiced by any believer, but is a more restricted system, since no verses are used to aid in their interpretation (Bascom 1969: 11). In the New World, both the number of deities and the systems of divinations used to communicate with them changed. Enslaved people continued to seek guidance from spiritual forces that fit their new circumstances and abandoned those that did not. These New World practices included Obi divination, where four coconut pieces or cowries—the same number of shells described as being used to “play paupaw”—are used to communicate with the orishas (Fernandez Olmos et al. 2011: 70–1). One of the Old World orishas who was carried to the New World is Shango, the protector of hunters, fishermen, and warriors. He is a deity associated with womanizing and drink, “challenges and dares,” music, drumming, thunder and lightning, and the numbers four and six (Fernandez Olmos et al. 2011: 51). Although it is impossible to know from the limited evidence available if the shakers of pawpaw on Boston Common were communicating specifically with him, the combination of people from the Bight of Benin (where divination was widely practiced), cowries (common media of divination), the act of casting or throwing the shells, the number of shells thrown, and the occasion on which they were publically thrown—a popular festival among Africans living in Boston that involved drinking and music—strongly suggests that West Africans openly engaged with the spirits under the guise of “playing pawpaw.” The use of red sealing wax to fill the dorsal side of cowries later used for gaming may have also been customary in playing pawpaw, and that combination of colors—red and white—also has strong associations with Shango (Fernandez Olmos et al. 2011: 51).

COWRIES AND GAMING Shango’s associated behaviors, if not the spirit himself, seem to have hung over the casting of cowries in later generations, even as the intentions behind the

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activity changed. White New Englanders appropriated and reinterpreted the practice for gambling sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, by which time pawpaws had also become known as “props” (Independent Chronicle & Boston Patriot, July 9, 1817). The gendered use of cowries for gaming became widespread in the early nineteenth century. White boys and men gambled with them covertly aboard ship and in the streets, alleys, docks, and taverns of Boston and the surrounding coastal communities of eastern Massachusetts (Anonymous 1846; Adams 1872: 166–7, 171, 183, 187, 191–2, 197). In seeking to understand the origins of the game, Robert Stearn described the practice of using four wax-filled M. moneta as dice (Figure 8.2). The … “props” were shaken in the hand and dropped or cast from the hand with a somewhat twisted motion of the wrist, so as to scatter them a little. When thrown, if the props turned up two sides one way and two the other, or two and two, the count was one—this was called a nick; if all four came the same side up, the count was four, and was called a “browner;” if the shells or props fell three one side and one the other, it was called an “out,” and the props were passed to the next player. The props continued with the same player until he made an out, and the number to make a game was agreed upon, before the playing commenced … (Stearn 1890: 354) Unscrupulous players could alter their props by adding a layer of lead beneath the sealing wax, effectively loading them so that the outcome of each toss was predictable. Newspapers and other accounts from the 1830s to the 1850s describe arrests, fines, and jailing for props players, including one suspect in a notorious murder trial who was described as having a set of false props in his pocket (Newburyport Herald, August 24, 1830; Anonymous 1846; Daily Atlas, February 25, 1850; Roney 1851). Social reformers throughout this period associated the game of props with inebriation, profanity, debauchery, vice, and misery, pointing to its corrupting influence on boys and formerly

FIGURE 8.2  Making “props.” From Stearn (1890: 354).

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respectable young men (Salem Gazette, November 23, 1830; Haverill Gazette, November 16, 1833; Providence Patriot, May 4, 1833; Chaplain’s Report 1864). Playing on Sunday was particularly objectionable, and one account describes the discovery of a group of banking and insurance clerks gambling in the coastal community of Hull in the 1820s. “Such a scattering as there was, such a blushing and burning, and such elongated visages … it was considered at the time one of the most unfortunate occurrences of the season” (Homer 1848). By the 1830s, “shaking props” had moved inside, joining roulette, ten pins, billiards, faro, and other card and dice games as a popular pastime in smoke-filled gaming houses. The accoutrements of the game had also become formalized, with shells being cast on long tables covered in green baize, the precursors to craps tables found in modern casinos (Providence Patriot, May 4, 1833: 1; Robinson 1851: 45, 64; St. Clair 1854: 44). The game was popular in Massachusetts through the 1850s, and then rapidly went out of fashion. The abandonment of props playing may at least in part be attributed to the actions of women, who were active campaigners in the temperance movements that spread throughout New England in the nineteenth century. Campaigns against alcohol and the spaces in which it was consumed also took aim at the associated vices of prostitution and gambling, perhaps contributing to the prevalence and tone of reports pertaining to props that appeared in newspaper accounts dating from the 1820s to the 1850s. The reasons behind the decline in reported incidents that occurs after about 1860 require further research, but may be due to shifting social priorities, changes in the structure of organized gaming, and even the invention of synthetics such as celluloid and ivorine in the 1860s that led to the mass production of dice. Mass-marketed games also took hold in the second half of the nineteenth century. The earliest American board game, developed by the daughter of a clergyman in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1830s and published in 1843, focused on domestic morality. Children negotiated the board to avoid sins on their journey to heaven, using a spinner or teetotum to avoid the use of dice or cowries that were associated with gambling (Flanagan 2009: 77–80). The transformation of cowries from instruments of vice to domestic toys for the amusement of children followed the rise of massmarketed games. These shells were widely exhibited at the Columbian Exposition in 1893 with games such as Pachisi and “The Crazy Game”—a Syrian version of mancala—and alongside dice and knucklebones in displays featuring games of chance (Culin 1893: 207–15). By the early twentieth century, if not before, cowries were distributed by gaming companies in bags and cardboard boxes with printed labels for use as tokens and as counters for card games. A turnof-the-century compilation of pastimes describes a game where participants competed to correctly guess the properties of an assortment of objects, such as

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the number of cowries in a bag, the weight of a stone, or the length of a piece of string (Lucas and Lucas 1903). They had become household commonplaces, ready-to-hand objects that could be used by young and old alike.

COWRIES AND DOMESTICITY The association of seashells, including cowries, with domesticity, education, and middle-class respectability came about primarily through white women’s participation in shell collecting and the “feminine arts,” which included shellwork (Figure 8.3). In the eighteenth century, the practice of shell-work joined the ranks of embroidery, japanning, and other handicrafts as a desirable skill for genteel women. While some men created and displayed elaborate architectural elements and models made of shell, women were the primary producers and consumers of items for domestic use made with seashells. Feminine shell-work took a variety of forms along a spectrum of complexity and cost, from the elaborate creation of freestanding floral arrangements made of local and exotic shells, to the intricate—and expensive—arrangement of shells by a small number of aristocratic women to line the walls and ceilings of domestic interiors and shell houses and grottoes on British estates (Pearce 1999; Walker 2000: 246).

FIGURE 8.3  Collection of shells used for shell-work. Photograph: the author.

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Beginning in the colonial era in New England and extending into the nineteenth century, wealthy girls were instructed in shell-work in private schools and by tutors who also included lessons in needlework, knitting, lacemaking, painting on glass, waxwork, and filigree (Newport Mercury, May 31, 1796; Columbian Centinel, March 31, 1821; Connecticut Gazette (published as the New-London Gazette and General Advertiser), June 29, 1831; Newport Mercury, July 26, 1845; Dow 1927: 275; Seybolt 1935: 35, 42–4, 89). The education of a young woman was designed in part “to fill up, in a tolerable agreeable way, some of the many solitary hours that [she] must necessarily pass at home” (Dr. Gregory 1774: 30, as cited in Edwards 2006: 14). While ostensibly a marker of domestic achievement, shell-work also gave women an entry into the scientific realm, providing them with an excuse to observe, collect, and process mollusks from local beaches and to recognize and seek rare species of shells from dealers. By combining specimens from far-flung oceans, modifying them through clipping and buffing, and wiring, waxing, or gluing them into orderly arrangements by size, color, and species within each piece of craftwork, women domesticated the natural world and combined the exotic with the everyday (Urbino and Day 1860: 299–300; Anonymous 1875: 17–18; Fennetaux 2009: 101–3). While shell-work could still be considered as “an elegant drawing room occupation” in the nineteenth century (Anonymous 1856:16), by mid-century it had also become associated with seaside travel, kitsch, and other markers of middle-class life. “The term ‘shell-work’ may, perhaps, suggest to our readers those gay and sometimes gaudy, but often very striking groups of brightly-tinted shell flowers, which we meet with at most watering-places,” opined the author of Elegant Arts for Ladies (1856: 16), while the heroine of a mid-century British satire encountered “cockle pincushions, shell dolls, and cats made of putty and periwinkles—articles interesting from association but of small intrinsic value” on the mantelpiece of her holiday cottage on the Isle of Wight (Smith 1848: 312). Consumers could purchase shell dolls made in Germany or France, “sailor’s Valentines” crafted in Barbados, or prepackaged assortments of seashells from which they could fashion their own shell-studded mirrors, boxes, dollhouses, and miniature furniture (Figure 8.3). Money cowries, although not dominant, are present in a range of surviving examples of these exuberant pieces of Victorian craftwork, including dolls’ furniture, moneyboxes, chests, and pincushions (Figure 8.4). Boxes of shells, including cowries, were included in shell-work kits sold by Sears, Roebuck and Company into the early twentieth century (Sears, Roebuck and Company 1910: 416). The M. moneta recovered archaeologically from the privy at the Industrial School for Girls in Dorchester, Massachusetts, was associated with two other species of Atlantic cowries, two possible coffee bean trivia (Pusula pediculus) and an unidentified Triviidae (Elizabeth Quinlan elec. comm. 2018). Together, this group may represent the

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FIGURE 8.4  Seated shell-work figures. Note the use of cowries for the legs of the sofa. Courtesy of the Strong, Rochester, New York.

shell-working efforts of disadvantaged young women learning the skills that school matrons believed would gain them respectability. Craft activities may also explain the presence of a possible M. annulus shell recovered from a nineteenth-century surface at the Seneca Boston– Florence Higgenbotham House on Nantucket (Bulger 2013: 93). Although the context cannot be firmly dated, the shell is associated with multigenerational households of free people of color. Gendered constructions of identity within nineteenth-century African American communities in New England emphasized the importance of domesticity and respectability among women in response to overt anti-black racism within the broader society. Mary Ann Boston, a member of the family who owned the house, was among the earliest educators at a school established for free children of color, teaching needlework to female students (Bulger 2013: 38–43). Alternatively, the shell may have been used for adornment, worn alone or as a composite piece of jewelry. Archaeologically recovered money cowries from Parker Academy, an integrated, coeducational antebellum school in southwestern Ohio, from antebellum slave quarters and the mansion house garden at the Hermitage in Tennessee, and from two nineteenthto early twentieth-century sites occupied by people of color associated with

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the University of Virginia in Charlottesville suggest that African Americans used these shells long after they had ceased to circulate as part of the slaverelated economies of the eastern seaboard (Ford 2003: 125; Ford elec. comm. 2014; Galle elec. comm. 2014; Brunache elec. comm. 2016; DAACS 2018). Cowries of species other than M. moneta and M. annulus have also been found at antebellum quarters on plantations including the Hermitage, Ashland–Belle Helene in Louisiana, and Bennehan in North Carolina, and in a postbellum context at Oakley Plantation in Louisiana (Singleton 1991: 157; Wilkie 1995: 146). Together, their presence suggests that in the nineteenth century cowries took on an associative rather than literal meaning among African-descended people. In addition to the functions they served in the popular imagination of the period, cowries, broadly defined, may have performed important memory work for African Americans arising from their historical and spiritual associations with West Africa and with more recent ancestors who had acquired them and passed them down through the generations. While the historical and cultural role of Africa in defining selfhood and citizenship in America was contested by African American intellectuals in the postbellum period, artists, writers, and civil rights activists of the “New Negro” movement and Harlem Renaissance turned to African themes in the early twentieth century to build a new representation of black identity. Aaron Douglas, Allan Randall Freelon, and Hale Woodruff created powerful images blending the rhythms, geometry, and fluidity of West African art with themes that combined stylized African landscapes and symbols with contemporary American experience. Among these works is Freelon’s 1921 drawing The New Negro, in which he juxtaposed a black woman, walking through the horrors of a landscape punctuated by the corpses of lynching victims, with a stylized African mask adorned with cowries (Gates 1988: 135). The deployment of African-derived and African-imagined objects in identity-building for diasporic people in the USA moved from the realm of visual arts, literature, and music into popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s, when cowries took their place alongside kente cloth, cornrows, and dreadlocks as signifiers of a collective Black identity (Matory 2015: 456–8; Walvin 2017: 52). The use of cowries to signal African American identity remains strong in today’s popular culture, and archaeologists routinely draw on these modern associations to interpret shells found on archaeological sites along the eastern seaboard as historic markers of African people at a given site. The memory of cowries’ use by white merchants, slave traders, gamblers, and ladies in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New England does not fit with our perception of these groups today, and has not, for the most part, persisted.

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CONCLUSIONS Tracing the use and meanings of cowries from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries demonstrates the myriad ways in which people have attached and reattached significance to these superficially simple, natural objects. Cowries were imbued with specific and sometimes contradictory meanings shaped by particular places and historical circumstances. This object world of early industrial New England was created by materials and large-scale processes that enabled the commodification of black bodies through international maritime trade, and that transformed the landscapes of Boston and surrounding towns through earthmoving and depositional processes that literally underpinned urban growth. In this context, where merchants bought and sold millions of shells as part of a network that stretched from the East Indies to the Caribbean and West Africa, cowries’ value lay in their volume and uniformity. For enslaved Africans and their descendants living in coastal cities, however, cowries were bound up in intimate practices of cultural expression and social exchange that both codified and challenged boundaries of ethnicity, race, and class. Meanings resided in individual shells or small numbers of cowries that served as important mediators with the spirit world, tools for conveying middle-class respectability, and objects with which to connect with the past. For white men and boys, cowries could be part of a landscape of vice experienced in back alleys, smokefilled taverns, and crowded jail cells; while for wealthy and middling women and girls, shell-work helped fill long hours of domestic tedium, provided access to scientific inquiry through a socially sanctioned pursuit, and affirmed a respectable level of education and cleverness. Belonging exclusively to neither rich nor poor, black nor white, men nor women, young nor old, the cowrie eludes easy explanation. Therein lies its fascination, and its relevance as an entrée into the object world of southern New England’s recent past.

NOTES

Chapter 3 1. Meaning it was not liable to suddenly electrically fail. 2. Buckley appears to have had this slightly backwards, as the sjambok (as the whip made infamous by apartheid police is rightly called in South Africa) is based on an earlier design that was imported to South Africa. Originally called the cambuk, the whip first appeared in the country in the seventeenth century alongside enslaved migrants from Java and the Malay Peninsula. The cambuk whip would therefore appear more likely to be one of the local Malay forms for which gutta-percha was traditionally employed than a new design for the British market. 3. The author can find no other reference to this donation and can only assume that this is a mistake on Oxley’s part, the letters RSA (for Royal Society of Arts) somehow having been transposed as RAS (for Royal Asiatic Society) somewhere along the way. 4. In the nineteenth century, the position of secretary was equivalent to our CEO. 5. One of the famous Siemens brothers. 6. At the time, the Spanish dollar was the most widely accepted coinage in the region. It remained so until the introduction of the British Trade Dollar in 1895. 7. Unlike the markets for sago and rice, which were farmed by some of Indonesia’s more sedentary ethnic groups and subject to some of the worst ravages of exploitative economics (Cleary 1996). 8. Who first established a British presence on Singapore. 9. From which quinine (and tonic water) is derived. 10  . British commercial attempts were not to begin until 1915, when TELCON established its own plantation in Malaya. Gutta-percha production would not come online until the late 1920s.

Chapter 5 1. While the firm was founded in 1857, Nathaniel Currier’s work as a publisher predates this partnership by several decades.

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2. The two New York landscapists best known for their studios were Frederic Edwin Church, whose studio space was decorated with potted palms in connection to his association with tropical scenery, and Albert Bierstadt, famous for painting the far west, who hung in his studio animal heads and Native American goods collected on his many expeditions. 3. The abundant sources on nineteenth-century American monetary debates include Tschachler (2010), Ritter (1997), Livingston (1986), Nugent (1968), Nussbaum (1957), and Carruthers and Babb (1996).

Chapter 8 1. Now classified as Monetaria moneta. 2. More recently discovered cowries have been published via social media due to a growing scholarly and popular interest in the histories of Africans in the northeast. 3. Both Piersen (1988: 18) and O’Malley (2009: 165) indicate that the slave trade to New England ended during the American Revolution, but the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database contains records of two shipments of enslaved Africans from the Gold Coast to Rhode Island aboard the Eagle in 1801 and 1802 (Records 36750 and 36760). 4. Thirty-one arrived in Rhode Island, twenty-four in Massachusetts, two in Connecticut, and one in New Hampshire. 5. These include the Massachusetts ports of Charlestown, Marblehead, Newburyport, Salem, and Kittery (now in Maine); Portsmouth (or Piscataqua) in New Hampshire; the ports of Hartford, New Haven, and New London in Connecticut; and Bristol, Providence, and Warren in Rhode Island (Greene 1968: 27–8).

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Maggie M. Cao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Lu Ann De Cunzo is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Delaware. Barbara Heath is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee. Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology in the School of Archaeology, Curator of World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and Fellow of St. Cross College at Oxford University. Diana Dipaolo Loren is Senior Curator at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. Cassie Newland is Senior Lecturer in Heritage and Public History at Bath Spa University. Timothy J. Scarlett is Associate Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology in the Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Technological University. Steven A. Walton is Associate Professor of History in the Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Technological University.

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207

Carolyn L. White is Mamie Kleberg Professor of Historic Preservation in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Nevada, Reno. William Whyte is Professor of Social and Architectural History at St. John’s College, Oxford University.

INDEX

advertising 7, 33, 135, 147, 152, 164 African Meeting House, Boston 142, 161 agricultural workers 29, 30 Alison, Archibald 124 Almeida, Dr. 59–60 amulets 152–4 Apollo Association for the Promotion of the Fine Arts 98–9 apprentices 51 architecture 20, 27, 111–33 Arcularius, Lucius 11 art 89–109 casta paintings 137 as a commodity 90–1, 96, 97, 108 “folk” painters 92–4 landscape painting 96–8 mass-produced 94–5 museums 96 trompe l’oeil 102–6 unions 98–9 Art Union of London 98 asylums 126 awls 145–6 Banks, Joseph 71–2 Barnum, P. T. 32 Beecher, Catherine 26–7 Bentham, Jeremy 26, 113–14 Berlage, H. P. 122 Bewley, Charles 62 bibelot 95

Bierstadt, Albert 97 blueprints 51–2 board games 169 bodily objects 135–54 Boito, Camillo 128 books, technical education 48–9 Boston, Mary Ann 172 Boston African Meeting House 142, 161 Industrial School for Girls 145, 162 Latin School 161 Boullée, Etienne-Louis 124 Bremner, G. A. 114–15 British Museum 17 British North Borneo Company 71, 75 brothels 124, 142–3 buckles 7–8 building restoration 130 bungalows 127 buttons 7–8, 144–5 California Gold rush 27 capitalism 16, 20, 21, 23, 24, 31, 33, 42 Caritat, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de 18 Casselden Place Redevelopment Archaeological Investigation Project 151 casta paintings 137 Chase, William Merritt 100–2 Chaux new town 124 childhood, redefinition 28

INDEX

Christianity 26–7 Christy, Thomas 76 church architecture 125–6 circuses 32 civil engineering 49 cleanliness 143, 146–7 clocks 47 clothing 6–9, 18, 139–46 Clough House 161 coins, pierced 152–4 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 126–7 Cologne Cathedral 128 colonialism 3, 18, 137 Colvin, Sidney 129 commerce 22–3 commodities 31, 33, 90–1, 96, 97, 108 consumption 22–3, 33, 35–6, 37 Contrasts (Pugin) 111–13 Copley, John Singleton 91–2 corporate structure 31, 33 corsets 142 “coupons” 97–8 cowries 155–74 craft trade 5 criminal justice system 20 Crookes, William 28 Crystal Palace 116 Currier, Nathaniel 95 Currier & Ives 94–5 Darwin, Charles 31 Davis, George Grove 11 Deetz, James 81, 82–7 design schools 51 desire 16 dining rooms 29 divination 166–7 douching syringes 143 drawing, technical 51–2 Dresden Opera House 121 Duchamp, Marcel 108 economic objects 57–76 Edmonds, Francis 99 education, technical 47–53 Eiffel Tower 116 electrical insulator 60–1, 62, 76 ells 22 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 164

209

Empathy Theory 124–5 Endicott Street Brothel 143 engineering architecture and 127 civil engineering 49 education 49–51 etiquette 18–19, 25 everyday objects 77–88 evolutionary theory 31–2 exchange 22–3 Expedition of Humphry Clinker, The (Smollett) 19 factory work 23–4 Faithful Colt, The (Harnett) 103–4 fans 142 Faraday, Michael 60 farmers 29, 30 “folk” painters 92–4 Fon 166 Fort Independence 138 Freelon, Allan Randall 173 gaming 167–70 Garnier, Charles 123 gender roles 18, 19, 26–7 “Georgian worldview” 83 Glasgow University 119 Gothic Revival 123 Granite Creek station 9–14 grave markers 84 gutta-percha 57–76 Gutta Percha Company 62 Haberle, John 104, 106 Hancock, Charles 60, 62, 63 handkerchief perfumes 152 Harding, Chester 94 Harnett, William 103–4 Harris, Thaddeus Mason 155–6 Hartman, Saidiya 150 Hatcher, William Henry 60 Herder, J. G. 18 Homer, Winslow 100 homespun movement 6, 7, 8–9 Hood’s Sarsaparilla 148 Hooker, Sir William 72 Hooker’s Division 142–3 Hope, Alexander Beresford 121

210

House and House-Life of the American Aborigines (Morgan) 129 houses design 27–8 home furnishings 28–9 improvement ethic 22 rural 29 Hugo, Victor 132–3 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 126 Huntington, Collis 97 Ifá divination 166, 167 Image Pedlar, The (Edmonds) 99–100 Imitation (Haberle) 104, 106 imperialism 18 improvement 19–20, 21–2 self-improvement 20, 25 India Rubber, Gutta Percha and Telegraph Works 63–5 indigenous architecture 129 indigenous souvenirs 94 Industrial School for Girls, Boston 145, 162 Ingres, Jean August Dominique 96 insulator material 60–1, 62, 76 international exhibitions 32, 33–4 iron 115–17, 118, 119 Isle of Lewis 118 it-narratives 19 J & T Forster and Co. 60 Jackson, Thomas Graham 120 Jarves, James Jackson 96 Kang Youwei 127 Kant, Immanuel 17, 19 Kay-Shuttleworth, Sir James P. 146 Kemalettin, Mimar 129 Kew Gardens 71–4 Labrouste, Henri 122 landscape painting 96–8 Latin School, Boston 161 learning, technical 47–53 Ledoux, Claude-Nicholas 124 lithographs 95 McCormick Harvesting Machine Company 34 McCracken, Grant 24

INDEX

machinery 23–4, 40–1 machine tools 45–7 management 43–4 Manet, Edouard 89–90, 102 manufactories 41 manufacturing 23–4, 42–3 Marey, Etienne-Jules 43 Marx, Karl 31, 42 mass-produced art 94–5 meal times 29 mechanization 23–4, 30 medicine 146–54 miasmas 152 mokuk 94 money, paper 105–6 Montgomerie, W. 59 Morgan, Lewis Henry 129 Morris, William 130 motherhood 26–7 Mud Lake Massacre 12 museums 17, 26, 33, 96 Muybridge, Eadweard 43 Newall, R. S. 59, 61 Newton, Isaac 124 nkisi 165 Nobles, William H. 10 Nobles Trail 10 Notre-Dame de Paris (Hugo) 132–3 Notting Dale estate 118 Obi divination 167 objecthood 15–37 Oikéma brothel 124 On the Origin of Species (Darwin) 31 orishas 166, 167 Page, John 139–40 Palace of Westminster 117 Panopticon 26, 113–14 paper money 105–6 Paris Opera House 123 parlors 29 pawpaws 156, 165–6, 167, 168 perfume 151–2 personal adornment 6–9 personal hygiene 143, 146–7 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich 52 Phillips, Ammi 92–3 philosophes 17–18

INDEX

photographs 29, 43, 131 Pierce, Charles S. 34 pierced coins 152–4 Pierce–Hichborn House 161 “Piggeries, The” 118 Pitt Rivers, A. L. F. 32 Pocock, W. F. 125 Pop Art 108 Popo Kingdom 166 prints mass-produced art 94–5 technical resources 48–9 “props” 168–9 Prosser buttons 144–5 Proust, Marcel 131 Pugin, Augustus 111–14 Purcellite 76 racism 18, 20, 35–6, 137 radiocarbon dating 78 Raffles, Sir Stamford 73 religion 26–7, 30 restoration 130 Revere House 161 Rhodes, Samuel 164 Richards, William Trost 97–8 Ringstrasse, Vienna 119 Robinson Crusoe’s Money (Wells) 106 Romanticism 126–7 Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 71–4 Ruskin, John 34, 106–8, 119, 121, 122, 131 St Mark’s, Venice 131 salons 96 sans culottes 141 sarsaparilla 148–50 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich 121 science natural world 17 soil science 54–5 “Scientific Management” 45 Scott, George Gilbert 119, 130 self-discipline 20 self-improvement 20, 25 Semper, Gottfried 119, 120–1 Seneca Boston–Florence Higgenbotham House 162 Senft, Ferdinand 54 sewing machines 34

211

Shango 167 shells, cowries 155–74 shell-work 170–2 shipping trade 3–9 shopping 25, 35 shop practice (culture) 51 Siemans, Werner von 61 Silver, Samuel Winkworth 63 Silvertown 63–5 Singer Company 34 slavery 86, 141, 150–1, 153–4, 161, 162–4, 165, 167 Sloane, Sir Hans 17 Smollet, Tobias 19 Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) 130 soil science 54–5 souvenirs 94 spirituality 165–7 Stearn, Robert 168 Straits Settlements 66 Studio Interior (Chase) 101 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 45 Taylor, Purcell 76 Taylor, Ruth Eliza Warner 11 teaching styles 52–3 tea ritual 19 technology 39–55 “technosphere” 117 TELCON (Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company) 76 telegraph industry 60–1 temperance movement 169 Thoreau, Henry David 30–1 timekeepers 47 tools 45–7 touchpieces 152–4 traveling shows 32 Treatise on Domestic Economy (Beecher) 26–7 trompe l’oeil 102–6 Turner, Frederick J. 34 university education 51 Upton, Dell 23 vernacular architecture 129 Vernon-Harcourt, William 65 Vienna, Ringstrasse 119

212

Viollet-le-Duc 120, 121, 129–30 Vodun 166 Waldron, “Puck” 11 Walker, Charles Vincent 60 Wanton–Lyman–Hazard House 162, 165 Webb, Benjamin 125 Webb, Philip 120 Wells, David 106 West, Benjamin 91 West Ham Gutta Percha Company 62–3 Wheatstone, Charles 61 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill 106–8 Whitney, George 97–8

INDEX

Williams, Nathaniel 161 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 15 women clothing 18 domestication 19, 26–7, 30, 34 domestic reform 36 motherhood 26–7 “New Woman” ideology 36 shell-work 170–2 workers, objectification 42–5 world’s fairs 32, 33–4 Yoruba 166, 167