Exploring Enlightenment attitudes toward things and their relation to human subjects, this collection offers a geographically wide-ranging perspective on what the eighteenth century looked like beyond British or British-colonial borders. To highlight trends, fashions, and cultural imports of truly global significance, the contributors draw their case studies from Western Europe, Russia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania. This survey underscores the multifarious ways in which new theoretical approaches, such as thing theory or material and visual culture studies, revise our understanding of the people and objects that inhabit the phenomenological spaces of the eighteenth century. Rather than focusing on a particular geographical area, or on the global as a juxtaposition of regions with a distinctive cultural footprint, this collection draws attention to the unforeseen relational maps drawn by things in their global peregrinations, celebrating the logic of serendipity that transforms the object into some-thing else when it is placed in a new locale.

About the Author

Ileana Baird is a Postdoctoral Preceptorship Fellow at the University of Virginia, USA.

Christina Ionescu is an Associate Professor of French Studies at Mount Allison University, Canada.

Reviews
'Readers interested in thing theory and students of material culture as discussed especially in literature will appreciate this book's efforts. Historical geographers can gain much from the interdisciplinary collaboration exhibited in this volume. Overall, the collection does highlight how humans relate to objects and convincingly displays how understanding such relationships can deepen our understanding of some aspects of the eighteenth-century world.' Journal of Historical Geography



Book Information
ISBN 9781138548237
Author Ileana Baird
Format Paperback
Page Count 386
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 453g