What is it about?
Cultural Economies explores the dynamic intersection of material culture and transatlantic formations of "capital" in the long eighteenth century. It brings together Material Studies and Atlantic Studies in a collection of essays that investigate ways that capital, material culture, and differing transatlantic ideologies intersected.
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Why is it important?
Cultural Economies provides new interpretive critiques and methodological approaches to understanding both the material and the abstract relationships between humans and objects, including the objectification of humans, in the larger current conversation about capitalism and inevitably power, in the Atlantic world. Chronologically bracketed by events in the long-eighteenth century circum-Atlantic, these essays employ material case studies from littoral African states, to abolitionist North America, to Caribbean slavery, to medicinal practice in South America. Cultural Economies demonstrates that the eighteenth-century Atlantic world of capital and materiality was intimately connected to both large and small networks that inform the hemispheric and transatlantic geopolitics of capital and nation of the present day.
Perspectives
Cultural Economies is a collection of essays edited by Victoria Barnett-Woods. It consists of twelve chapters, all by different authors (including the editor), of which mine is the eleventh, titled "Conveyance and Commodity: The Ordinary Merchant Ship in the British Atlantic, 1600--1800," which explores the dual role played by the merchant ship in the Atlantic economy. The other essays in the collection examine such diverse ingredients in the Atlantic cultural economy as foods, textiles, religious and medical practices as cultural capital, and human beings themselves as capital.
Dr Phillip Frank Reid
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This page is a summary of: Cultural Economies of the Atlantic World, April 2020, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003025436.
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