ABSTRACT
Cultural Economies explores the dynamic intersection of material culture and transatlantic formations of "capital" in the long eighteenth century. It brings together two cutting-edge fields of inquiry—Material Studies and Atlantic Studies—into a generative collection of essays that investigate nuanced ways that capital, material culture, and differing transatlantic ideologies intersected. This ambitious, provocative work 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, providing both broad coverage and nuanced interpretation. Holistically, 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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|59 pages
Capitalized Bodies and the Imperial Imagination
chapter 1|18 pages
“Venereal Distemper”
chapter 2|19 pages
Creolizing the Gothic Narrative
part II|67 pages
Representation and Power in the Contact Zone
chapter 5|21 pages
Reading African Material Culture in the Contact Zone
part III|46 pages
Consuming Cultures in the Colonial Atlantic
part IV|49 pages
Labor and Identity in Early American Probates
chapter 9|23 pages
“The Only Property I Could Dispose of to Any Advantage”
chapter 10|24 pages
Institutionalizing the Slave Power at the Local Level
part V|44 pages
Capital Networks, Capital Control