HIST 231: Imagining Enlightenment in 18th-Century Europe (HC)

"Eighteenth-century consumers in Britain, living in an increasingly globalised world, were infatuated with exotic Chinese and Chinese-styled goods, art, and decorative objects. However, they were also often troubled by the alien aesthetic sensibility these goods embodied. This ambivalence figures centrally in the period's experience of China and of contact with foreign countries and cultures more generally."--Provided by publisher.

Coffee, tea, and chocolate were all the rage in Enlightenment Europe. These fashionable beverages profoundly shaped modes of sociability and patterns of consumption, yet none of the plants required for their preparation was native to the continent: coffee was imported from the Levant, tea from Asia, and chocolate from Mesoamerica. Their introduction to 17th-century Europe revolutionized drinking habits and social customs. It also spurred an insatiable demand for specialized vessels such as hot beverage services and tea canisters, coffee cups and chocolate pots.

"In 1775 a visitor to Laurent Spinacuta's Grande Menagerie at the annual winter fair in Paris would have seen two tigers, several kinds of monkeys, an armadillo, an ocelot, and a condor - in all, forty-two live animals. In Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots, Louise E. Robbins explains that exotic animals from around the world were common in eighteenth-century Paris. In the streets of the city, residents and visitors could observe performing elephants and a fighting polar bear. Those looking for unusual pets could purchase parrots, flying squirrels, and capuchin monkeys. The royal menagerie at Versailles displayed lions, cranes, an elephant, a rhinoceros, and a zebra, which in 1760 became a major court attraction."--BOOK JACKET.

This is a concise and elegant account of the eating and drinking habits of the upper classes in the eighteenth century.

See especially Chapter 29 "Colonial Beverages and the Consumption of Sugar" by Alain Huetz de Lemps.

Historians have generally come to accept the idea of a "long eighteenth century," one that extended from circa 1660 to 1830. In The Global Eighteenth Century, editor Felicity Nussbaum and the contributing authors take this idea one step further, positing an eighteenth century that is "wide" as well as long, reaching beyond Europe into the African diaspora, the Americas, the Levant, China, India, and Oceania.

This book surveys an underlying discourse on female and oriental consumerism in nearly four centuries of British colonialist narratives on India. Economic, ethical, colonial, patriarchal, and protofeminist polemics shaped one another, creating a colonialist spectatorship that constituted non-Western and female subjects as spectacular and needing discipline.

"Combining the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, Atlantic history, and the history of the French Revolution, Paul Cheney explores the political economy of globalization in eighteenth-century France. Drawing upon the writings of diplomats, philosophes, consuls of commerce, and merchants, Cheney rewrites the history of political economy in the Enlightenment era and provides a new interpretation of the relationship between capitalism and the French Revolution."--BOOK JACKET.

In mid-18th-century France, elaborately mounted Asian porcelains were at the height of fashion. Commissioned by the Parisian marchands merciers, or luxury merchants, artisans produced exquisite gilt bronze confections to adorn imported porcelains and often modified the porcelains themselves in order to adapt them to the décor of French interiors.

Focusing on the question, 'How did the British who remained in Britain perceive American Indians, and how did these perceptions reflect and affect British culture?', Savages within the Empire explores both how Britons engaged with the peripheries of their Atlantic empire without leaving home, and, equally important, how their forged understanding significantly affected the British and their rapidly expanding world.

What induced the British to adopt foreign coffee-drinking customs in the seventeenth century? Why did an entirely new social institution, the coffeehouse, emerge as the primary place for consumption of this new drink? Brian Cowan provides the definitive account of the origins of coffee drinking and coffeehouse society, and in so doing he reshapes our understanding of the commercial and consumer revolutions in Britain during the long Stuart century."--BOOK JACKET.

Challenging existing narratives of the relationship between China and Europe, this study establishes how modern English identity evolved through strategies of identifying with rather than against China. Through an examination of England's obsession with Chinese objects throughout the long eighteenth century, A Taste for China argues that chinoiserie in literature and material culture played a central role in shaping emergent conceptions of taste and subjectivity.

This book presents a history from Latin America to Europe. The Spanish conquest of Central America introduced chocolate to Europe, where it became first the stimulating drink of kings and aristocrats and then was popularized in coffee-houses.

An examination of Ottoman/Turkish-inspired architecture in Western Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reclaiming turquerie as cross-cultural art from the confines of the inconsequential exoticism it is often reduced to, this book analyses neglected images, designs and constructions; and links Western interest in the Ottoman Empire to notions of self-representation and national politics. The author argues that the appropriation of those building types was neither accidental, nor did it merely reflect European domination of another culture.

Fruitfully combining approaches from economic history and the cultural history of commerce, this book examines the role of interpersonal trust in underpinning trade, amid the challenges and uncertainties of the eighteenth-century Atlantic. It focuses on the nature of mercantile activity in two parts of Spain: Cadiz in the south, and its trade with Spain's American empire; and Bilbao in the north, and its trade with western and northern Europe. Drawing from a broad range of Spanish, Peruvian and British archival sources, the book reveals merchants' experiences of trusting their agents and correspondents, and shows how different factors, from distance to legal frameworks and ethnicity, affected their ability to rely on their contacts.

This is the first book to document the origins and early history of environmentalism, concentrating especially on its hitherto unexplained colonial and global aspects. The book shows how the new critique of the colonial impact on the environment depended on the emergence of a coterie of professional scientists, especially in the Dutch, French and English maritime empires.