Novels, Needleworks, and Empire: Material Entanglements in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World

Chloe Wigston Smith's book explores the vibrant links between domestic craft and British colonialism in the eighteenth century, revealing how women's handiwork shaped the form and content of print and material culture. It includes artifacts made by women of color, bringing the global into conversation with domestic crafts and placing images of empire and colonialism within arms reach.

Format: Hardback
Length: 312 pages
Publication date: 14 May 2024
Publisher: Yale University Press

The first sustained study of the vibrant links between domestic craft and British colonialism, "Handiwork and Empire: Women's Material Contributions to the Homes Place within the Global Eighteenth Century," by Chloe Wigston Smith, has been named a finalist for the Susanne M. Glasscock Book Prize. In the eighteenth century, women's contributions to empire took fewer official forms than those collected in state archives, but their traces were recorded in material ways through the ink they applied to paper or the artifacts they created with muslin, silk threads, feathers, and shells. Handiwork, such as sewing, knitting, embroidery, and other crafts, formed a familiar presence in the lives and learning of girls and women across social classes and was deeply connected to colonialism. Chloe Wigston Smith follows the material and visual images of the Atlantic world that found their way into the hands of women and girls in Britain and early America—in the objects they made, the books they held, the stories they read—and in doing so adjusts and alters the form and content of print and material culture. A range of artifacts made by women, including makers of color, brought the global into conversation with domestic crafts and consequently placed images of empire and colonialism within arms reach. Together, fiction and handicrafts offer new evidence of women's material contributions to the homes place within the global eighteenth century, revealing the rich and complex connections between the global and the domestic.

Weight: 608g
Dimension: 399 x 261 x 29 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780300270785