'Material technologies of empire: tobacco, textiles and race in everyday Scottish life': Professor Beverly Lemire

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Habits of consumption provided instruction in race, bringing plantation priorities to Scottish streets and homes. Consumption and use figure as technologies of empire, part of a “human-built world.” Marcy Norton argues that “Technology is at once process and product.” Tobacco consumption was distinctively transient – ephemeral – resolving into wreaths of smoke or a sharp sneeze. This colonial product emerging from Indigenous American technologies and beliefs, and was sustained through slavery. White fabrics like linen or cotton were widely used and made in Scotland, defining eras and regions. Though different in form, these media shared key traits. First, Scotland’s history is entwined with both, with their emergent use and broad fashion. Second, their ties to empire facilitated new racialized habits and processes, animating the handling of these commodities, distinct to their time and place. I explore the ways these products and processes reified the culture of slavery in Scotland.

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Professor Lemire

Beverly Lemire is Professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta. She publishes extensively in the field of early modern consumer practice, fashion history, early global trade, gender, race and material culture. Most recently she headed a 4-year funded collaborative project “Object Lives & Global Histories in Northern North America: Networks, Localities & Material Culture.” www.objectlives.com An edited volume will be published next year.

Authored books include: 'Fashion's Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660-1800', (1991); 'Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade before the Factory, 1660-1800' (1997); 'The Business of Everyday Life: Gender, Practice and Social Politics in England, c. 1600-1900' (2005, 2012); 'Cotton' (2011). Her most recent book is 'Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures. The Material World Remade, c. 1500-1820' (Cambridge, 2018).