Portrait of a woman in silk : hidden histories of the British Atlantic world / Zara Anishanslin.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Print version record.

Introduction: the Atlantic world in a portrait -- "Our incomparable countrywoman": Anna Maria Garthwaite, silk designer. Anna Maria Garthwaite, 1688-1763 -- The clergyman's daughter with a designer's imagination: British landscapes, natural history networks, and the artistry of Anna Maria Garthwaite -- "An English and even a female hand": Anglo-French rivalry and the gendered politics of flowered silk -- Designing the botanical landscape of empire: "curious" plants, "Indian" textiles, and colonial consumers -- "An inventive and pushing genius": Simon Julins, master weaver. Simon Julins, c. 1686/8-1778 -- Industry, idleness, and protest: the Spitalfields weaver as guild member and cultural symbol -- "Boys and girls and all": male consumers, female producers, and colonial sericulture -- "Mrs. Mayoress": Anne Shippen Willing, wearer. Anne Shippen Willing, 1710-1791 -- "As I am an American": performing colonial merchant power -- Hanging the portrait: the colonial merchant's townhouse -- Emulating colonists: scandal, regality, and sister portraits -- "Tolerably well by the force of genius": Robert Feke, painter. Robert Feke, c. 1707-c. 1751 -- The Bermuda Group in Newport: George Berkeley and Feke's painterly craft -- Painting New Eden in New England: Massachusetts merchants, Milton, and violent refinement -- "'Tis said the arts delight to travel westward": Newport merchants, Redwood Library, and the rise of arts and learning -- Death and rebirth. 1763: Unraveling empire -- Coda: 1791.

"Through the story of a portrait of a woman in a silk dress, historian Zara Anishanslin embarks on a fascinating journey, exploring and refining debates about the cultural history of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. While most scholarship on commodities focuses either on labor and production or on consumption and use, Anishanslin unifies both, examining the worlds of four identifiable people who produced, wore, and represented this object: a London weaver, one of early modern Britain's few women silk designers, a Philadelphia merchant's wife, and a New England painter. Blending macro and micro history with nuanced gender analysis, Anishanslin shows how making, buying, and using goods in the British Atlantic created an object-based community that tied its inhabitants together, while also allowing for different views of the Empire. Investigating a range of subjects including self-fashioning, identity, natural history, politics, and trade, Anishanslin makes major contributions both to the study of material culture and to our ongoing conversation about how to write history."-- Provided by publisher.

In English.

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