Karen Harvey is a Professor of History at the University of Birmingham. Her publications include Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (2004), The Kiss in History (2005) and The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2012).

List of illustrations

List of contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Historians, material culture and materiality

Karen Harvey

1 - Things that shape history: material culture and historical narratives

Giorgio Riello

2 - Ornament as evidence

Andrew Morrall

3 - Back yards and beyond: landscapes and history

Marina Moskowitz

4 - Draping the body and dressing the home: the material culture of textiles and clothes in the Atlantic world, c. 1500-1800

Beverly Lemire

5 - Using buildings to understand social history: Britain and Ireland in the seventeenth century

Anne Laurence

6 - Pushed around: material culture, dispossession, and the American shopping cart

Catherine Gudis

7 - Repurposed objects and performance: ritual acts of healing in East Africa

Jonathan Walz

8 - Object biographies: from production to consumption

Karin Dannehl

9 - Regional identity and material culture

Helen Berry

10 - Objects and agency: material culture and modernity in China

Frank Dikötter

11 - Mundane materiality, or, should small things still be forgotten? Material culture, micro-histories and the problem of scale

Sara Pennell

12 - The case of the missing footstool: reading the absent object

Glenn Adamson

Index