Building the British Atlantic World

With this well-curated collection of essays spanning Britain's Atlantic world, the editors and authors provide a panoramic guide to the region's material qualities. Readers are whisked from Bermudan forts to Nova Scotian housing via Indian praying towns, Jamaican stores, British seaports, and the gentleman's suburban house. Citing the volumes edited by Robert Blair St. George, John Styles, and Amanda Vickery, this book sits within an ongoing conversation about British Atlantic material culture but nevertheless represents a departure in scope from earlier work. Its wide-ranging chapters provide a genuinely British Atlantic perspective on the material world across North American, Caribbean, African, and British locations. The volume is also commendable for astute essays that shed light on unexamined corners of the British Atlantic material past. Anna O. Marley reveals the careful planning behind Thomas Jefferson's art collection at Monticello. By hanging paintings of wonders such as the natural rock bridge at Rockbridge County, Virginia, in public rooms, Jefferson sought to convey an American sublime to eminent guests rather than slavishly following a European aesthetic. Peter Guillery's carefully researched study of artisan churches in London proposes a complicated relationship between Britain and America that belies classification as a straightforward process of transatlantic borrowing or copying. Similar dynamics are at work in Lee Morrissey's discussion of Drayton Hall, South Carolina, in which he describes the relationship between Italy's Palladian villas, Britain's embrace of Palladianism, and its reconstruction in South Carolina. As an aristocratic agricultural estate at a certain distance from the city of Charleston, Drayton Hall functioned more as a Palladian villa than many British manifestations of the genre. Furthermore, although the Carolinian masterpiece was part of an Anglo-American Palladian revival, it was constructed mostly by the labor of enslaved Africans owned by the family and the low-country's resident craftsmen

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