The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America by Jennifer Van Horn, and: Luxurious Citizens: The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America by Joanna Cohen (review)

"A consumer society" has long been a descriptor for the United States. In the past and present, consumerism functions as much more than the acquisition of goods; it links individual action to governmental policy and consumer goods to citizenship rights. Even before the nation's founding, consumerism played an integral role in shaping the lives and politics of people in North America. The work of T. H. Breen and Richard L. Bushman, among others, has made clear that what people bought, traded, and sold in early America mattered greatly to their sense of self, community, and empire. But when and how did consumption become intertwined with the ever-evolving concept of citizenship?

Using different methodologies, the two books reviewed here reveal the multiple ways elite Americans attached consumerism (with its racialized, classed, and gendered overtones) to citizenship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jennifer Van Horn and Joanna Cohen approach history differently; the former utilizes material culture to explore how object assemblages crafted not only individuals but also a nation of citizens, whereas the latter employs political economy to investigate how ideologies and policies of consumption created a modern capitalist nation-state. Though their perspectives differ—Van Horn focuses on personal consumption, Cohen on national—both authors are interested in investigating the political lives of Americans through the lens of consumption. The chronology also dovetails nicely, with Van Horn concluding at the dawn of the nineteenth century, where Cohen begins.

In The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America, Jennifer Van Horn argues that urban elites formed their notion of the civil self through their networks of objects and people. The book centers on the North American port cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston from the late colonial through the early national period. The six chapters proceed in a roughly chronological fashion, with each chapter based on one artifact or object type. The first three chapters focus on mid-eighteenth-century city engravings, portraits, and gravestones to demonstrate the unique "assemblages" or "networks of things" that urban colonial elites created in British North America (p. 21). The following three chapters trace how these networks evolved during the tumultuous era of war and nation-building by examining masks (or the lack thereof), dressing furniture, and prostheses. As elite Americans worked to build a new civil society from the rubble of revolution, they used their colonial assemblages to formulate a new collective identity, one that defined citizenship in this new nation.

The Power of Objectsis an exceptional example of the recent turn in material culture studies toward object assemblages. Instead of categorizing and dissociating different material forms, this theory brings multiple object types into conversation with one another and with other cultural products, including pamphlets, poetry, and prints. Van Horn's work reveals how objects and people were integral to the networks that defined new individual and group identities within an emerging social order.

Objects are key to Van Horn's interpretation, and she approaches them with a keen eye to multiple layers of meaning. Drawing on seminal works of material culture methodology, Van Horn studies the materiality of objects in depth. She evaluates the material on multiple levels, including an object's sensory properties, physical properties, and history, and her object descriptions are frequently poetic. But Van Horn goes beyond connoisseurship—or material literacy—to inquire how objects functioned as adaptable symbols within the worlds of elite American colonists. She skillfully weaves the tangible with the ideological. In this way, portrait headstones (an...