"A conviction of the reality of things": Material Culture, North American Indians and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain

This article explores how eighteenth-century Britons use material culture to engage, explain and justify their empire. Focusing primarily on North American Indian-related objects, it examines both how Britons exhibited these sorts of ethnographic materials in museums, coffeehouses, and auctions and how audiences interacted with the displays. Material displays reached audiences outside the social parameters of the much-explored imperial discourse in print culture, such as families and children, and their popularity further indicates that interest in the wider world was a practice and not merely a prescription. Such public material exhibitions ultimately assisted in the formation of an increasingly imperial, globally-minded society by fostering a set of acceptable, shared views of alien cultures and their relationships with Britain.