Session Abstract

The pace and character of social change are central themes for historians studying the transition from the early modern to the modern world.  In the Long Eighteenth Century, people who sought to demonstrate their status through a range of manifestations of the polite ideal contributed to the dynamism of the Atlantic World.  Numerous merchants, lawyers, local politicians, and various other professionals who had not been born into elite social circles found themselves benefitting from this international setting.  Polite standards of living were to become essential to their new social identities.  Despite suggestions that such individuals caused “politeness” to grow increasingly ambiguous and that terms such as “gentleman” had less purchase as the eighteenth century wore on, the distinction between the polite and the impolite remained significant.  Indeed, this devaluation of the polite arguably led to more finely calibrated markers of status. 

This panel complicates traditional understandings of “politeness” by examining where and how people in the British Atlantic constructed identity and navigated social change.  It especially suggests that domestic spaces served as complex signifiers that enabled individuals to exert claims to status. Through the acquisition and use of houses and their furnishings, individuals and families on the cusp of genteel status used material things attached to particular spaces in an effort to secure the politeness associated with social elites. This session will investigate the nuanced ways this assertion of politeness took place; and it does so across a range of geographies.  The evaluation of housing choices in both town and country settings will provide contrasting ideas about the meaning of material culture for owners and the networks in which they participated.  Meanwhile, the detailed consideration of small ornamental objects will offer insights into the construction of status for immigrant populations.  Adopting a transatlantic perspective that considers port cities in Britain, Ireland and North America, this panel ultimately explores polite spaces as frames for the socially contested lives of Liverpool merchants, Bristol customs officials, Philadelphia colonial administrators, and Irish immigrants relocating to New Orleans in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.