Cities served as centers of power in the increasingly globally connected world of the early modern era. They were the nodes connecting networks of trade, political affiliations, and cultural exchange; the joints that enabled complex geographical, political, and economic articulations between the constituent parts of large polities, cultural regions, and empires. Their buildings, ports, public spaces, and markets housed the economic, political and cultural institutions that promoted the interests of local, regional, and imperial elites, and solidified the broader order that regulated the lives of everyone else.

But what about the role of the more intimate spaces within the cities? Early modern urban households often stood as microcosms of broader social, political, and culture environments. Formed by a mix of elite and non-elite members; women, men and children; free and enslaved people; the indigenous and foreigners, urban households included members of diverse gender, racial, religious, and ethnic groups. They were the most fundamental social unit, space of conviviality, and source of material well-being (or deprivation) in cities and towns. As a result, one could argue that urban households influenced more pointedly the daily lives of city dwellers, their experiences with power, and their sense of social-racial belonging or marginality than other urban spaces and institutions.

The purpose of this panel is to explore the place of Atlantic urban households in the global history of early modern power structures and the social and cultural realities that sustained them. More specifically, it investigates the materiality of urban households to illuminate the participation of different urban populations and communities in the material wealth Atlantic encounters and exchanges generated and the socio-racial divides it created. Household goods, their uses, display, and generational transmission, were crucial to the historical process that shaped constructions of social hierarchies, cultural identity, and power relationships within a world grappling with the meanings and implications of imperial politics and capitalist economic practices. Households that projected wealth and advantageous placement within Atlantic networks of material exchange afforded its members claims to political and economic prominence. Households that accumulated goods associated with the lifestyle of elite classes, or at least urban communities not involved in manual labor, supported their member’s ambitions to enter more privileged public institutions or social circles. The materiality of households reveals much about the comforts enjoyed by various segments of Atlantic urban populations. They reveal something about these groups’ daily routines and distinct intimate and cultural practices. Finally, they offer a glimpse into the priorities and strategies urban residents of African, Native American, and European descent embraced when pursuing meaningful lives and (a modicum of) privilege within their changing worlds. Focused on urban settings in the Spanish, Portuguese, and French Americas and in the African Gold Coast, the papers in this panel offer a close reading of the material life and realities of Atlantic urban households. They interrogate and illuminate how the material realities of urban household shaped and re-shaped the gendered, racial, and power dynamics that has defined much of human interactions since the 1500s.