EAA 2018: Abstract

This paper foregrounds the role of 18th-century male merchant sea captains as footloose early-modern consumers and drivers of large-scale change. In this paper, Anglo-American and Bermudian captains are considered not as anonymous movers of the burgeoning British mercantile capitalist economy and agents of British colonialism, but as conscious masculine social actors navigating a new and growing array of entanglements between them and the newfangled material things being produced at the dawn of industrialization. Historical archaeological investigations carried out at the campsites of Punta Salinas, by the saltpan of the Venezuelan island of La Tortuga, and the subsequent reconstruction of the vibrant assemblages of practice of dining and drinking there, reveal that once captains began to acquire refined ceramic and glass vessels in the late 1720s and early 1730s, they never stopped. Through their maritime mobilities captains quickly became entrapped in entanglements of enabling dependence and constraining dependency with a growing array of fragile and exotic material things. These male captains not only consumed the ‘fruits of empire’ but also reformulated and readapted elite masculine and feminine British practices to their new social contexts, and – in the case of Punta Salinas – to a uniquely liminal and temporary campsite on an arid and uninhabited island. Middling Anglo-American and Bermudian sea captains selectively adopted refined Georgian practices, thereby restructuring the gendered practices of the urban elite, influencing British ceramics manufacture, and strategically making these practices their own in their untethered maritime world. In this way, male sea captains were at the forefront of innovating with gendered Georgian gentility beyond the home, ushering in modernity by way of the sea.

Masculinity; Seafarers; Assemblages of Practice; Consumerism

Oral presentation

  Abstract (PDF)

Konrad Antczak^1,2