Keynotes: Evan Jones (Bristol) and Jon Stobart (Manchester Metropolitan)

Call for Papers

This two-day conference invites proposals from postgraduate students, ECRs and academics working on the production, distribution and consumption of goods and materials in early modern Britain and Europe, broadly defined as 1500-1800.

The conference will forge discussion between different historical approaches to production, distribution and consumption. On the one hand, continued growth and interest in material culture studies has fostered a wide-ranging field in which the cultural reception of goods and meanings of consumption have been discussed under prisms of intimacy, interaction and representation. On the other, economic and political histories have understood with increasing depth and precision the complex series of networks, transactions and communications which facilitated the production of materials and goods and brought them within the access of consumers. Each field foregrounds more long-standing social questions: what were the normative attitudes shaping the behaviour and responsibilities which dictated how, when and what individuals consumed? What were the material realities of the act of consumption? How were individual’s lives shaped by their access to materials and their duties to production? How did the ‘world of work’ intersect with the home?

This conference therefore follows trends of more recent historiography by promoting an inclusive historical approach that traces the links between production, distribution and consumption in early modern history. Ultimately, it seeks to identify where and how the interrelationships between these three substantive fields were realized and manifested, and what impacts these connections had on the historical actors who produced, distributed and consumed.

Please send proposals for papers of 20 minutes in length to Alex Taylor and Tom Rusbridge: connections@sheffield.ac.uk by May 21st 2017

Proposals may cover, but are not limited to, the following: