Everyday Political Objects

From the Middle Ages to the Contemporary World

Christopher Fletcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000397031
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Everyday Political Objects examines a series of historical case studies across a very broad timescale, using objects as a means to develop different approaches to understanding politics where both internal and external definitions of the political prove inadequate.

Materiality and objects have gradually made their way into the historian's toolbox in recent years, but the distinctive contribution that a set of methods developed for the study of objects can make to our understanding of politics has yet to be explored. This book shows how everyday objects play a certain role in politics, which is specific to material things. It provides case studies which re-orientate the view of the political in a way that is distinct from, but complementary to, the study of political institutions, the social history of politics and the analysis of discourse. Each chapter shows, in a distinctive and innovative way, how historians might change their approach to politics by incorporating objects into their methodology.

Analysing case studies from France, the Congo, Burkina Faso, Romania and Britain between the early Middle Ages and the present day makes this study the perfect tool for students and scholars in the disciplines of history, art history, political science, anthropology and archaeology.

Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003147428

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: useful things
• 2 Rings of power: the interpretation of early medieval objects of adornment
• 3 The practical and symbolic uses of the medieval horn: from power object to common instrument
• 4 A history of domestic disorder: the French royal household in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
• 5 The prince and his coffer: the material functions and symbolic power of an everyday political object at the end of the Middle Ages
• 6 Teapots, fans and snuffboxes: the portable politics of gender and empire in eighteenth-century Britain
• 7 Wooden shoes and wellington boots: the politics of footwear in Georgian Britain
• 8 The fan during the French Revolution: from the elite to the people
• 9 Resisting with objects? Seditious political objects and their ‘Agency’ in restoration France (1814–1830)
• 10 A sonorous politics of everyday objects: coal workers’ charivaris during the Anzin strike of 1884
• 11 Political fashion: elegance as subversion in the Congos of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• 12 ‘Citizen Browning’: the banality of a revolutionary object, c.1905–c.1912
• 13 Bringing audible propaganda into the everyday: the politicization of the phonograph record from its origins to the SERP, 1888–2000
• 14 Image, voice and voivodes: communist diafilm in Romania (1950–1989)
• 15 The trajectory of a spear: the materiality of an everyday political object
• Bibliography of secondary material
• Index