Call for Papers: Production, Distribution and Consumption in Britain and Europe, 1500–1800
RHN 78/2017 | Call
https://www.ruralhistory.eu/newsletter/2017/rhn-2017-078
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Organiser: Sheffield Centre for Early Modern Studies
15-16 September 2017, Sheffield, UK
Deadline for proposals: 21 May 2017
Call for Papers:
Connections in Commerce and Consumption: Production, Distribution and Consumption in Britain and Europe, 1500–1800
Keynotes: Evan Jones (Bristol) and Jon Stobart (Manchester Metropolitan)
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:
- How networks of trade and production connected to places of buying, selling and exchange
- Representations and perceptions of traders/ merchants/ artisans
- How distributors related to the goods and materials they were selling
- The effects of production, distribution and consumption for communities
- How the economics of trade were replicated and merchants and others were trained
- New techniques in production and manufacturing
- How objects facilitated connections between different locations and occupations
- How consumers accessed and used knowledge of production and distribution
- Regulation on trade, distribution and consumption (guild, civic or central legislation)
- Informal/ illicit economies and the intersection thereof with official trade
- Changing patterns of consumption and production over time
- Comparative studies
- Micro and macro approaches/ the local versus the national
- Formation of social/cultural identities via distribution and consumption
Source: http://www.scems.group.shef.ac.uk/