In Sparkling Company: Reflections on Glass in the 18th‐Century British World. Edited by Christopher L.Maxwell. Corning, NY: Corning Museum of Glass. 2020. 304 p. 191 illus. $65 (hb). ISBN 978‐0‐87290‐223‐7.

Abstract

Even a dedicated scholar of eighteenth-century material culture must admit that the history of glass in this period is somewhat underservedunlike the related arts of porcelain and silverware, which have been thoroughly contextualised by scholars including Karen Harvey, Amanda Vickery and Philippa Glanville. While there are numerous collectors' volumes dedicated to table glass, documenting a bewildering variety of drinking vessels, there has been no book that attempts to locate glass within the broader cultural, social and economic contexts of the eighteenth century.This would be reason enough to welcome the publication of In Sparkling Company: Reflections on British Glass in the 18th-Century British World, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Corning Museum of Glass, New York. Fortunately, this generously illustrated volume does much more than dutifully fill a gap in existing scholarship. Edited by Christopher L. Maxwell, the essays in this book offer a confident interdisciplinary overview of glass as a significant aesthetic, technological and economic phenomenon in the 'British World' of the titlethe global sphere of influence over which Britain exercised military, colonial and cultural power, from North America to southern Africa.Maxwell's own introduction is a lucid summary of glass design and production in eighteenth-century Britain. Covering the key technological advances of the period without becoming mired in the minutiae of manufacturing, it makes a case for glass as a commodity signifying 'modernity, pleasure and sociability' (p. 17). Maxwell expands on this in the first essay, 'People in Glass Houses: The Polished and the Polite in Georgian Britain', comparing the materiality of glass surfaces with the semantics of politeness, and assessing the importance of 'polish' to both. It also incorporates a helpful discussion of glass prices and comparable costs, which serves to locate objects discussed throughout the volume within a wider nexus of conspicuous consumption.Having established this, Kerry Sinanan upends our assumptions about consumption, offering a close reading of glass luxury objects which 'conversely expressed all that was rapacious and barbaric about the Enlightenment' (p. 71). In 'Slavery and Glass: Tropes of "Race" and Reflection', Sinanan examines the ways in which glass intersected with both the trade in enslaved Africans and the iconography of the abolitionist movement. Moving between the Murano glass beads that were traded by Europeans in exchange for slaves and the glass seals featuring Josiah Wedgwood's iconic ' Am I Not A Man And A Brother?' motif, she deftly turns our preconceptions of these objects on their heads. Murano beads were used by slavery apologists to support a theory of racial hierarchy in which 'uncivilised' Africans placed equal value on glass trinkets and human lives, whereas in fact they formed a sophisticated system of value and agency among enslaved people. Likewise, the kneeling black man at the centre of the Wedgwood motif, so long presented as a...