As art history curricula at more universities adapt to the global turn of the discipline, suitable textbooks that place European art within a broader global context of mobility, exchange, and cross-cultural interaction are increasingly necessary. With Art, Commerce and Colonialism 1600–1800 and other volumes in the series Art and Its Global Histories, the faculty of the Open University have created a text that introduces students to new theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of early modern global art. Each chapter of this book contains complex ideas and nuanced explanations of multivalent artworks in clear prose that will engage students and provide the basis for rich in-class discussion.
The book surveys the intersection between art, commerce, and colonialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—a crucial time in the history of globalization. Emma Barker's introduction familiarizes students with the most significant problems in the study of early modern global art, particularly in regard to periodization and stylistic terminology. Her essay also orients students to the major themes of the field: the ways that non-European people, places, and objects were represented by European artists; the visualization and manipulation of space in colonial and commercial contexts (e.g., urban planning, mapping, etc.); and the effects of cross-cultural exchange on visual and material culture. These themes are elaborated upon in subsequent chapters, each dealing with a different global power.
In chapter 1, Piers Baker-Bates successfully traces the contours of the broad subject of colonial Latin American art, focusing on a few vital issues: the multidirectional interaction between colony and metropole, the Spanish construction of colonial space, the indigeneity of Latin American art, and the role art could play in creating and upholding racial hierarchies. One particular strength of Baker-Bates's contribution is his lucid explanation of historiography, taking the reader through various interpretive approaches from older center-periphery models to Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann's more recent viceregal model. Next, Emma Barker's chapter focuses on the ways that seventeenth-century Dutch art celebrated the newly independent republic's global dominance in maps and allegorical images. She goes on to describe how Rembrandt and still-life painters engaged with and represented exotic commodities that were newly available to a large portion of society.
The volume then turns its attention to the decorative arts with Clare Taylor describing the role that chinoiserie played in the development of eighteenth-century visual and material culture. She highlights recent scholarship that investigates gendered responses to chinoiserie, noting that while women were especially criticized for consuming Chinese or Chinese-style goods, men also acquired and displayed chinoiserie and, moreover, played an active role in facilitating trade in such objects. Finally, Elizabeth McKellar closes the book with a chapter on domestic architecture in North America and the Caribbean, focusing in particular on the meaning of classicism in various colonial contexts. McKellar draws from scholarship that analyzes Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and Caribbean plantations as racialized “landscapes of control” and “landscapes of violence,” making this a particularly important essay for any course that includes eighteenth-century neoclassicism (181).
The biggest strength of Art, Commerce and Colonialism is that each author provides brief narratives of how scholarly approaches to their topic have changed over time. These forays into historiography, written in ways that are understandable to undergraduate students new to the study of art history, are indispensable. For example, McKellar explains that earlier generations of scholars usually described the movement of ideas between Great Britain and its American colonies as unidirectional, from center to periphery. Now, scholars such as Daniel Maudlin and Bernard Herman would prefer to speak of a “shared economic, political and artistic culture [generating] mutual interdependence between Britain and its colonies,” in which ideas circulate around the Atlantic, manifesting differently depending upon local circumstances (154). These passages allow students to see that art historical scholarship is an ongoing conversation, with various theories and approaches existing in dialogue with one another and being questioned once new information is discovered. Art, Commerce and Colonialism gives students an easy entry point into complex scholarly conversations that demonstrate the ways in which early modern art is interwoven with race, gender, power, and money—issues that continue to be relevant to their lives.
