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Throughout the Atlantic world, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, technology trumped humanity in visual representations of sugar plantations and their enslaved workforces. European artists presented the production of sugar as technologically progressive, while minimizing its crucial conjunction with slave labor. The sugarmill, with its vertical three-roller mills and trains of evaporative vats, became a synecdoche of the most intensive and expansive industry in the early modern world. Yet a major historiographic debate—whether the dependence on slave labor made the production of sugar economically regressive—has simply ignored the abundant visual evidence on the issue. As a humanitarian abolitionist movement mobilized in late-eighteenth-century Britain, its images emphasized the abuse of slaves individually but overlooked plantations, while artistic clients of anti-abolitionist patrons responded with picturesque landscapes showing slave plantations as tranquil manorial communities that happened to have intensive productive technology. And in defiance of abolitionism elsewhere, planters in mid-nineteenth-century Cuba visually advertised their global economic predominance with hypertechnological images of factories requiring only minuscule inputs of enslaved labor. The visual privileging of sugar’s technology manifested how easily Europeans could be distracted from concerns about the millions of enslaved people in their colonies.

Herman Moll's The World Described (1720), the pre-eminent folio atlas of Hanoverian Britain, departs from the usual Ortelian model in the selection and ordering of its contents. It placed Britain at the centre of the atlas so that the first half provided a cartographic description of Britain's overseas commercial interests, while the second half showed the kingdom's political interests on the Continent. The argument presented here is that Moll gave priority to global rather than imperial dimensions in helping his British readers appreciate the multifarious geography of their country's interests.

Written in an engaging style that will appeal to historians and material culture specialists as well as to general readers, this pathbreaking work brings together such disparate topics of analysis as climate, fire, food, clothing, the senses, and anxiety--especially about the night.

Herman Moll\"s The World Described (1720), the pre-eminent folio atlas of Hanoverian Britain, departs from the usual Ortelian model in the selection and ordering of its contents. It placed Britain at the centre of the atlas so that the first half provided a cartographic description of Britain\"s overseas commercial interests, while the second half showed the kingdom\"s political interests on the Continent. The argument presented here is that Moll gave priority to global rather than imperial dimensions in helping his British readers appreciate the multifarious geography of their country\"s interests. (Author abstract)

Crowley discusses the sensibility of comfort. Concern with comfort provided a rationale for moderate but innovative patterns of consumption that transcended both the aristocratic imperatives of luxury and the necessities of poverty.