Author Description

Material Culture and Sedition, 1688-1760 is a groundbreaking study of the ways in which material culture was used to avoid prosecution for treason and sedition in the eighteenth century. Challenging existing accounts of the public sphere and consumer culture, it argues that the birth of modern Britain was accompanied by political repression which helped develop a counter-culture of treacherous objects and secret societies. Though set in the Jacobite period in the British Isles, it considers transnational evidence and sets out an approach which can be applied in a wide variety of other contexts.