Returning to power: writing the history of men and materiality in the eighteenth century and beyond

On Wednesday 29 October, historian Ben Jackson (Manchester), will be joining us to reflect on his recent book Material Masculinities: Men and Goods in Eighteenth-Century England (MUP, 2025) and his attempt to explore how material goods were important to eighteenth-century men to acquire and assert their gendered and social power.

The flourishing history of eighteenth-century gendered material culture in the last decades has resulted in important and persuasive arguments surrounding what, how, and why men and women bought, owned, resold, and repaired with such veracity. However, studies of men, consumption, material goods, and materiality often focus on material goods as symbolic signifiers of identity. The book, and this paper, returns to a more Marxist and feminist approach that explores power, in its myriad forms and sites, and gendered materiality. Men engaged with the rapidly changing material and consumer landscape of the industrialising, commercialising, and expanding eighteenth century, Ben argues, precisely because it was useful to them in acquiring and asserting forms of masculine power. The talk will consider the processes involved in the materialisation of masculinity in the period and argues that eighteenth-century men and things had a reciprocal relationship; consumer goods shaped, and were shaped by, eighteenth-century men’s lives.