Party Animals: Animal Products in Portable Objects of Sociability in Eighteenth-Century Britain

This article looks at the use of animal products in the fashioning of polite sociability in the long eighteenth century. Shagreen, shells, or tortoiseshell were commonly used to make or cover small fashionable accessories that equipped men and women with the wherewithal of polite sociability. Writing tablets, snuffboxes, lorgnettes, nutmeg graters or fans came in a variety of finish that often included such animal materials whose lustre, sheen, shapes or colour signalled their exotic origins and contributed to the performance of taste and rank. These portable objects created elite sociable networks both in their sourcing and exchange-through gifts or proxy shopping-and in their uses, which took part in materializing bonds and constructing space (H. Lefebvre) through gestures and performance. They were also underpinned by the global networks of trade created by the expanding empire and the fascination for-and early exploitation of-the "exotic" fauna thus discovered by European elites. Combining a material culture approach, global history and environmental history, the article explores the sourcing, uses and implications of animal products in portable accessories of sociability to show how their specific qualities articulated different notions of space, whilst they also constructed the nature vs. culture binary.