Fractured Domesticity in the Old Regime: Families and Global Goods in Eighteenth-Century France

• Published in: The American historical review 2019-10, Vol.124 (4), p.1267-1277
• Main Author: HARDWICK, JULIE
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: AHR Roundtable Unsettling Domesticities: New Histories of Home in Global Contexts
• ISSN: 0002-8762; 1937-5239
• DOI: 10.1093/ahr/rhz645

The fractured nature of emergent domesticity in its first phase in the 1760s was inextricably tied to the perils as well as promises of commerce for individual households in an unpredictable global economy, although historians have focused on the metropolitan roots of domesticity. A microhistorical exploration of the world of a single household in the French city of Lyon brings the fault lines of a globalizing economy, consumption, and domesticity into sharp focus as lived experience. It suggests the uneven terrain of domesticity, in terms of gender, household, and family, as well as for producers and consumers. In the experiences of household members and in the classified advertisements in the local newspaper, fractured domesticity was manifest, the conjugal labor—reproductive and productive—that made global domesticity local was evident, and the centrality of commercial risk as a fault line in domesticity was clarified. The power and limits of “domesticity” as an emotional, cultural, and economic as well as political project were located in familial practice. The potency and limits of domesticity functioned as a system of power that was contingent, layered, and fragmented and that highlighted and elided emotional, reproductive, and productive costs in particular ways at particular times.