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‘Born in America, in Europe bred, in Africa travell’d and in Asia wed’: Elihu Yale, material culture, and actor networks from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2016
Abstract
Objects can serve as non-living actors in a Latourian actor network which spans not only geography but time. Over this spatial–temporal network, what I call ‘object-actors’ acquire meanings that motivate living actors to use these objects as connecting points between past and present. Object-actors form networks in original exchanges between individuals and institutions, connect the past and present, and generate new and shifting meanings in this global–temporal network. Object-actors work and generate meaning in four dimensions – distance, location, relation, and time. Globally, object-actors can accrue conflicting meanings bound by locality. This article uses the collections of Elihu Yale as a case study in how object-actors constitute an important aspect of networks, and how those networks are not bound to the original transactions between historical parties or to their original geographies.
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Footnotes
*
The author would like to thank the anonymous readers at the Journal of Global History, as well as Heather Ellis and Simone Müller for their careful reading of multiple drafts of this article. Any errors remain solely my responsibility.
References
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