Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines some of the important and well-established approaches to 'material culture' and 'materiality', and their implications for historians. It addresses the power of objects not only to heal but to transcend human time. The book then reveals the ways in which historians can enrich their work by reconstructing the life of an object from production to consumption. It also traces the journey of the shopping trolley from design to an afterlife of resistance, and examines how the trolley 'maps consumer culture and its antithesis'. The book demonstrates how materials, trade, use and meanings of textiles and clothes in the context of the Atlantic world approaches can produce rich and textured accounts, revealing interactions between people across large areas of the globe, as well as men's and women's intimate experiences of their clothed bodies.