Tarnished Silver: Interpreting the Material Culture of the Atlantic Slave Trade Negotiations of 1715

Abstract

This article describes the approach taken to interpreting, in a gallery setting, a set of silver with a troubling history: it had been made for use during negotiations of a major eighteenth-century contract for the transportation of enslaved Africans. Two further avenues for interpretation are presented, both of which relate to the Atlantic slave trade. The first follows the way that the “plain” surfaces of British silver of this period have been understood, while the second follows the physical transformation of the gilding. Both follow the “social life” of particular material properties of the silver, in an alternative approach to the well-established concept of the “social life of things”.