Daily Lives and Daily Routines in the Long Eighteenth Century

This book explores the ways in which the lives and routines of a wide range of people across different parts of Europe and the wider world were structured and played out through everyday practices. It focuses on the detail of individual lives and how these were shaped by spaces and places, by movement and material culture – both the buildings they occupied and the objects they used in their everyday lives. Drawing on original research by a range of established and emerging scholars, each chapter peers into the lives of people from various social groups as they went about their daily lives, from citizens on the streets to aristocrats at home in their country houses, and from the urban elite at leisure to seamen on board ships bound for the East Indies. For all these people, daily routines were important in structuring their lives, giving them a rhythm that was knowable and meaningful in its temporal regularity, be that daily, weekly, or seasonal. So too were their everyday encounters and relationships with other people, within and beyond the home; these shaped their practices, movements, and identities and thus served to mould society in a broader sense.

Gudrun Andersson is Associate Professor of History at Uppsala University. Her research interests include early modern gender history, cultural history, and material culture. She has published extensively on early modern elite status and consumption, e.g. Stadens dignitärer. Den lokala elitens status- och maktmaifestation i Arboga 1650–1770 (2009).

Jon Stobart is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research centres on retailing and consumption in the long eighteenth century. Recent publications include Consumption and the Country House (2016), the Routledge Companion to the History of Retailing (2019) and Comforts of Home in Western Europe (2020).