Just Published: Professor Joe Drury on Humans, Machines, and Automatons
Professor Joe Drury has a chapter coming out next week in the new Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English, edited by Nicole Aljoe, Sarah Eron, and Suvir Kaul. The title of Professor Drury's essay is “Humans, Machines, and Automatons.”
Here is the abstract of Professor Drury's chapter:
Lord Macartney’s assumptions about the Chinese taste for spectacular ornamental machinery during his unsuccessful 1793–1794 embassy reflected changing attitudes toward technology within Britain’s Industrial Enlightenment. Where machines had previously been valued for their aesthetic qualities, the labor required to produce them, and the luxurious consumption they excited, late eighteenth-century commentators such as Adam Smith increasingly emphasized their utility, the productive labor they saved, and the frugality required of the capitalists who introduced them. Responding to this shift, Frances Burney’s Evelina and William Beckford’s Vathek reimagined the longstanding British enthusiasm for ornamental mechanical exhibitions and toys as a barbarous form of “Oriental” fetishism.
Lord Macartney’s assumptions about the Chinese taste for spectacular ornamental machinery during his unsuccessful 1793–1794 embassy reflected changing attitudes toward technology within Britain’s Industrial Enlightenment. Where machines had previously been valued for their aesthetic qualities, the labor required to produce them, and the luxurious consumption they excited, late eighteenth-century commentators such as Adam Smith increasingly emphasized their utility, the productive labor they saved, and the frugality required of the capitalists who introduced them. Responding to this shift, Frances Burney’s Evelina and William Beckford’s Vathek reimagined the longstanding British enthusiasm for ornamental mechanical exhibitions and toys as a barbarous form of “Oriental” fetishism.
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