| This dissertation revisits a set of old questions: why does the furniture of eighteenth-century Anglo-America look the way it does? What determines the design of this furniture---its shapes, proportions, ornament, materials and construction? Past scholars have answered these questions by focusing on issues of style and technology. My dissertation, however, argues that the answer to these questions rests in the conception of furniture, and more specifically, in the conception of what furniture constituted relative to its owner. Under the pressure of the Enlightenment, and the profound shifts in the understanding of non-human things that it brought about, Anglo-Americans gradually moved away from the long-standing animistic sense that chests, tables and chairs were equivalent, human-like subjects---non-human things with human qualities---and began to think of them as objects---as inanimate, material entities that shared nothing in common with the human at all. I argue that this conceptual shift guided and to a large extent determined the design of eighteenth century Anglo-American furniture. |
