Tilt-top tables: commodities in eighteenth-century America

Abstract

American furniture historians have long known that eighteenth-century craftsmen constructed tilt-top tables from component parts made by other artisans. They have not investigated, however, the significance of this proto-industrial production in the historical contexts o f craft specialization and consumerism. This thesis explores the role of tilt-top tables made in America between 1740 and 1790 as commodities in the expanding market economy of the British Atlantic World. In so doing, it breaks from current studies of American furniture that focus on the work o f individual craftsmen or geographic regions, and demonstrates the benefits of researching one furniture form throughout many regions. ☐ This thesis systematically investigates the people who made, distributed, bought, and used tilt-top tables by examining extant examples, artisans’ records, and newspaper advertisements. Tilt-top tables were the products of complex market-driven interactions between artisan-entrepreneurs and consumers. Fueled by favorable economic conditions beginning in the 1740s, both urban and rural craftsmen developed profitable business relationships through which they exchanged tilt-top table parts and specialized services including carving and turning. Craftsmen and merchants sold tilt-top tables at finely gauged price levels thus allowing consumers to choose the size, wood, features, and decoration that matched their preferences and their financial resources. Their shape, surface, and versatility encouraged Americans to use tilt-top tables for many activities, including tea parties, card playing, and business transactions. Eventually, Americans associated tilt-top tables so closely with polite social interaction that they became visual cues for genteel respectability. Like ceramics and printed textiles that were produced inexpensively in large volume to sell to increasingly fashion-conscious consumers of moderate means, tilt-top tables became vehicles for the spread of refinement in America.