A Barrier or a Bridge to American Identity? The Uses of European Taste among Eighteenth-Century Plantation Gentry in British America

The article discusses the pursuit of genteel European tastes as part of the process of the cultural legitimization of emerging eighteenth-century elites in the plantation region of British America. It surveys the applications of metropolitan taste and suggests that the colonists well succeeded in their pursuit within the American cultural marketplace, even though they were not fully recognized as gentry by London. The author refutes a common interpretation that this quest for gentility was a futile, artificial endeavor and an obstacle to developing an original American culture. Instead, he argues that stylizing life and commanding objects of approved taste was one of the most effective means of constructing the identity and authority of the new class as British gentry. It was the achieved firmness of this identity that provided, during the Revolution, the confidence and determination to publicly claim for all America such gentry birthrights as liberty and equality. These claims -a fact unforeseen by the newly legitimized colonial gentry -were picked up and domesticated by the common folk and became an essential and distinct ingredient of the new American culture.