ARTIFACT IMAGE
Sugar Bowl Item Info
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- Title:
- Sugar Bowl
- Date:
- 18th century, about 1847
- Description:
- Transfer-printed earthenware (possibly creamware) sugar bowl (a) with top (b), gilt floral designs and piping along borders
- Marks/Inscriptions :
- "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" inscribed on both sides of bowl
- Geographies:
- europe;england
- Material:
- Ceramic; earthenware
- Provenance:
- Acquired by Mrs. Thomas Jenkins, given to Anti-Slavery Fair by Queen Elizabeth
- Quaker connection:
- Acquired by Mrs. Thomas Jenkins
- Object Story, Consumption and Use:
- Anti-slavery sugar bowls were common Abolitionist messaging tools in the 1800’s. The Committee for the Abolition of Slavery, based in England, adopted English potter and entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood’s design, which is featured on the body of this bowl. The phrase, “Am I not a man and a brother?”, became a central feature of many Abolitionist objects after its coinage in 1787. This sugar bowl is both a unique and common piece of Abolitionist history that reveals how material and ideological circulation were functioning during the time of its production, 1847. This sugar bowl was sent to a Philadelphia-based Anti-Slavery Fair by Queen Victoria. It was then purchased by a Mrs. Thomas Jenkins. Anti-Slavery Fairs were very common in the United States, being used by Abolitionist communities as a way to disseminate political values and ideals. This bowl reveals how Abolitionist messaging became very entangled in domestic spheres as its purpose was to both hold sugar and signal to visitors in the home the politics of its owners. This form of Abolitionist work was exclusively associated with femininity, as most of the Fairs were organized and put on by women. Looking closely at this sugar bowl, and the history embedded in it, reveals the values of Anti-Slavery work at this time. While there is not much information available about both the actual making of this object and where the money that was raised from its selling went, we can see how material culture can become explicitly infused with symbols and messaging as a way to further political agendas.
- Research Sources:
- 1. J.R. Oldfield, “Consuming Abolition in The Ties That Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820-1865 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 91-116. 2. Julie L. Holcomb, “Prize Goods: The Quaker Origins of the Slave-Labor Boycott, in Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016) 13-35. 3. Troy Bickham, “Eating the Empire: Intersections of Food, Cookery and Imperialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Past & Present, no. 198 (2008): 71-109. 4. Andrew White, “A ‘Consuming’ Oppression: Sugar, Cannibalism and John Woolman’s 1770 Slave Dream,” Quaker History 96, no.2 5. Jean R. Soderlund, “Priorities and Power: The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society.” In The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Cornell University Press, 1994), 67-88. 6. Rachael Scarborough King, “An Eighteenth-Century Quaker Poem and Transatlantic Abolitionism,” in American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), 176-183.
- Type:
- Image;StillImage
- Format:
- image/jpg
- Accession Number:
- SC-FHL-R-0029
Source
- Preferred Citation:
- "Sugar Bowl", From Local to Global - Consumption and the Quaker Body, Swarthmore College, https://swat-ds.github.io/material-culture/material-culture/items/mc001.html