ABOUT BOOK

This chapter therefore makes a case for a political history of shoes, by bringing ~together these two rich fields. It will begin by thinking about the nature of ~political culture in the eighteenth century, where political virtue was evaluated in ~highly moral and gendered terms, and where shoes became the focus of debates ~about masculinity and citizenship. It will then turn its attention to citizenship in a ~national sense, to think about how certain types of leather shoes came to be seen ~as synonymous with Britishness, and how wearing them informed what it meant ~to live as a ‘Briton.’ Debates about politics and gender were inseparable from those ~on social class, and shoes worn by different social classes were loaded with political ~meaning. They also give us an insight into how people from different social classes ~moved and comported themselves. Focusing on the history of shoes in these ways ~can therefore show how embodiment should be central to our understanding of the ~practice of politics in eighteenth-century Britain.