936  BOOK REVIEWS little is made of this in the book, though Vaughn does note that Olaudah Equiano was so disturbed by the heathen nature of several Americans from the Moskito Coast that he tried to proselytize their “prince.” Vaughn’s secondary concern is “to put a human face on the Americans’ experiences before and after, but especially during, their overseas ventures” (xvi). This works best for the famous ones like Sansom Occum and Joseph Brant, for whom the trip to England was a career high point. This is clear even for lesser-known figures, like Tomochichi and Osteneco, who milked their voyage for political clout for the rest of their days. But this also gives the book an antiquarian feel. One is confronted with one individual’s story after another, with very little reflection on what these experiences might mean for our understanding of the British Empire—or even the histories of Britain or Native America. There is a wealth of material for reflection here. As Vaughn notes, many Native visitors experienced something of “celebrity” and were regularly associated with spectacles—be it sixteenth-century cabinets of curiosity, seventeenth-century fairs, or eighteenth-century the- aters. Vaughn, who has worked on Shakespeare before, is particularly fascinated by the Americans’ encounters with British plays. “Shakespeare’s plays, and a few others, initially benefited disproportionately” (241). There follows a list of the performances seen, but no thoughts on why the British thought it so important to make Mohawks watch Hamlet and Macbeth. There seems to be a great opportunity here for future reflections on the ideological construction and personal political experience of British expansion. Vaughn’s occasional comparisons indicate that there is something peculiar about the Americans in Britain worth further exploration. The abundance of individual and group portraits of Americans reaching from Martin Frobisher’s first Inuit captive of 1576 to Joseph Brant in 1776 is not matched by a similar fascination with Africans or Asians. While a few “likenesses . . . were drawn or painted, they pale in comparison to the number made and copied for widespread distribution of Americans, even the relatively humble” (242). This suggests a number of things—perhaps Britons’ more intimate, possessive relationship to America? This also raises a variety of questions. Did Native Americans (as opposed to Anglo- Americans) offer Britons a useful way to think about their empire? Was it more appealing to focus on those one could theoretically “civilize” rather than those one could not (Asians) or those one did dehumanize (Africans)? The questions stimulated by the material Vaughn has gathered will, I imagine, prove the enduring usefulness of his work. No doubt with time a few more Native Americans in Britain will be found—sailors from New England, for example. But Vaughn’s research will remain foundational. His framework notes the different ways people from different times and places came to Britain and were treated there, from “Ralegh’s American Interpreters” to the “Delegations from the Lower South,” catching the changing phases of this Anglo-American experience. The pan-American perspective is laudable. The 1776 cutoff date reveals Vaughn’s origins as an historian of Colonial America. But his footnotes will be of interest to a wide range of scholars of the United States, Britain, Native America, and the wider Atlantic world that tied them together. Evan Haefeli, Columbia University LINDA LEVY PECK. Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century En- gland. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi+431. $35.00 (cloth). Linda Levy Peck’s much-anticipated study of the place of luxury, especially luxury goods, in seventeenth-century England is itself a beautifully produced publication from Cambridge https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1086/522718 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Maryland - University Libraries, on 10 Mar 2017 at 20:53:52, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at