Although the Treatise celebrates the pleasure gained from things, it was in other ways the antithesis of the consumer culture that would transform the modern world. Novelties held few attractions. Things produced for the market were suspect. True value resided in antiquity, and could be appreciated only by the connoisseur. As one of Wen’s associates wrote in the preface to the Treatise, sons of the nouveau riche and ‘one or two dullards and persons of mean status’ were trying to pose as ‘aficionados’, but they inevitably failed, ‘besmirching anything which comes into their hands with their wanton fumbling and grabbing, to an utter pitch of vileness’.79 The quest for antiques set off its own kind of demand, including grave robbing. It sparked a wave of imitations. ‘How many authentic antiques can there be?’, one poet asked, warning readers to watch out for forgeries in late-seventeenth-century Suzhou; one technique was to apply vinegar to brass to create the illusion of an ancient patina.80 Still, this kind of demand was ultimately about digging up old bronzes of the Shang period (c.1600– c.1046 BCE) and collecting antique pieces of calligraphy from the Jin dynasty (265–420) – that is, goods that already existed – rather than attracting various new kinds of possessions. One exception was newly commissioned pieces of fine art and calligraphy, but even here the brushwork often followed the style of ancient masters. Instead of releasing a current of new articles, antiques and original pieces of art were stocks to be cherished for life; indeed, even in the afterlife. Many merchants as well as members of the imperial elite chose to be buried with antique jades and bronzes, old paintings and books. In 1495, the merchant Wang Zhen was interred with twenty-four paintings and two scrolls of calligraphy – two of the paintings were signed Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) but have been exposed as fakes; several others were by fourteenth- hand fifteenth-century court painters and scholar-officials.81
If goods were circulating more quickly, then they did so in a conservative cultural environment. Like Renaissance Italy, late Ming China failed to generate a sense that consumption might make a positive contribution to state, society and economy. Confucian literature was full of warnings about how extravagance led to corruption. The Plum in the Golden Vase offered several volumes’ worth. Ximen Qing’s decadent lifestyle is a morality tale of how his lust for things and sex fed off each other until they overpowered him. Fine clothes and ornaments constantly arouse Ximen. In one scene, he observes a maidservant, Chun-mei, ‘wearing a blouse of aloeswood-colored moiré [a wavy silk] with variegated crepe edging, which opened down the middle, over a drawnwork skirt of white glazed damask. Shoes of scarlet iridescent silk, with white soles, satin high heels, and gold-spangled toes were visible beneath her skirt.’ In addition to a tiara of jade, ‘enchased [sic] with gold’, her ‘hair was further adorned with plum-blossom shaped ornaments with kingfisher feather inlays . . . which had the effect of further enhancing:
The fragrant redness of her ruby lips, and
The glossy whiteness of her powdered face.
Before he knew it, Hsi-men Ch’ing’s [Ximen Qing’s]
Lecherous desires were suddenly aroused.
Soon he is fondling her breasts, ‘sucking at the teats like a young calf’. The desire for things and the desire for flesh propel each other forward on the road to self-destruction. Ximen lays out fifty taels of silver and buys four sets of silk clothes for a singing girl he kept in a brothel, ‘explaining that he planned to deflower’ her. ‘Amid dancers’ skirts and singers’ clappers, he is forever seeking novelty.’82 The novel played relentlessly on the double meaning of the ‘silver stream’. Letting it flow too freely drained the body of its physical and financial strength. At thirty-three, Ximen dies from an overdose of aphrodisiac. By implication, too much consumption would be equally fatal to the health of the nation.
The elite did not put on a hairshirt, although literati circles and scholarly women did favour simple attire, and courtesans in late Ming China were known for their plain robes.83 What the gentry, scholar-officials and literati did was to promote an alternative canon of values and behaviour. Rather than competing directly with the conspicuous consumption of some rich merchants, they sidestepped it, elevating an aesthetic disposition and the disinterested appreciation of art for art’s sake above material wealth and the accumulation and waste of possessions that came with it. Cultural capital trumped economic capital, to use the language of later sociologists.84 High status was demonstrated through connoisseurship, the collection of antiques, the writing of poems, playing the guqin (zither), studying the classics or spending idle time with an exclusive group of friends. Drinking games with poetry competitions are the principal form of leisure in the novel Dream of the Red Chamber (1791). In the sixteenth century, the elite formally forbade villagers such pleasures, including the collection of rocks and antiques. Pleasure required mental rather than material resources. It could not simply be purchased like any other commodity. A lot of it was contemplative, spiritual and aesthetic, such as admiring mountain scenes and gardens in nature or paintings. Sociability could involve heavy drinking, but even this was valued as an act of transcendence that left the physical world behind.85 It resembled the classical Aristotelian ideal of leisure as contemplation – reserved for the elite who did not need to work – more than our busy contemporary pursuit of material satisfaction and productive leisure.
This learned, contemplative culture of consumption continued to set the social tone in late Ming and Qing China. Commerce had unleashed a diffusion of goods and created new classes of consumers, but it had not yet created its own lifestyle or value system. The conflicted identity and soul-searching of the salt merchants of Yangzhou here is revealing. True, some were nouveau riche flouting their wealth. But many others took their cue from the official scholar elite and its ideal of the cultured life, learning to play the zither, sending their poems and calligraphy to scholars for approval, and preparing their children for the official examinations, hoping to secure a place among the elite for future generations. As we have seen, already in the late fifteenth century a merchant such as Wang Zhen would try to enhance his status by surrounding himself with paintings by the educated elite. By the eighteenth century, the Hung merchant family entertained famous scholars, astronomers, poets and calligraphers. Ma Yueguan and his brother Ma Yuelu became poets in their own right and used their wealth to build up a rare book collection and host a literary salon; they also generously supported historians and poets through sickness and financial difficulties.86 Culture, not material wealth, was the ticket into the elite, and this was a successful strategy for many merchant families, if not in the second, then in the third generation, when sons became degree-holders and officials. All this is not to say that China was stagnant or closed. As we have seen, Japanese lacquer, European glass and Western pet rats found their way into the empire. But how much bigger would the trade in foreign goods have been if the Ming had had its own Western Ocean companies along the lines of the European East India companies. European goods remained on the margins of Ming and Qing culture. They were mere curiosities with no assigned place in a value system which looked for meaning in the past.87 The cult of antiquity pulled in the opposite direction from the pursuit of novelty that would distinguish an acquisitive consumer culture. In that sense, China was commercially advanced but culturally backward looking.
MORE STUFF
It was in the north-west of Europe, in the Netherlands and Britain, that a more dynamic, innovative culture of consumption came to take hold in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The growth in shops, markets and personal belongings was well under way in Renaissance Europe and Ming China, but their further expansion in the Netherlands and Britain was only in part a continuation of this earlier trend. For the two countries separated by the North Sea changed after 1600 in ways that, together, created a new kind of consumer culture. The exponential rise in stuff went hand in hand with a rise in novelty, variety and availability, and this was connected to a more general openness to the world of goods and its contri
bution to the individual self, to social order and economic development. What distinguished the basket of goods in the eighteenth century was the combination of novelty, variety and the speed of change. Tobacco, tea and porcelain were new things that spawned new forms of consuming, socializing and self-representation. Equally important was the jump in variety. The manufacturer Matthew Boulton, who sold tea kettles, buckles, buttons and toothpick cases, had 1,500 designs on his books.
There was, perhaps, no better indicator of the change than the shift in the meaning of the word ‘consumption’ itself. After centuries in which the body politic had been modelled on the human body, the consumption of goods began to be distinguished from its epistemological cousin, consumption as a wasting disease. Personal excess, of course, continued to attract moral critics, but it was no longer a dangerous social disease. Instead, a chorus of new voices defended man’s appetite for more as the impetus of human advancement. Here was a fundamental transformation, overturning centuries of received wisdom: less is more gave way to more and more. Once regarded as a drain, to be checked and kept under control, consumption was now defended as a source of wealth. In 1776 Adam Smith pronounced it the ‘sole end of all production’.88
The first signs of this change were apparent in the Dutch Republic, which declared its independence from Spain in 1581. The Netherlands pioneered a new type of society and economy that provided a favourable environment for greater consumption. Its distinctive twin features were an integrated market and a mobile, open society. Land was not in the hands of the aristocracy, as in most of Italy and the rest of Europe, but belonged to smallholders. Secure in their tenure, thanks to long leases, they made the most of the rising demand and price for food from a growing urban population by switching from basic wheat and rye to higher value butter and cheese, meat and garden vegetables. Peasants turned into market-savvy farmers. Grain was profitably imported from eastern Germany and the Baltic. In the towns and cities, money and labour flowed into increasingly specialized and successful industries. Haarlem became the centre for fine linen, Delft for ceramics. Leiden, in 1584, produced 27,000 pieces of cloth: eighty years later, it churned out six times that number, and with a growing share of pure woollens (lakens).89 If Ming China saw signs of specialization, the Dutch raised the division of labour to a new art form. Their villages were characterized by a proliferation of skills and trades, of shoemakers, wagon-makers and horticulturalists as well as farmers and small traders. In contrast to the wool trade in Flanders, guilds were absent in the new Dutch export trades, which had little interest in having obstacles placed in their path. Even where guilds existed, as in the north of the Netherlands, they were subordinate to urban governments and lacked the independent power to restrict trade and labour they possessed elsewhere on the continent.90 Instead, in the Netherlands, the textile trade acted as a magnet for workers from Flanders and Liège. The United Provinces were one commercial zone, without the many regional barriers and taxes that required goods to be unloaded and assessed every few miles in the German-speaking lands. More than anywhere else in the world, labour, capital and land were allowed to find their most productive outlet.
It was this virtuous mix of flexibility and fluidity that enabled the Dutch to attract and expand trade, and to absorb the pressures that a growing population and seventeenth-century wars were putting on living conditions elsewhere on the continent; the Dutch population doubled between 1500 and 1650, reaching 1.9 million. All this was not enough to trigger an industrial revolution. But, and crucially for our interests, it did manage to convert a growing population to high wages and a growing demand for goods; in turn, rising real wages prompted the search for labour-saving devices such as windmills and the horse-powered butter churn. Thus, a typical dairy farmer at the end of the sixteenth century was able to buy one third more rye for every pound of butter he sold than at its start. He could afford to buy more things.91
The domestic interior and everyday life were transformed. Farmhouses were filling up with things. By the late seventeenth century, it was common for a farmer to own a clock, carpets and curtains, paintings and books, and some porcelain dishes standing on eight-sided tables, items rarely seen a century earlier. At the time of his death in 1692, the rich farmer Cornelis Pieterse de Lange owned sixty-nine silver buttons, in addition to a number of silver spoons and knives. Few of his neighbours in Alphen were able to match that, but the rise in comfort and possessions was palpable everywhere. By 1700, mirrors had become ubiquitous. Proliferation, though, was uneven. Some things, such as the number of tablecloths, saw little change; the number of bedsheets might even have slightly declined. Others, however, were multiplying apace. In the village of Lisse, the widow Anna Nannige Beverwijk had sixty-one table napkins, for example. Linen, in particular, was a deposit of wealth, and many farmers poured their new earnings into it. On modest dairy farms, men and women had eighteen linen shirts each in their wardrobes by the 1670s, three times the number a century earlier. Fashionably decorated linen was replacing cheaper wool.92
The new scale and taste for abundance was nowhere more apparent than in the great townhouses of Dutch cities. The Bartolotti house, on Amsterdam’s Herengracht, was an opulent burgher’s palace. In 1665, its great hall had a long oak table with twelve red velvet-upholstered chairs, an ebony-framed mirror and paintings of the Nativity, family members and the Princes of Orange on the wall. Even the maid had seven paintings in her room. Typically, such townhouses integrated several worlds of consumption, bringing together fine silverware made in Amsterdam and Utrecht with cabinets from east India, tiles from Delft and carpets from the Orient. In 1608, the Dutch East India Company put in an order for over 100,000 pieces of Chinese porcelain.93 Some of this would be re-exported, but a good deal would find its way on to Dutch tables and walls. As Simon Schama has brilliantly shown, there was nothing especially plain or thrifty about the Dutch, not even among more modest merchants and shopkeepers.94 In 1717, a tailor’s household on the Prinsengracht contained five paintings, Delft earthenware, pewter tankards, seven lace curtains, two dozen chairs, several books, six sets of bed linen, forty-one napkins and a birdcage. There was a general appetite for more possessions and finer, decorated articles that went right across the population, as illustrated by the lotteries organized by many towns to raise money for charities. In Veere, in the south-western Netherlands, the lottery in 1662 offered wine goblets and standing salts, silver jars and silver sword handles. And these were just the minor prizes. Those lucky to win the top prize took home a silver table service of dishes, plates, tankards, candlesticks and forks worth 4,000 florins.
After the Reformation, Calvinists continued to repeat ancient warnings about wealth as a mother of extravagance. But, importantly, local magistrates refused to listen. To the contrary, towns staged lavish banquets, allegorical masques and fireworks to celebrate their greatness and wealth. It is worth noting how, by contrast, in China, the late Ming emperors repeatedly forbade their subjects to ‘make their pleasure’ and set off fireworks in New Year celebrations.95
In the Dutch Republic, an acceptance of pleasure simultaneously gained hold with a taste for new things. Commercial success and an openness to the world of goods went hand in hand, not least because growth relieved some of the age-old pressure against ‘sumptuous’ lifestyle and luxury manifest elsewhere. Consumption no longer automatically threatened national ruin and to eat up finite resources. Rising earnings meant the Dutch were able to consume more and still invest, belying the simpler morality tale made famous by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic (1904/05), where Calvinist thrift appeared as the cradle of modern capitalism. For the Dutch, the temptations of luxury could be managed as long as burghers did not forget they were also citizens. It was possible to steer a path between excess and austerity. This acceptance extended to smaller pleasures in everyday life, not only to drinking beer (as long as it was downed in licensed public houses) but also to new habits developing with exotic foods, drugs such as smoking tobacco, and sweet
ening food and drink with sugar. As early as 1620, tobacco was being smoked for pleasure. Puffed in moderation, in a clay pipe made in Haarlem or Groningen, it was acceptable. Some militant Calvinists smelled self-indulgence and stupefying lethargy, but there was little taste for prohibiting the crop in Amsterdam, where it was dried and cut. In fact, the major growers who started to cultivate a domestic variety included a deacon of the Reformed Church.96 Here were portents of an emerging mass culture which diffused previously exclusive exotica and integrated them into daily life. The world of consumption was beginning to be navigated with a new moral compass.
Across the North Sea, in England, the volume and variety of goods also grew exponentially in this period. They would reach unprecedented dimensions in the eighteenth century, but the first effects of greater spending can be traced back all the way to the late Middle Ages. In England, real wages in 1500 were three times higher than they had been in 1300, thanks to the Black Death (1348–9), which had wiped out over one third of the labouring population. Higher wages and cheaper food created demand for more varied, higher quality goods. Instead of making do with the bread and cheese of their ancestors, English workers by the late fourteenth century were enjoying meat and ale. Peasants started to wear shoes made of cattle hide rather than the cheaper sheepskin. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, most of the higher quality goods that marked this rising standard of living were foreign imports, such as silks and velvets from Italy or stoneware from the Rhineland (see Plate 4). Tellingly, beer was introduced from the Netherlands – its hops made it last longer than native ale, which went off in a week, and thus assisted the spread of alehouses.97 In the sixteenth century, the domestic market became the backbone for products made in England. Imitations joined imports, often with the help of skilled immigrant labour. London emerged as a production centre for glass and silk. The biggest trade was that in the new draperies, the lighter, finished kinds of wool which artisans from the Low Countries introduced to England.
Empire of Things Page 8
