Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  The Chinese state might not have blocked trade, but it did not promote it either. Wealth created in the Yangzi Delta was siphoned off and transferred to the poorer north, a kind of cross-subsidy for the sake of political stability. The British state was no charity bazaar, but it squeezed its people’s wallets to build up trade and colonies as well as to subsidize the elite. And trade spurred demand, as contemporaries appreciated. ‘It is not because an English washerwoman cannot sit down to breakfast without tea and sugar, that the world has been circumnavigated,’ the champion of colonization Edward Gibbon Wakefield noted, ‘but it is because the world has been circumnavigated that an English washerwoman requires tea and sugar for breakfast.’41 The Atlantic empire gave the new textile industries, too, a much bigger outlet than they would have had otherwise.42 The promotion of trade intersected with a domestic culture receptive to experimentation, as was the case in the new cotton and pottery manufactories. All this favoured growth and development.43 And it enlarged the basket of goods for Britons at home and in the colonies. Trade was significant because it cheapened consumer goods at a time when food prices were rising. It was those with disposable income, the middling sort and the rich, who were the main beneficiaries.

  URBAN LIVING

  All societies had capitals and major cities. China had Beijing and Yangzhou; France had Paris, with half a million inhabitants by 1700. What set the Netherlands and Britain apart was the density of their urban landscape. Towns and cities grew by leaps and bounds. In England and Wales in 1500, fewer than one in thirty people lived in a town with a population of more than 10,000; by 1800, it was one in five. In the Netherlands, this proportion increased from 16 per cent to 29 per cent. Meanwhile, a mere 5 per cent lived in towns in the lower Yangzi in 1800, the most developed region in China at the time; in Latin America and India, it was around 6 per cent.44 France and Germany were overwhelmingly rural societies, while Italian cities suffered from stagnation or decline. Why should this matter? After all, commerce expanded in the Yangzi in the absence of towns, as revisionist historians have recently shown. For consumption, however, urban life was decisive – for four main reasons.

  First, thanks to their size and social complexion, towns and cities provided a favourable space for product differentiation and specialized services. The sheer variety of tea sets, wallpapers and ready-made gowns is unthinkable without them, as is the arrival by the mid-eighteenth century of dedicated glass and china shops alongside the general mercer of old. Cities thus accelerated and fed the specialization made possible by trade. Secondly, towns provided a stage where desires were tickled and new tastes diffused. Urban tradesmen acquired porcelain, curtains and saucepans faster than their counterparts in the country.45 In other words, urban living did more to increase demand than rising income or falling prices did. The countryside was not entirely cut off, but there were only so many novelties that a pedlar could carry on his back. What urban shops began to offer in the eighteenth century was a whole ambience of consumption, with goods behind plate glass and mirrors, display cabinets and comfortable chairs for customers. Shopping became part of urban leisure. Provincial shops played a crucial role in the cultural as much as the commercial integration of Britain. In Chester in the 1730s, for example, the upholsterer Abner Scholes assembled two showrooms of an ideal home, with chairs and tables, modern fabrics and framed prints of Lilliputians, made fashionable by the suceess of Gulliver’s Travels.46 Urban living, thirdly, cut into self-provisioning. True, the French bourgeoisie continued to draw on wine from their vineyards and urban workers kept chickens into the twentieth century but, in general, ‘autoconsommation’ was much harder for city folk than for their country cousins. Cooking requires an oven, time, skill and coal. Urban workers lacked most of these. Clothing, too, was increasingly purchased ready-made.

  Booming cities, finally, created a particular arena of communication. Growth and mobility constantly brought new faces together. Reputation and identity were more fluid. Dress was a way to signal who one was, or wanted to be. A new culture of appearance took hold. ‘Fine Feathers make fine Birds,’ the Dutch-born physician and philosopher Bernard Mandeville noted in The Fable of the Bees in 1714, ‘and People where they are not known, are generally honour’d according to their Cloaths and other Accoutrements they have about them; from their richness of them we judge of their Wealth, and by their ordering of them we guess at their Understanding. It is this,’ Mandeville concluded, that made a person ‘wear Clothes above his Rank, especially in large and Populous Cities, where obscure Men may hourly meet with fifty Strangers to one Acquaintance, and consequently have the Pleasure of being esteem’d by a vast Majority, not as what they are, but what they appear to be.’47 The anonymity of towns made it easier to seek approval and be treated above one’s station. ‘This Golden Dream’, as Mandeville called it, unleashed a game of imitation and disguise that made demand self-perpetuating.

  It is not necessary to be quite so cynical, but the general point about the importance of consumer goods for identity formation stands. Dress, accessories and comportment provided a social positioning system. A trader, new to town, was less likely to attract business if he dressed like a country bumpkin, a customer less likely to receive credit. Perhaps as significant as building trust and impressing others was fashioning oneself. One of the first things young workers bought with their wages was a decent set of clothes: it announced a new, mature identity. Simultaneously, the commotion of cities more generally put a premium on privacy, as people drew their curtains and looked for comfort inside the home and in its possessions. The stage was set for ‘self-fashioning’ three centuries before literary critics coined the term.48

  THINGS ON THE MIND

  Karl Marx believed that Western capitalism divorced humans from the world of things. The rise of the West, in this influential view, entailed a unique ability to look at an object as an abstraction, a lifeless thing that could be exchanged for money, in contrast to tribal cultures which fetishized goods for their magical powers. The more goods the West accumulated, the less they cared about them. Many have blamed the enlightenment for the West’s ‘self’-importance. For Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the founders of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School of social research, it left behind an ‘instrumental rationality’. For some anthropologists, the sharp line between people and things set the West apart from the more organic material cultures of Africa or China. In Ming China, man was part of the world of things (wu). In Europe, according to this view, however, they were torn asunder by René Descartes, who, in the 1640s, argued that the mind was an entity separate from the body and the material world. A century and a half later, Immanuel Kant is said to have completed ‘humankind’s victory over . . . things’.49

  This fixation on humans as independent subjects is, we are told, the source of our own current mess. Modernity gave Western man the delusion that he controlled matter. Our dependence on things was forgotten. Objects became subordinate and disposable. The throwaway society was the inevitable result. In recent years, the French social scientist and tireless champion of things Bruno Latour has been at the forefront of a campaign to give things back the respect they deserve and reclaim them as actors in our lives. What is required, Latour insists, is nothing less than a break with the intellectual foundations of modernity. From Hobbes and Rousseau to Rawls and Habermas in the late twentieth century, political thought has been the ‘victim of a strong object-avoidance tendency’, dreaming up assemblies emptied of stuff, where people meet as if ‘naked’, equipped only with reason.50

  It would be foolish to deny parts of the critique – the enlightenment did sponsor the idea of critical reason and undermined folk ideas which, for example, had invested trees and other objects with the power of speech and action. The real question is whether dematerialization captures the overall thrust of modernity and whether it led to a distinctly carefree attitude to things in the West. After all, that the Chinese saw persons and things as one has not stopped them from consumi
ng a lot in recent decades. Nor did Western modernity have a single tradition. Arguments for the authentic self were paralleled and sometimes drowned out by a new fascination with things as handmaidens of knowledge and identity; even Descartes did not believe in a strict dualism between mind and matter or subjects and objects. Instead of falling into a sudden material amnesia, artists and scientists were, in fact, thinking about things, including in political economy, philosophy, literature and law. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century minds were, for want of a better word, becoming stuffed.

  The embrace of things had its roots in natural philosophy. Renaissance culture had made people more attentive to objects. Collections of books and exotic herbs reflected the expertise and taste of the collector. This provided the foundation from which Dutch and English scientists and travellers in the seventeenth century would develop a fresh approach to knowledge. Instead of proceeding from general principles, they began with the detailed description of objects. Understanding could not be achieved by mental exertion alone but required going out into the world, to smell, touch and catalogue the many things that filled it. In the decades after 1598, fleets of Dutch ships returned from the East and West Indies with collections of shells, nutmeg, armadillos and the bones of an elk. Expeditions to the Spice Islands added a Hottentot spear. Cabinets of exotic plants and artefacts like those in Enkhuizen and Leiden appeared in travel guides and attracted artisans and merchants as well as students and royalty. Commercial expansion and ‘tasteful objectivity’ fed each other.51 Both reached out into the world in search of new things.

  The empirical, material approach to knowledge made trade a virtuous partner of science and sociability. Goods and goodness advanced hand in hand. Trade did not just line the pockets of the merchant. It opened up the world for the general good. Like science, trade taught people to appreciate objects and to work together, as Caspar Barlaeus, the Renaissance polymath, argued in his lectures at Amsterdam’s Athenaeum in the 1630s. This was a much more dynamic and open view than that of civic humanism, where magnificence had been the privilege of the few. Trade validated objects in the home in a new way. The Chinese dishes and Turkish carpets that Dutch burghers displayed in their homes were symbolic of this ‘positive relationship to the world’, in the words of the Ming historian Timothy Brook, and stood in contrast to the late Ming, where the foreignness of objects carried little value.52

  The established position had been that the desire for things was simultaneously a costly drain on the nation and corrupted the individual. This was well expressed by the English merchant Thomas Mun. The Dutch were beating us, Mun wrote in 1664, because they were industrious, while the English were suffering from a:

  general leprosie of our Piping [smoking], Potting [drinking], Feasting, Fashions, and mis-spending of our time in Idleness and Pleasure (contrary to the Law of God, and the use of other Nations) [that] hath made us effeminate in our bodies, weak in our knowledge, poor in our Treasure, declined in our Valour, unfortunate in our Enterprises, and contemned by our Enemies. I write the more of these excesses, because they do so greatly wast[e] our wealth.53

  Yet even as Mun was writing, this orthodoxy was coming under fire from the new champions of things. Desire was a divine gift, the scientist Robert Boyle wrote in 1655. While ‘other creatures were content with . . . easily attainable necessaries’, God had furnished man with ‘a multiplicity of desires’. ‘Superfluities and dainties’ were not bad. ‘Greedy appetites’ inspired an ‘inquisitive industry to range, anatomize, and ransack nature’. Instead of distracting people from the world of the spirit, the lust for goods gave them a ‘more exquisite admiration of the omniscient Author’.54 God wanted people to be consumers, not ascetics.

  The classical suspicion of luxury lost ground as the culture of improvement gathered steam. For the Royal Society, founded in 1660, Venetian glass and other foreign luxury goods advanced new technologies and useful knowledge. Patents proliferated. In his History of the Royal Society (1667), the Bishop of Rochester presented luxury and novelty as vehicles of progress. At the beginning, he wrote, society had been divided into the powerful and the rest. The powerful increased their pleasure and conveniences through luxury; the rest did so through work. The result was opulence and cities. So far, so good. Where the bishop broke with earlier writers was in daring to imagine that progress could continue, thanks to the ‘discovery of new matter, to imploy men’s hands’ and the transplantation of the same matter from the colonies, such as silk. ‘We have no ground to despair.’ The microscope, optical glass and other new instruments showed that ‘we have a far greater number of different things reveal’d to us, than were contain’d in the visible Universe before.’ Trade and novelties injected constant fresh energy into Britain: the more the better.55

  Novelties were also news, and the latest goods were promoted by the burgeoning market for printed news. In addition to selling tea and coffee, the apothecary John Houghton, a fellow of the Royal Society, ran a weekly, single-folio commercial newsletter between 1692 and 1703. Sold at two pence, the Collection for Improvement of Agriculture and Trade mixed information on the price of coal and company stock with adverts for chocolate and spectacles.

  These texts were about more than this or that novelty item. They expressed a fundamentally new view of human nature. The critique of luxury had drawn on the principles of the ancients. Aristotle presumed that man had limited needs. The best way to satisfy them was to lead a simple life, according to Socrates. The moderns raised their sights. An early exponent of a more expansive vision of desire was Nicholas Barbon, a pioneer of insurance and banking in London in the 1680s Mankind, according to Barbon, was born with two general wants: the ‘Wants of the Body, and the Wants of the Mind’. And the latter were ‘infinite’. Desire was the ‘Appetite of the Soul’, and as natural to it ‘as Hunger to the Body’. ‘Man naturally aspires’ and ‘his wants increase with his wishes, which is for everything that is rare, can gratify his senses, adorn his body, and promote the ease, pleasure and pomp of life.’ England’s resources were, similarly, ‘infinite and can never be consumed’. Consumption was not fixed by physiological limits. Barbon knew what he was talking about – a wheeler-dealer, he was a fashionable dresser and a speculative builder who profited from Londoners’ wish for greater comfort in the aftermath of the Great Fire. Fashion was not wasteful. Rather it was the ‘desire of novelties and things scarce, that causeth trade’. The more the nation traded, the more people earned, the more they consumed, the fatter the king’s coffers.56

  In The Fable of the Bees (1705/14), Bernard Mandeville sharpened the blade of this argument and delivered the coup de grâce to the old moral order. Private vices, in his famous phrase, made for public benefits:

  Envy it self, and Vanity

  Were Ministers of Industry;

  Their darling Folly, Fickleness

  In Diet, Furniture, and Dress,

  That strange ridic’lous Vice, was made

  The very Wheel, that turn’d the Trade.

  Vice had raised ‘Pleasures, Comforts, Ease/To such a Height, the very Poor/Liv’d better than the Rich before’.57 The argument cut through the moral unity of civic humanism, which imagined a symmetry between individual virtue and the public good. It divorced social benefits from individual character. Bad intentions did not matter, if the results were good. A glutton made a good citizen. Strong nations were built by vice, not virtue.

  In sixteenth-century China, the writer Lu Ji had already questioned the notion that extravagance impoverished society. The luxurious living of the few encouraged commerce. It is unhelpful, however, to see here a Chinese Mandeville avant la lettre.58 Unlike the Dutch doctor, Lu Ji did not imagine a ‘wheel’ of perpetual growth. The amount of wealth created by heaven and earth was fixed. One person’s loss was another’s gain. What made Mandeville so revolutionary was that he portrayed a society where individuals’ lust for things fed everyone’s gain, making the whole nation wealthier and stronger.

  The
fresh appreciation of consumption mirrored a more positive view of wages. In the past, the poverty of the many was taken as given. There was only so much to go around. If weavers’ wages went up, so would the price of cloth, resulting in fewer sales, fewer jobs and more poverty. It was the massive increase in trade and the confidence in useful knowledge in the decades after the Restoration (1660) that opened contemporaries’ eyes to what had been a fact for two centuries: Britain was a high-wage economy. John Cary argued in 1695 that improved skills and labour-saving technologies made it possible to be competitive and pay high wages. Instead of being condemned to a struggle for survival, the bulk of the population could enter the ranks of consumers. Higher spending was feasible. In fact, it was desirable, Daniel Defoe argued in A Plan of the English Commerce in 1728. For the entire nation depended on the many labourers and shopkeepers and ‘the largeness of their Gettings’: ‘by their Wages they are able to live plentifully, and it is by their expensive, generous, free way of living, that the Home Consumption is rais’d to such a Bulk, as well of our own, as of foreign Production.’ ‘We are a luxurious, expensive People.’ Life was ‘full of Excesses’, Defoe wrote, ‘even criminally so in some Things’. Still, cutting wages to cut consumption was a bad idea. Pay them less and they would spend less. The whole kingdom would suffer.59