Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  Not everyone was convinced. When a mild earthquake hit New England in 1727, the Puritan Cotton Mather, a Harvard graduate, preached it was a sign of God’s displeasure at the vanities of his flock. The luxury wars were a pan-European phenomenon. What distinguished the debate in Britain was less the absence of critics than its more fluid, mercantile tone. Expanding commerce and arguments for consumption were supporting each other. Getting rid of the crypto-absolutist James II in 1688 helped, by reducing fears of courtly excess. Instead of a sharp divide between luxury and necessity, contemporaries discovered a spectrum of ‘modest’ or ‘innocent luxury’ in between. What once was luxury could mutate into necessity, as in the case of sugar. Why try to stop the lower orders from joining in? By 1776, as we have seen, Adam Smith could present consumption as ‘the sole end of production’ as if it was the most uncontroversial fact of life.

  On the continent, by contrast, the luxury debate was rekindled by the crisis of the nobility and the rise of despotism. Once a sign of magnificence and virtue, critics complained, luxury was corroding the Spanish nobility, as nobles tried to outspend each other on showy dress and gardens. Strong, productive landowners turned into soft, effeminate puppets. Their power ended up in the hands of an absolute monarch. In France, similarly, Denis Diderot denounced luxury as a source of corruption, centred on the court. And the Church! Voltaire added. Elaborate banquets and liveried servants diverted wealth from more productive employment which had justified luxury in the past. Luxury no longer helped the poor, Baron d’Holbach concluded, it created them.60

  Critics of luxury were not automatically traditionalists and antitrade, just as its defenders were not all modernizers, let alone democrats. The English Nicholas Barbon was a Tory. In France, the Marquis de Mirabeau attacked his fellow noblemen for being decadent ‘bloodsuckers’ but looked for salvation to free trade and agrarian development, not a return to Spartan frugality.61 The excesses of the nobility, like those of bankers today, attracted attention because they seemed to explain a deeper crisis – French losses in the Seven Years War (1756–63) did wonders for the sale of the Marquis’ L’Amis des hommes. Consumption remained first and foremost a political, not an economic question. When it was sweet and when sour depended on the system of government. Luxury was vital in a monarchy where the rich supported the poor, Montesquieu argued, but evil in a republic of equals.62

  In the course of the Enlightenment, the luxury debate crystallized two opposed yet equally radical views of human nature and social order. One celebrated the authentic self. In this view, the self existed prior to and separate from the material world. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the desire for things turned free men into slaves. Fashionable clothes and excessive comforts alienated people from their true self. Rousseau himself donned a simple Armenian coat, much to the ridicule of high society. His great achievement was to extend this idea of a pure self into a political argument for social equality. A republic needed free, active citizens, and this required equality. Luxury destroyed it and reduced people to things. Despotism and slavery were twins.

  An alternative view was advanced by David Hume, Rousseau’s friend and host in London in 1766 until their heavily publicized falling-out when the exiled Rousseau, known for his belligerence, accused his host of secretly plotting against him. Taken to extremes, Hume wrote in his Essays, luxury was pernicious, but the general ‘increase and consumption of all the commodities, which serve to the ornament and pleasures of life, are advantages to society’. The difference between the two men was beautifully captured by Allan Ramsay in his famous portraits of 1766, with Rousseau appearing in his plain Armenian coat while the Scottish philosopher sported bright scarlet, gold brocade and fine lace. Luxury, Hume argued, made a nation stronger and happier. Where ‘there is no demand for such superfluities, men sink into indolence, lose all enjoyment of life, and are useless to the public’. ‘Slothful members’ made poor citizens and poor soldiers. Rather than leading to despotism, the desire for more was the bulwark of liberty. For it enlarged the ‘middling rank’ which neither submitted to slavery (like poor peasants), nor had the hope of tyrannizing others (like barons).63

  Hume’s project was nothing less than ‘a science of man’, and his positive view of luxury was part of a larger appreciation of the role of objects in the making of the self and civil society. Mandeville had left the door wide open to accusations of vice and immorality. Hume closed it, connecting ethics and emotions to the economic defence of material desire. The desire for things made people better as well as richer. By nourishing commerce and industry, it brought them together in clubs, conversation and entertainment, all of which made them ‘feel an encrease of humanity’. ‘Thus,’ Hume concluded, ‘industry, knowledge, and humanity, are linked together by an indissoluble chain, and are found, from experience as well as reason, to be peculiar to the more polished, and . . . more luxurious ages.’64

  That curiosity about objects encouraged civilized sociability had already been the argument of Dutch natural philosophers. In A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume extended this to the self. Hume had studied at La Flèche, Descartes’ college, but the Treatise presented a full-scale alternative to Cartesianism. The mind was not its own entity, separate from the body and nature. Rather the self was a fiction, a kind of work in progress, the composite result of impressions and ideas. It is not clear whether Hume had read Spinoza, who argued that thought originated in sense and sensibility and was thus rooted in matter. He was certainly familiar with his disciples, Pierre Bayle and Mandeville, and frequented the Rainbow Coffee House, on Fleet Street in London, which was popular with Spinozists. Hume showed how bodily pleasure and pain shaped our identity and passions. An encounter with a new object was one way in which intelligence and feeling were inspired and strengthened. When the ‘soul’ applied itself to understand a novelty, Hume wrote, it moved with difficulty at first. This difficulty excited ‘the spirit’ and was ‘the source of wonder’. Over time the stimulus wore off.65 This was just as well, added Hume’s friend Lord Kames in his reflections on novelty a few years later. If it did not, we would suffer from overload and ‘have no room left either for action or reflexion’.66 To trigger the sense of wonder, new objects needed to keep coming. Novelty’s psychological effect fascinated the Scottish Enlightenment and put fashion and obsolescence in a new light. Far from being artificial or alienating, new things helped make us who we were. Stop their flow and the self would lose some of the impressions that kept it alive.

  Today, consumption is so often associated with selfishness that it is worth emphasizing how the eighteenth century appreciated that individuals’ desire for things had social benefits. Wealth, social order and an interest in doing good sustained each other. How did possessions achieve this? The utility of an object pleased its owner, Hume pointed out, by permanently reminding him of the pleasure that object would give in serving its purpose. What had not been noticed, Adam Smith added in The Theory of Moral Sentiment (1759), was that the means for attaining pleasure were often valued higher than that pleasure itself. People stuffed their pockets with ‘little conveniences’ and contrived ‘new pockets’ to carry more. They walked about ‘loaded with a multitude of baubles’ of so little direct use that it ‘is certainly not worth the fatigue of bearing the burden’. And yet, people accumulated more and more. People were in love with ‘numberless artificial and elegant contrivances’, Smith wrote, because they imagined them to be ‘means of happiness’. On its own, a tweezer case looked frivolous and contemptible. Yet, ‘in our imagination’, it was part of a harmonious system that made the pleasures of wealth ‘grand and beautiful and noble’.67 The deception energized mankind and prompted men to cultivate the soil, build cities and improve science and communication.

  Self-interest was tamed and civilized by an interest in the approval of others. The faculty of sympathy – the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes – made for social order: a poor man who could imagine himself one day as master of a mansion was
unlikely to want to get rid of the rich. In the past, it was felt that consumption had to be regulated because reckless spending would otherwise wreck society. This was nonsense, said Smith. Extravagance was driven by ‘the passion for present enjoyment’. It was ‘sometimes violent’ but ‘momentary and occasional’ compared to the stronger desire to better our condition which we carried from the cradle to the grave. This prompted us to save to accumulate wealth. On balance, the frugal many always outnumbered the profligate few. The increase in England’s wealth was proof of this. Consumption could safely be left in the hands of individuals. It was ‘the highest impertinence and presumption’, Smith concluded, for ‘kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense, either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society.’68

  In the Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith looked back on the decline of feudalism and rise of commerce in Europe. It was the great barons’ appetite for diamond buckles and ‘trinkets and baubles’ that made them gradually barter away their authority, he argued. They literally consumed their power. To fund their growing appetite for goods they first reduced the number of their retainers. The barons’ ‘expensive vanity’ then gave the remaining tenants a chance to extract longer leases and win greater independence in return for a promise of higher rents. Merchants and artisans were happy to supply the goods. Thus, a ‘revolution of the greatest importance to the public happiness’ was unleashed, the unintended consequence of the ‘folly’ of one, and the ‘industry’ of the other. The wealth of commercial society was set free. And with it greater peace. The ‘pride of man makes him love to domineer’, Smith observed in the same section.69 Much better if that desire found an outlet in snuffboxes and hats, however silly, than in owning other people. Material possessions constrained personal aggression and social strife. People would be too busy acquiring things to kill each other.

  William Blackstone, the father of common law, devoted the largest book of the Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9) to ‘the Rights of Things’. He drew distinctions between everything from movable things and land to domestic and wild animals. The right of inheritance ensured that possessions had a virtuous effect on society. It ‘sets the passions on the side of duty, and prompts a man to deserve well of the public, when he is sure that the reward of his services will not die with himself’, but be transmitted to those for whom he has ‘the dearest and most tender affections’; the initial origins of the right, Blackstone suggested, were probably simply that a person had his family around him on his death bed.70

  Blackstone was reacting to a trend. Possessions were becoming increasingly central to personal identity and family memory. Plates and cutlery started to carry stamped initials. Sometimes identity was literally carved into furniture, as in the cupboards and drawers in eighteenth-century America which their female owners emblazoned with their names. Heirlooms constructed family memory and kept the self alive for future generations. In 1756, an English lady set down that ‘the old china cup with the gilt cover and saucer, that has a setting in gold belonging to it, Mary must have, and give it to her daughter’, as was family tradition. ‘These trifles I give to renew in her mind whenever she sees them, the constant tenderness of her truly affectionate mother.’71 Objects forged a similar bond for the growing number of mercantile and imperial families separated by the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in this period. The early modern ascendance of the conjugal family oriented towards its children no doubt stimulated such practices of material remembrance, and also explains why women played such a significant role as its custodians. Personalizing objects was a way simultaneously to serve the family ideal and to carve out a private space in its midst.

  But the material culture of the self was never easy. By blurring the line between person and object, it made it difficult to say where one ended and the other began. Possessions helped create the self, but what if consumption depleted it? In Scotland, Hume and Smith’s paean to commerce and innocent luxuries faced some critics, for example, the judge and philosopher Lord Monboddo, who worried that modern comforts would sap the strength of Highland warriors and lead to population decline.72 The rising circulation of goods also raised fears that their worship might possess the soul. Daniel Defoe reflected this ambivalence. On the one hand, he reported on the virtuous circle between consumer goods, industriousness and a higher standard of living. On the other, in Moll Flanders (1722), he told the story of a young woman whose lust for silk handkerchiefs and golden beads led her to thievery, prostitution and imprisonment: the more she desired things, the more she herself was reduced to a thing for sale.

  The transmigration of souls from person to thing became a running theme in eighteenth-century literature. The ‘souls of fashionable folk are to be found in their garments’, the great satirist Jonathan Swift wrote. A genre of ‘it narratives’ took off, in which watches, coins and lapdogs gave accounts of their lives. For the ancient philosopher Pythagoras, belief in the transmigration of souls had led to greater sympathy for other creatures. Eighteenth-century stories narrated by objects, by contrast, often painted a grim picture of human vice and folly. Owners were selfish and careless, slaves to their consuming passion – pretty much the opposite of the philosophical ideal of sympathy and sociability. In the Adventures of a Black Coat (1760), the garment narrated the fall of Susan Sirloin, the daughter of a humble tradesman, whose desire for more drove her to prostitution. If anyone in this tale had moral sentiment it was the coat, who concluded that the power of reason was wasted on humans: they ignored the road to true happiness in their hectic craving for instant satisfaction. That the real authors behind these ‘it narratives’ were themselves adapting to an increasingly competitive literary market might in part explain their cynical tone. Other commentators worried that women were becoming wound up like clockwork, fixated on fashion and tea parties. A good century before Carlo Collodi put speech and cunning into Pinocchio (1883), contemporaries were already fascinated by the grey zone between human subjects and animated puppets. The two mingled in puppet theatres, where it was left to the audience to figure out what were the life-sized puppets and who was the aptly named wooden-legged actor Samuel Foote.73

  A CULTURE OF IMPROVEMENT

  Since the earliest moments of exchange, human communities have had to confront the challenges that new things, tastes and desires brought with them. The spectacular rise of consumption in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reflected the reach of colonial power, technological advances and the growth of an urban, wage-earning population, but none of these would have mattered had society not also chosen to live in a fast-changing world of goods. Goods did not just arrive. They had to be invited in. In the past, societies were stand-offish. The Dutch in the seventeenth, and even more so the British in the eighteenth century, were more accommodating. Ideas about innocent luxury and a fluid self offered supporting arguments. But, in the final analysis, consumption is a lived experience, and it was here that a decisive compact emerged between values and practices that justified the arrival of ‘more’. For all the fears it continued to generate, consumption was welcomed as an integral part of personal and social improvement. It was made safe.

  Few habits brought out the dangers of luxury more clearly than overeating. Gluttony was one of the seven deadly sins, austerity its remedy. Eighteenth-century doctors changed the diagnosis and the cure. ‘Hypochondria’, as contemporaries labelled melancholy and depression, was a disease of luxurious living, the result of gorging on food, drinking too much wine and a sedentary lifestyle. The patient was left constipated, melancholic and listless. It was one of the nervous disorders that the physician George Cheyne called the ‘English malady’. Unlike the older theory of bodily humours, which identified black bile as the cause of melancholia, this diagnosis rested on the novel idea that bodily organs were connected through nerves. The
stomach signalled to the brain. Pumping it full of tea, brandy, chocolate and tobacco curdled the mind. Hypochondria was a particular worry for the elite, whose superior capacity for sympathy and sensibility was traced to their delicate nerves. Luxurious living threatened their fitness to lead. It was difficult to govern a country, let alone an empire, from a sick bed, convulsed by dyspepsia, spasms and depression. The collapse of the Roman empire was an oft-cited case in point.

  The orthodox solution had been fasting, purging and bleeding. Eighteenth-century Britons increasingly felt they could manage without resorting to such drastic measures. Hypochondria medicalized and at the same time normalized excess. In medical as in social knowledge, there was growing faith that greater consumption did not have to lead to ruin. Today remembered for his Fable of the Bees, Bernard Mandeville was also a doctor of medicine, trained at Leyden, who, in 1711, presented a Treatise of the Hypochondriack in the form of a dialogue. Your disease has been misdiagnosed, the foreign doctor Philopirio explains to the patient Misomedon, once of ‘gay, even Temper’ but now ‘peevish, fickle, censorious, and mistrustful’. The ‘hypo’, as the condition was dubbed, was located in the nervous coat of the stomach. The cure was to abstain temporarily from excessive suppers to give the stomach time to regain strength and to go riding for physical and mental invigoration. Then, ‘you will eat your Suppers with as much Pleasure as ever.’ In support, Philopirio cites the case of a pregnant Dutch woman who ‘being prodigiously in love with Pickled Herrings, fed on them daily in great quantities, and before her longing was satisfied, which in all probability must have lasted some Weeks, had eaten Fourteen Hundred, without receiving the least Injury by them’ – ‘A very good Observation for a Dutchman’, Misomedon dutifully responds.74 The occasional binge was safe. Where Mandeville opted for selfregulation, other physicians turned to drugs. A lively market in manuals and medication sprang up.75 Some doctors prescribed more tea, coffee and brandy, not less. Luxury thus fed itself.