Empire of Things
Page 16
Life was not always cheerless. Jenny had a piano – bought on hire purchase. The generous Engels sent bottles of Bordeaux and port. Children and family were delighted when the ‘basket of spirits’ arrived. The Marx household lived the different modes of consumption that coexisted in Victorian times. It combined stock and flow, circulation and novelty, restraint and excess. Clothes were assets and needed to be conserved. Come winter, and the coats were reclaimed from the pawnshop – not so different from Renaissance times. In July 1864, his wife returned from an auction with household goods, including a carving knife and fork for Friedrich: ‘I had told her that those were missing in your household.’ New things, however, also tickled the imagination. When the closest communist ally in exile, ‘Lupus’ Wilhelm Wolff, died in 1864 and left Marx £600, Marx immediately dreamt of fitting out the entire family in the finest Manchester silk. When possible, the family holidayed at the seaside in Ramsgate. Paying off the greengrocer and worrying about the bare necesseties did not preclude bingeing, now and then. One evening he took the socialists Wilhelm Liebknecht and Edgar Bauer on a pub crawl from Oxford Street to the Hampstead Road until they were so drunk that, by two o’clock, they turned to smashing gas lanterns with paving stones.93
The irony was that Marx was about fifty years behind the times with his diagnosis of accelerating immiseration. Around 1800, the engine had indeed stuttered. In the first industrial nation, wages were stagnant at best, and their share of GNP falling. In the long run, however, industrial development was achieved by investment and technology – by making work more productive, not by paying workers starvation wages. Notwithstanding pain and suffering, from the 1830s British labourers were earning more and spending more;94 the pattern would be repeated in Germany, Italy and other ‘second industrializers’ just two generations later. Rising expectations made it more appealing to reform capitalism than to crush it.
The decades after the French Revolution, then, are best understood as a reaction, not a reversal. Infatuation with ‘affluence’ after 1945 made it tempting to paint a dark picture of the early nineteenth century. For ‘the ordinary individual’, the ‘normal expectation was to live on the edge of starvation’, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith assured us. ‘Progress would enhance the wealth of those who, generally speaking, were already rich but not of the masses. Nothing could be done about it.’95 Not even the Revd Thomas Malthus, the poster-boy of the ‘dismal science’ was that gloomy. In the first edition of his Essay on Population in 1798, Malthus did indeed have no hope for improvement: higher wages and more children would end in a subsistence crisis and famine. In subsequent editions, however, there were rays of hope. Instead of breeding, people with good money in their pocket might decide to postpone marriage and opt for more comforts and fewer children. The thought of depriving themselves or their children of a respectable life would simply be too painful. The taste for comforts and conveniences would thus teach the lower classes prudential habits. Malthus believed this was precisely what had set more prosperous England apart from impoverished Ireland: ‘It is the diffusion of luxury therefore among the mass of the people, and not an excess of it in a few, that seems to be most advantageous, both with regard to national wealth and national happiness.’ There would always be rich and poor, but in Malthus’s mind there was at least a chance now that the proportion of the poor would diminish by joining the middle class. More consumption was one step in the right direction.96
In the short run, the Napoleonic Wars gave way to the restoration of the monarchy but, in the longer term, Europe would be convulsed by two new forces: nationalism and liberalism. While their main object was to free nations and create liberty, they also added to the growing support for consumption. Compared to Marx’s leap into abstraction, most contemporaries kept consumption down to earth. Wilhelm Roscher was the father of Nationalökonomie in Germany, the science of national or historical economics then in the ascendant. ‘The person,’ Roscher explained in 1854, ‘who pays twenty dollars for a coat has consumed that amount of capital only when the coat has been worn out.’ Roscher drew, among others, on Mirabeau, who had hoped to turn ostentatious aristocrats into agrarian modernizers. Consumption was everything that was ‘lost in utility’. A landlord who pocketed the rent without making any repairs was consuming because he was using up his fixed capital. This way of looking at it gave consumption a role in national development. National character determined consumption but, equally, consumption shaped the nation. For Roscher, British and Dutch comfort and cleanliness were examples of the increasingly benign character of consumption, towards the ‘real, healthy and tasteful enjoyment of life’ and away from ‘inconvenient display’. Roscher followed on the heels of writers like Moritz von Prittwitz, a lieutenant general in the Prussian infantry, who were making their peace with pleasure and who had emphatically announced: ‘enjoying more means living more means being more human!’97 For the nation, what mattered was that consumption was productive, not wasteful. Interestingly, national economists were convinced that civilization cut down waste. ‘The more civilized a people are,’ Roscher wrote, ‘the less do they completely destroy values by use; and the more do they use their old linen etc. as rags.’98
When producers and consumers clashed, the state was to side with the latter, Roscher advised. Nationalism made social balance the ultimate goal. Few serious liberal thinkers went as far as the popular French economist Frédéric Bastiat, who wanted consumers to rule everything. Still, liberalism changed the tone of political debate and introduced a more emphatic defence of the consumer. Again, one example must suffice to indicate the drift of things, and what better place to look than in an anonymous pamphlet written by ‘a consumer’ attacking the protection of silk producers in England in 1833. The consumer was not a sectional group: ‘each of the labourers is a consumer’; that the author felt the need for italics shows just how unusual the term still was at the time. There was ‘no other standard of the public utility of any productions than that of their being suited to the wants and demands of consumers’. Anyone who thought that public life should be guided by other considerations was mistaken. Experience proved beyond doubt that ‘men or nations are rich by the possessions of useful commodities [and] that the object of trade or barter is the acquisition of things which we desire.’99
The Dutch and English middle classes had been the first to let little luxuries into their lives and make their peace with the world of goods. Elsewhere on the continent, a culture of frugality, restraint and self-denial retained its strength among bourgeois families, but even here the wind of change is palpable by the late nineteenth century. In few places was the ideal of a simple life and self-discipline more pronounced than in Switzerland; Geneva had been Rousseau’s home town. The essential instruments of a rational conduct of life were saving, keeping accounts and planning for the future. This would allow oneself to rise above brute economic forces and reach a higher cultural sensibility. Traditionally, the thought of self-indulgence filled the Swiss bourgeoisie with horror. In the second half of the nineteenth century, fewer and fewer lived up to this ideal. There were still those, like the prosperous state archivist of Zurich, Gerold Meyer von Knonau whose household and appearance were modest and sober; typically for bourgeois families, his son received pocket money from the age of ten and had to keep detailed accounts to develop discipline and thrift. But there was also Josefine von Weiler, a rich widow from Bern who remarried into even more money in 1855 and who rented holiday homes in Nice and Paris, spending heavily on new dresses, carriage and horses during her travels. In the late nineteenth century, the puritan interior of bourgeois homes was giving way to plush and decor. Previously blank walls and floors were covered with wallpaper and carpets. Chandeliers multiplied, and dinners became more lavish. In the 1860s, the young Ameli Moser justified her spending on a new wardrobe by telling her bourgeois parents that excessive modesty was just as conspicuous and bad as excessive luxury.100
For those raised on Puritan virtues,
these new comforts made for a sometimes difficult psychological balancing act. At the breakfast table, bourgeois families showed their restraint by having either butter or jam, never both. Yet, in the evening, the soirées were lavish, champagne flowed and a growing variety of fish and fowl was served. For the Bern surgeon Emil Theodor Kocher, who would later receive the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on the thyroid gland, domestic comfort and conveniences were a dangerous ‘idol’, and he urged his wife to throw their material ‘ballast’ overboard so they could reach the higher spheres of existence. But this was a fantasy. Greater consumption and convenience were now a part of their lifestyle. While some, like the senior Bernese official Emmanuel von Fischer, worried about consumption being a drain on wealth – worst were the many ‘useless daily expenses’ – others now stood up in defence of a richer lifestyle. In 1890, the liberal theologian Konrad Kambli revisited luxury from a reformed-Christian perspective.101 Luxury, he argued, was not a sin. Rather, it was a civilizing force. That was, after all, why societies which did not enjoy luxuries were barbarians. True, he wrote, not all luxury was good. But, as long as it was measured and appropriate to the rank of a person, it assisted his own cultivation and that of society overall. Kambli was not an original thinker. But, from the more general perspective of a change in mentality, what mattered was that, in the end, he had reached a similar conclusion to David Hume’s great defence of ‘innocent luxury’ a century and a half earlier.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries put in motion the pendulum of consumption. Possessions, comforts, tastes and desires were all growing and becoming more elaborate, setting off a backlash of worries about excess and corruption. More goods provoked greater fear of goods. What was new and radical was that there were now values and practices that favoured greater consumption and kept the momentum going. It was only the beginning.
3
Imperium of Things
Perhaps the greatest single omission from mainstream theories of consumption is geopolitics. Economists tend to focus on individuals seeking to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Sociologists, meanwhile, see consumption as a sign of emulation and distinction between groups. Other writers look at mentalities, such as the romantic imagination, with its dream-like disposition for future pleasure, or at practices, such as cooking or home improvement. Global power is conspicuous by its absence from all these approaches. Conversely, the classic theorists of imperialism had little to say about the desire, appropriation and use of things. For J. A. Hobson, Heinrich Friedjung and Joseph Schumpeter, all writing in the immediate aftermath of the European scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century, imperialism was driven by finance capitalism, aggressive nationalism, or an ‘atavistic’ aristocracy that was clinging on to feudal power and glory. Consumers featured, if at all, as victims of a jingoist conspiracy that enriched the few at the expense of the many.
This lack of interest is curious, since, as we have already seen in the case of cocoa, coffee, tea and sugar, empires long played a critical role in channelling new goods, tastes and lifestyles. One reason for the silence is, simply, that the social-democratic Hobson, like the Marxists Rudolf Hilferding and Vladimir Lenin who followed him, was interested in what was new about the ‘new imperialism’ rather than in empire more generally. If we take a longer view and compare the world in 1492, when Columbus first set sail, with that in 1900, by which time one fifth of the world dominated the rest, what is striking is how the phenomenal expansion of goods happened alongside the equally massive expansion of European power. In the next two chapters, we will follow the new material culture as it carved its way through the city and the home. But we need to start by placing it in its larger geopolitical context to appreciate the uneven dynamics of global consumption.
Empire changed the terms of consumption. The flow of goods, in turn, shaped the workings of imperial power. What this interplay looked like depended on the politico-economic arena in which it took place, and this underwent a major overhaul in the modern period. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the context was set by mercantilism, a mix of trade barriers, monopolies and shipping restrictions with which states tried to seize trade and power at the expense of their rivals. In this view, one country’s gain was another’s loss. Empires were locked in a tug of war, each determined to protect its own colonies, ships, goods and silver. In Britain, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, some Whigs began to develop a more liberal view and see overseas markets as a source of growth and power,1 but omnipresent threats from French and Spanish rivals ensured that, in reality, trade remained a branch of warfare, not a vehicle for peace and plenty. While early modern empires thus paved new pathways for exotic foods and drugs, they simultaneously put a brake on the traffic of goods by erecting trade barriers to keep out foreign articles, forbidding their own goods to be shipped in foreign vessels and sponsoring national industries. Such mercantilist policies were expensive and it was ordinary people who paid for the wars, navies and the higher prices that came with them.
After Waterloo (1815), everything changed. The military defeat of France on the one hand, and China’s internal convulsions on the other, handed Britain a hegemonic position. In the Indian Ocean, rivalry between the powers had been bad for shipping. In the decade after Waterloo, with Britain in control, the number of ships crossing to India and China doubled; the end of the East India Company’s monopoly on trade in India in 1813 opened the door for other British and European vessels.2 And more voyages and bigger tonnage meant cheaper cotton, pepper, tea and other goods for consumers. Naval power and industrial superiority gave Britain the confidence to switch from mercantilism to free trade. Instead of planting ‘Keep Out’ signs around its colonies, Britain threw the door wide open. Instead of a zero-sum game, trade was now believed to benefit all. The free-trade empire set itself the mission of creating one integrated world market. Liberal imperialism and globalization became almost indistinguishable. The 1850s–’70s saw the emergence of the first European free-trade zone, as Belgium, France and other nations joined a more open trading network.
For consumers, the switch to liberal empire had profound consequences. Free-trade Britain created the world’s first consumer-friendly empire. Most immediately, it meant cheaper goods and lower taxes for Britons. Instead of squeezing its people, the British state switched to a path of growth, with low taxes on a rising volume of goods. Consuming more was now public policy. But for the rest of the world, liberal imperialism had effects that were at least as great. The ‘open door’ to the British market indirectly benefited consumers from Vienna to Buenos Aires. But the legacy was more profound than cheaper prices. It affected the very conception of civilization, humanity and property.
British hegemony spread a new dominion of things that unsettled alternative material cultures. After a century of dominating the slave trade, Britain abolished it in 1807 and then led the international battle against the trade in human chattel. Liberal empire insisted that people were not things – with dramatic effects for African kingdoms built on man-ownership.
Goods are not neutral. In the age of empire, they were intensely associated with superior European technology, science and gunboats. The rising tide of goods brought mixed fortunes to all sides. For indigenous societies, European shirts, sofas and umbrellas upset existing hierarchies. For imperial masters, goods were signs of power, too, but ones to mark the distance between ruler and ruled. Consumption amongst colonial subjects had to be controlled. By the 1880s, when the scramble for Africa got under way, the internal contradictions of liberal empire were in plain view. Global levels of trade and consumption were rising fast, but so was the pace of conquest and annexation.
Here was the paradox of this phase of globalization. Economically, the world was more open in the 1870s and 1880s than a century or two earlier, but in terms of political and cultural power it was becoming more rigid and closed. The hardening of racial thinking in these years interacted with Europeans’ ambivalence towards the ex
panding world of goods they had done so much to bring about. On the one hand, there was a liberal opening, as Europeans discovered the consumer at home and thought in positive ways about the contribution of that person to the creation of value, wealth and social order. On the other, there was a closure of the European mind, as Africans and other colonial subjects were relegated to a subordinate position, coolies working for Western mass markets or ‘backward’ peasants, rather than consumers in their own right. This racial asymmetry was the opposite of the democratic widening from aristocratic to bourgeois and then to mass consumption within Europe. While one was not the direct cause of the other, the two were part of the same story. Europeans’ subjugation of colonial populations ran in parallel to the European apotheosis of the consumer and the ‘standard of living’ at home. While we therefore start in Africa and India, we ultimately return to Europe to appreciate the transformation of consumption in the age of empire.