Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  A comparison with the United States is instructive. American racism was most passionate at home. Americans did not carry the same burden of territorial empire into the world of goods. They worried far less about other races mimicking them. Africans, Indians and Chinese, all were potential customers for Singer sewing machines and other American products.40 It was the United States, not the British empire, which took on the older mission of things, promising to raise other races up the ladder of material civilization. This would give it a critical edge in the mid-twentieth century.

  Empire, then, qualifies the traditional story of consumer society as a democratic advance from elite to bourgeois to mass consumption. As class barriers were softening, racial divides were hardening. In Europe, elites had gradually given up attempts to regulate status through sumptuary laws in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Imperialism can be understood as a regression, re-exporting an informal sumptuary policy to the colonial world. Indeed, in the Second World War, colonial administrators in East Africa tried to formalize it by limiting Africans once again to merikani cloth.

  JEWELS AND BY-LAWS

  Wajid Ali Shah, the last king of Oudh (Awadh), was in exile in Calcutta when the Indian Mutiny erupted in 1857. Here, at the southern outskirts of the city, he reconstructed the noble court and lifestyle of his lost Lucknow. Matija Burji, the Eastern Dome, was a collector’s dream. The entire animal kingdom was assembled, from lions, leopards and bears to giraffes from Africa and a two-humped camel from Baghdad. In his pigeonries, Wajid Ali Shah had over 20,000 birds. He paid 24,000 rupees for a pair of ‘silk-winged pigeons’, it was said, and another 11,000 for a pair of white peacocks. A cage on a hillside offered the entertaining sight of thousands of snakes in pursuit of helpless frogs. If Wajid was not a scholar like some earlier nawabs, he was certainly a collector on a grand scale, gathering the finest animals, Urdu poetry and at least three hundred wives.

  Noble leisure had its plebeian counterparts. Birds of prey were reserved for the nobility, but quail fighting was popular with poor and rich alike. A bird fight was treated as fine art. Contenders were carefully hardened for battle. First the bird was starved. Then it was given a purgative rich in sugar to cleanse its insides. At night, the trainer would wind up the quail with shouts of ‘ku’, so ‘he loses his surplus fat.’ Finally, as battle loomed, the beak was sharpened with a penknife. Some owners administered drugs so an injured bird would keep fighting ‘like one possessed’, the historian Abdul Halim Sharar reminisced in 1920.41

  Here were the last vestiges of an oriental culture of consumption that had flourished under the Mughal empire. British rule brought armies and tax collectors, but it also spread new norms, habits and behaviours. It changed the terms of consumption. Quail fighting became a base act of cruelty, no longer a fine leisure pursuit. A poetic recital of a young nawab’s sexual exploits was now shamefully obscene, admiring thousands of song birds idle waste. In the early days of British rule, in the second half of the eighteenth century, Robert Clive (Clive of India), the nabob par excellence, accumulated filigree boxes, betel-nutcrackers and other Mughal elite artefacts, while governors such as Warren Hastings learnt Urdu and Persian. Many Europeans collected Indian birdcages and antiques, sat under embroidered tents and slept with Indian mistresses.42 But as the British empire dug its teeth deeper into the subcontinent, the rift between the two cultures grew wider. As the Mughal empire crumbled, its material culture lost its appeal for Europeans. ‘Year after year has witnessed the introduction of fresh European refinements,’ a contributor to the Calcutta Review wrote in 1844: ‘our dwellings have grown internally less and less Oriental . . . Our rooms are no longer bare and unencumbered; they are chock-full of European furniture; the walls are hung with paintings; the floors covered with warm carpets. The ‘eye is pleased; the spirit is raised; there is a greater feeling of home’. The ‘unquestionable accession of mosquitoes’ was a prize worth paying for having curtained rooms and enjoying European comforts in the tropics.43 The 1857 rebellion accelerated the withdrawal into a cocoon of white-only country clubs.

  The historian Christopher Bayly has offered a powerful interpretation of the switch from Mughal to British rule. Consumption regimes echoed a shift from archaic to modern globalization, and from artisanal skill to modern mass production. ‘Whereas modern complexity demands the uniformity of Levi’s and trainers,’ Bayly concludes, ‘the archaic simplicity of everyday life demanded that great men prized difference in goods . . . In one sense archaic lords . . . were collectors, rather than consumers.’44 This is too harsh a verdict on modernity, echoing older notions of how consumer culture leads to disenchantment and loss of authenticity. In reality, collecting and consuming have reinforced each other in the last two hundred years; in museums but also in private households, with their stamps, antiques, rare beer cans, or exotic nutcrackers from distant places.45 ‘Cosmic kingship’ has been democratized: everyone can be a collector and play the role formerly reserved for rulers, protecting exotic objects or discontinued toys from extinction. Fashionable youths, meanwhile, personalize their jeans and trainers. Standardization is always undercut by diversification, or ‘customization’, as it is called in the world of fashion.

  Bayly nonetheless put his finger on two critical qualities of earlier consumption regimes. The first is their hybridity. Until around 1800, rulers demonstrated their divine authority by amassing exotic spices and animals, fine furs and fine books from distant lands; Wajid Ali Shah’s ancestor Asaf ud-Daula had a stockpile of English watches, pistols, mirrors and furniture in his palace in Lucknow. ‘Fusion’ is not a recent invention. The second point is about the tributary flow of consumption. Nawabs and other rulers were more than private connoisseurs. They controlled the flow of goods and services for the rest. Shawls, jewels, brass and silver: their acquisition was mainly a result of tribute and gift, not individual choice. Instead of market transactions between buyer and seller they were exchanges between ruler and client conducted at public feasts and ceremonies. The British empire cut through these networks of rule and mobilized consumption for its own ends. It was a two-pronged offensive. One was on the production side – cheap factory textiles from Lancashire flooded the Indian market. The other, equally important, went to the heart of the luxury regime – the central state took control of taxes and bazaar duties and slashed elites’ tributes and pensions.

  Indian courts practised conspicuous consumption on a grand scale. At durbars (courts or ceremonial gatherings), courtiers brought nadhr gifts for their superiors and valuable pishkash presents for the emperor. In return, the emperor awarded gifts, khil’ats (robes of honour), jagirs (land titles) and allowances.46 Armies were another transmission belt for goods and loyalty. In Nagpur, in central India, the Maratha court was by far the biggest consumer in the region, buying up three quarters of all fine muslins, shawls and kinkhabs (silk brocades with gold and silver thread) for itself, its retainers and soldiers. The Maratha maintained 150,000 men. In the eighteenth century, the East India Company participated in this network of gifts and patronage, but the tributary system came to an end with the company’s loss of its trade monopoly in India in 1813.

  Formal British rule brought down the architecture of this court-based luxury and the local producers supporting it. When princely armies disbanded and court retainers lost their allowances, regions contracted like deflating balloons. Artisans lost their elite customers for fine cloth, leather and sweetmeats. Many towns witnessed an exodus.47 The precise impact of British power differed from city to city. For example, in the Gujarati city of Surat, just north of Mumbai, the main textile industries shrank, but artisans who made the famous gold thread jari managed to hang on.48 Notables, meanwhile, tried to keep up their former lifestyles as best they could, even as their pensions were being cut back by the British. While undermining old elites, the British empire simultaneously promoted new ones, such as the Parsis. Still, with all these nuances and qualifications, it is clear that, overall, the British e
mpire was bad for luxury consumption in India.

  This was fully intentional. India was ‘backward’, one English observer argued in 1837, because ‘princes and nobles were engrossing all the wealth of the country,’ while its people were ‘groaning’ under the burden. There was no harm done at all if cheap British textiles killed local manufacturers. Much better for them to move into more efficient employment on abundant land. ‘As to the Indian people generally, they are clear gainers; or they would surely not take the British goods, unless they were either cheaper or better than their own.’49 This was the voice of the free-trade empire: trade would bring specialization, greater efficiency and welfare. British rule was benign because it shifted resources from idle princes to the Indian people. The sad truth was that the British empire managed to do the first without accomplishing the second. Simply put, Indian society under colonial rule moved from the shape of an hourglass into that of a pyramid. At the top, the rich elite was slimmed. At the bottom, the poor were not getting poorer, but there were many more of them. The middle class and affluent workers remained few.

  Why India under British rule became locked into a cycle of pauperization has been one of the longest-standing debates in history and economics. Some of it had to do with geography and timing rather than imperial rule. Globalization was under way in the nineteenth century, and it made sense for India to buy British textiles, which were getting cheaper, and to grow and export those raw materials which were commanding rising global prices, especially opium, raw cotton, indigo, sugar and wheat. Britain did not need imperial control to sell its cotton shirts: India’s switch from the workshop of the world to its farmyard would probably have happened with or without empire. Cheap yarn from Lancashire, moreover, benefited Indian consumers and handloom weavers. India’s main problem was that its industries were labour intensive. Without new technologies, artisans worked harder, not more efficiently. Big industries remained few and far between. British investment was too small to jumpstart the economy. All this had a paradoxical effect on Indian patterns of consumption. On the one hand, Indians reaped the benefits of a mass market of cheaper and more varied goods. On the other, their real wages were restrained, at best growing modestly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.50

  Where British rule left its mark was on the style of consumption. Some historians have stressed the ‘ornamentalist’ nature of the Raj after the Mutiny, marked by an inflation of titles and orders, the crowning of Victoria as Empress of India in 1877 and the great Delhi Durbar of 1911, the huge assembly to celebrate George V’s coronation. Native princes covered in gold and diamonds were joined by 100,000 people to watch the arrival of the new king, who was spectacularly dressed in a robe of imperial purple, white satin breeches and silk stockings, and adorned with the collar of the Order of the Garter, rubies, emeralds and the Star of India.51 Such imperial spectacle was part of a strategy to shore up old Indian princes and present the British Raj as a legitimate successor to the Mughals, but they never reinstated the older tribute system. Gifts and goods no longer oiled the wheels of power.52 A centralized state bureaucracy took their place. Instead of a public demonstration of fealty and status, gifts were reduced to bribes collected in secret.

  This fundamental switch deserves emphasis, because ever since the economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote his Sociology of Imperialism in 1918, it has been fashionable to treat imperialism as an ‘atavism’, a living museum in which an outdated feudal elite could recreate traditional hierarchies and the ‘life habits of the dim past’.53 In fact, the opposite happened. The Raj spawned a new material culture. Private was separated from public life, leisure from work, administrative rules from native networks. For the British in India, leisure was about polo, not patronage. Moderation and individual restraint took the place of excess and public display. Consumption was to be productive, not spectacular. Spending (and saving) had to be for a purpose.

  British imperialism advanced through by-laws and new ideals of private comfort. Together, they reshaped two critical sites of consumption: the city and the home. In 1850, the Government of India Act allowed Indian cities to form municipal bodies and follow the path of urban improvement pioneered in Manchester and Birmingham. Incorporation left few aspects of urban life untouched, from the style of housing and the look of local shops, via what alcohol could be sold where, when and by whom, all the way to where to dump one’s rubbish. For local elites, municipal bodies were new instruments of influence and co-optation. At first, members were nominated by the British, but from 1883 an equal number of deputies were elected by propertied voters. British rule imported British ideas of urban living. The local manzil, or courtyard house, with its small openings to keep out heat and dust, was a particular thorn in the side of Victorian reformers preoccupied with fresh air and windows, and ignorant of local knowledge about climate control. In Lucknow, new houses were denied planning permission unless they followed an English-style bungalow, with rooms for different functions and an outside garden instead of the customary internal courtyard. The shopping experience, too, was streamlined. Shopkeepers had to get rid of exterior decoration in favour of neat and simple fronts. For local residents, these interventions had contradictory effects. The free-trade empire was committed to opening markets and extirpating aristocratic excess. At the same time, the British levied new taxes on food, tobacco and salt; the local elite made sure that the house tax hit them least hard. Food and drink were regulated for the sake of public health. This meant the end for distillers of local booze, pushing many people to seek refuge in opium and hashish. The local elite turned to whiskey, gin and sherry.54

  The pull of British culture was never complete. Religious gift-giving, for example, continued, in spite of utilitarian appeals to thrift. Local elites performed a balancing act, seeking to maximize their influence with the new rulers without losing their standing in their own communities. English education and standards of middle-class discipline and probity were gaining ground. The luxurious lifestyle of the Mughal gentry and the splendour of Hindu religious festivals, once celebrated, were condemned by Nagar Brahmins and Parsis alike as sheer waste. When scribal communities such as the Kayastha started to work for British administrators they dropped the customs of their former Muslim rulers, such as lavish weddings. For the aspiring middle class, consumption was harnessed to professional advancement.55 Not all these predispositions were new or imposed from the outside. Here and there, British rule was able to draw on pre-colonial attitudes, such as the more austere strand of Hinduism which radiated out from the Ramanandis – Nepalese followers of Rama and courtiers of Muslim nawabs – to other service elites and Muslims.56

  If not always an innovator, the British empire was a fertile soil for ideals that favoured less ostentatious and more ‘rational’ consumption. The social capital to be gained from education, in particular, reordered the priorities of spending and the role of women. Advice literature told Hindu women that their true religious place was in the home, not with priests in public festivals. Their energies needed to be channelled into household management in the service of their husband’s career.

  In other colonies, as in India, empire introduced an ideal of domesticity that ran roughshod over local customs. In Dutch Sumatra, for example, Karo women worked the fields and had some control over money. Missionaries wanted them to be housewives. Ironically, it was the growing fashion for fitted clothes, first adopted by their husbands, that broke the mould. The desire for Western clothes made many send their daughters to missionary schools that offered sewing clubs.57

  For the Western world of goods, the imperial dance meant two steps forward and one step back. Indians were caught in a crossfire of messages: to consume more, to consume less, and to consume differently. British feminists were shocked by Bengali women in their transparent saris with heavy jewellery and no undergarments. Indians had to be put into shoes and stockings. Too close an emulation of Western styles, on the other hand, made imperial rulers and Indian nationalists
alike uncomfortable. British attempts to impose a uniform order on the subcontinent and fix Indian customs were doomed from the start. Britons were prohibited from wearing Indian dress at official functions in 1830. Affluent Indians began to put on European suits, shoes and stockings, though often with turbans and never with a Western hat. In 1854, the Governor-General allowed Bengalis to appear in boots and shoes at official and semi-official occasions. By the time a new resolution had been passed, Indians pressed for further changes. After gaining the right to wear shoes, Bengalis in the 1870s appealed to be exempted from the rule requiring them to wear a turban in the office. Turbans, they pointed out, were not a regional custom. They preferred a light cap. The Lieutenant-Governor, Ashley Eden, was livid and refused. Dress was meant to exhibit the difference between East and West. A cap was a dangerous hybrid that signalled ‘a prevailing laxity’ among native officials who no longer knew their place.58

  The Indian middle class, too, was torn about the appropriate style of consumption. While many professional Indian men inclined towards a Western lifestyle, they urged their wives to be traditional. Nationalist periodicals frowned upon Indian women who opted for Western makeovers.59 Their husbands meanwhile were satirised by Indian writers as baboos, a ‘modified Anglo-Indian’, as if ‘civilization could be brought about by wearing tight pantaloons, tight shirts and black coats of alpaca or broadcloth.’ The baboo exchanged modesty and practical sense for ‘must-have’ leather shoes from Cuthbertson and Harper, shoemakers to the British in India (see Plate 39). He owned a piano rather than a native instrument, ate mutton chops, drank brandy and smoked cigars, all in violation of Hindu law.60 Nationalism turned the marketplace into a moral minefield.