Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  These moral restraints intensified as caste and gender roles were loosening. In the early twentieth century, Indian women started to do more of the shopping, to eat out and go to the movies. While the poor continued to spend heavily on religious festivals and weddings,61 they were not entirely bypassed by the current of goods either. ‘Half hose or full stockings’ were worn by ‘the wealthiest Baboo to the commonest fruit seller’, an Indian critic noted in 1881.62 Poor labourers in Calcutta, previously naked except for a loincloth, began wearing shoes and stockings, increasingly made in Japan. In rural society, caste-based restrictions were softening. The poor started to sport artificial-silk saris and wear cloth previously reserved for Brahmins.63 Consumer culture would probably have changed the fabric of Indian society even if there had been no empire. What British rule did was to create a material nursery for a new colonial elite. Nationalists inherited a middle-class ideal of disciplined consumption. From the more cyclical mode of the Mughal tributary festival, which was about recycling loyalties and maintaining status, consumption shifted to a more dynamic, if less flamboyant, style committed to maximizing future earnings and status. In East as in West, conspicuous consumption now bore the stigma of decadent waste.

  The imperial advance of European things was nowhere clearer than in the home, both for its ambition and its limits. The decades after the Mutiny brought a rising wave of European families. By 1914, close to 200,000 Europeans were living in India. Setting up home in the colony was a demonstration of imperial strength and identity. Armchairs and paintings of the English countryside, the ritual of changing for dinner, corsets and stiff collars: these were material reminders of where one came from and why one was there. Advice books drummed home the unbridgeable divide between the two cultures:

  One of the characteristics of an Englishman is to make his surroundings, wherever he may be stationed, as like as possible to those of his own country. The representative Indian changes but little in his ways, and he, too, likes to be amongst his own country people: consequence, as a general rule in India, the European quarters and the Indian or native city are separate.64

  The Indian bungalow was as different from the English home as ‘a temple from a church’, one commentator wrote in 1904.65 Bungalows often lacked wallpaper and curtains. Rooms intercommunicated with each other, instead of creating discrete spaces for separate members of the family. Servants were thus more visible, as were children. Rooms were often characterized by their temperature (‘hot’, ‘cold’, ‘wet’), not their social function.

  Britons in India worked hard to anglicize the domestic interior. The lists of goods arriving in Calcutta on British ships give a flavour of the British taste and the lifestyle that arrived with it. On 15 July 1784, the Calcutta Gazette advertised the investment of Captain Johnson of the Berrington. It consisted of an ‘elegant assortment of goods, which are of the latest fashions’, including pianofortes, ‘Salisbury kitchens’, fine Irish linen, claret, porter and ale, cheese and pickled salmon, and a set of the House of Lords and Commons debates. Other sales in the same year included ‘superb full dress suits’, ‘silk and cotton hose’ and Hogarth’s complete works.66 John Paterson, the Calcutta agent of the P&O Steamship Company, in 1869 owned a ‘Victoria couch; an Albert couch; a Victoria easy chair; an Albert easy chair; a mahogany easy chair; . . . a set of six Genoa chairs . . . a mahogany square piano forte; seven volumes [of] music books and a lot of loose music books’ and a ‘mahogany marble top centre table’. The local objects in his possession were limited to two ‘inlaid marble dishes of Indian workmanship’ and models of Indian servants.67

  Ruling a tropical colony, however, made smooth transplantation impossible. For many imperial families, home in India was a mobile affair, closer to a camper van than a country cottage, as they moved between hill stations and administrative centres. Rents were high. Families brought their eiderdowns, chintzes and dinner sets from Britain, but plenty of rugs, furniture and accessories were picked up in India in shops, auctions or second-hand marts. British women could not ‘resist the temptation of collecting brasses, rugs, embroideries and treasures of all kinds’, returning from the hill stations to their winter quarters laden with trophies.68 Some memsahibs slept on a charpoy, a rope bedstead. The respectable tea planter George Williamson of Assam had armchairs and sideboards but neither pictures nor textile furnishings. Families used Indian matting and purdahs for door screens. Even in 1900, British men in the Raj still outnumbered British women by three to one. They often shared lodgings and made do with minimal furnishings. Many homes resembled curiosity shops. ‘The chair on which we sit,’ one resident noted in 1872, ‘was bought from a distinguished civilian . . . That table was picked when the inspector of railways gave up housekeeping . . . That davenport [sofa] was purchased when the late judge left the country on his retiring pension.’69 Whatever the ideal, for imperial families, Westernization was a partial affair.

  In homes of the local elite, European goods and furnishings started to cross the threshold more frequently after the mid-nineteenth century but often stopped at the reception room. Gooroo Churn Singh, a Calcutta merchant, owned several two-storey brick houses, furnished with an Albert couch, a carpet from Brussels and a cut-glass twelve-light chandelier with frosted and engraved shades.70 Past the reception room, however, Hindu merchants kept an exclusive zone for their extended family. This dual lifestyle was a continuation of the flexible cultural adaptation that stretched back to the eighteenth century: the Khatris of Benares had maintained palaces and worn Mughal jewellery and Persian dress in public but for their home opted for simple dhotis and a mud-walled house in town.

  The rising river of Western goods reached furthest into colonial societies where racial and cultural barriers were lowest, as in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), where the Dutch left behind a high degree of intermarriage and where an Indian merchant diaspora flourished. The local elite wore trousers underneath Indian jackets and dressed their children in sailor uniforms. Their houses were filled with upholstered furniture, pictures and chandeliers. On Mr Peiris’s Belvedere estate, ‘one of the finest and best appointed country seats of the Western Province’, interior arrangements were ‘on the latest English lines’. Indeed, for the mosaics of pictures that lined the walls and floors, all materials were specially imported from England (see Plate 16). Mr Peiris had also been caught by the English passion for cycling at the time: he was captain of the Moratuwa Cyclists’ union. Not very far away lived the cinnamon and coconut plantation owner Mr N. E. de Croos; the family originated from India. He served on the local board of his town, Negombo, was a ‘pillar of the Catholic Club’ and president of the cricket club. ‘He used to play tennis and football, and has lately become a keen horseman.’ ‘Barbeton’, his town house, was ‘one of the finest residences in the Western Province’. Its drawing room included chandeliers, paintings and photos, carpets as well as matting, armchairs and a piano. For his official photograph, Mr de Croos appeared in morning suit, complete with top hat.71

  THE DISCOVERY OF THE CONSUMER

  In Europe, the era of high imperialism (1870s–’90s) took consumption to new heights. In part, this was the result of the fast-advancing global integration of markets, made possible by steamships, imperial expansion and trade liberalization. The price of wheat, sugar, beef, cooking oil and much else plummeted. Cooling technology and canning brought Argentinian steak and Canadian salmon to dining tables in Bordeaux and Bristol. The cost of clothing fell, too. At the same time, European and American labour became more productive, thanks to factory production and new technologies, boosting exports and raising wages. In 1899, a British worker had twice as much spending power as fifty years earlier. Americans enjoyed even higher real wages.72 In the old world and the new, Europeans and their descendants had never had it so good.

  The quickening pace of consumption had equally important cultural and political dimensions. New spending power and the growing influx of goods drew attention to the way in which consumption was reord
ering norms, relations and identities. How people spent their money came to matter as much as how much they earned. The power of the purse handed shoppers a personal weapon for social justice. Thinkers and activists discovered ‘the consumer’ and started to flesh out this person, recognizing their contribution to wealth and welfare. Slowly but surely, Europe and America were developing a sense of themselves as consumer societies.

  The new prominence of consumption was part of a mental shift in industrial societies. In the wake of the French Revolution of 1789, earlier optimism had given way to an emphasis on natural limits. Things might improve a little, thanks to prudent policy and habits but, ultimately, most political economists agreed the economy would hit a ceiling. The deeper one had to dig for coal and the less fertile land one put under the plough, the higher the cost and the lower the yield. That was the law of diminishing returns. From the mid-nineteenth century, America and Britain realized that they had broken through that ceiling. Other industrial nations followed. They were now in uncharted territory, politically and morally as much as economically. Growth unsettled assumptions about the social order, the nature of wealth, its origin, use and distribution. Was destitution ordained or was it man-made, the result of bad policies and institutions? If the latter, what share of riches should go the poor? Excessive display and debt continued to set off alarm bells. Contemporaries did not ignore the role of land and production as sources of wealth. But the balance was shifting. By the late nineteenth century, economists, radicals and social movements were picking up the story where the Enlightenment had left off. Everyone was beginning to talk about the consumer.

  The career of the concept of the ‘standard of living’ is a good indication of the hopes and anxieties that came with growing spending power. Household budgets had first been studied in seventeenth-century France and England. From the mid-nineteenth century, they developed into the central tool of an increasingly global enterprise of social investigation. By 1930, several thousand inquiries had been conducted everywhere from Boston to Bombay, Shanghai to Rome and St Petersburg, showing in pounds and pennies exactly how much money households with different incomes spent on food, lodging, clothes and ‘sundries’, or small assorted items. Any social reformer worth the name carried a budget study in their pocket.

  One driving force was Ernst Engel, director of the Statistical Bureau in Saxony and then, after 1860, in Prussia. The next two generations of social policy experts passed through his research seminar – the first in the world. Engel injected a bracing statistical precision into government and scholarship. His goal was to build up statistics into an independent science with a social mission. Engel had sat at the feet of Frédéric Le Play at the École des Mines in Paris in the 1840s. For Le Play, who compiled thirty-six volumes on the budgets of European workers, material improvement dangerously undermined patriarchy and religion. Engel, by contrast, was a liberal at heart and a constant thorn in Bismarck’s side. For twenty years, the Iron Chancellor tried to sack him for briefings that exposed how official policy was often based on fantasy and inference rather than hard fact, before finally managing to give him the boot in 1882. For men like Engel, statistics not only clarified ‘the social question’, they held part of the answer. Budget studies could defuse social conflict by documenting how people were progressively better off. As a family’s income improved, the proportion spent on food declined. This became known as Engel’s law, the first economic law derived from inductive analysis. Freed-up money went towards better education, healthcare and recreation. In good time, Engel believed, the working class would pull itself up from vice, misery and revolutionary temptations to a middle-class plane of comfort, order and self-improvement. Engel was no naïve utopian. Towards the end of his life (1896), he compared his own studies with data from the United States and Belgium. As important as the rise in incomes itself, he noted, was that it was smooth and gradual. If it was too sudden, it might produce a moral regression, as happened with the Belgian workers who spent rising wages on drink in the 1850s. Still, Engel was convinced that people wanted to improve themselves and, given the chance, would do so. He looked forward to the day when 80 per cent of a budget would be devoted to needs, leaving 20 per cent free spending money. At the time, this was generous. In 1857, in his seminal study, a middle-class household in Saxony still spent 85 per cent on food, clothing, housing and fuel, a poor worker as much as 95 per cent.73

  Budget studies gave consumption a new visibility. Well-being, they showed, was a result of the art of spending, not just earning. Politically, this made the standard of living a double-edged sword. What good were higher wages if they went towards alcohol and tobacco? critics asked. Greater purchasing power might unhinge the entire economy. A budget analysis of forty-three families convinced the Massachusetts Commission on the Cost of Living in 1910 to blame a rise in prices on the increasing ‘waste of income’ that resulted from a ‘national habit of extravagance’. On the other hand, household budgets also gave reformers and trade unions new ammunition in the battle for a ‘living wage’. Round about a Pound a Week (1913) in Britain and similar investigations elsewhere demolished the idea that poverty was caused by drink. In the United States, organized labour started to fight for an ‘American’ standard of living. They could not be expected to live like an Irish peasant or Russian serf, they insisted.74 By 1919, investigations were no longer just concerned with the share of expenditure on food, lodging and recreation but with establishing a basic consumption norm, down to the precise number of shirts, shoes and stockings purchased. A ‘fair standard of living’, according to the Bureau of Municipal Research in Philadelphia, required every year two new dress shirts, six washable collars and one suit (50 per cent wool) for him, and one skirt, nine cotton stockings, one corset and one and a half hats for her. This kind of wardrobe would have cost $78 a year for a man and $66 for a woman, at a time when workers in the garment industry earned between $350 and $600 a year; an experienced female printer would earn $16 a week.75

  Many studies at the time, in fact, jarred with Engel’s law. In 1911 Hawaii, for example, Portuguese and Chinese labourers increased the share they spent on food as their earnings improved. The same was true for European peasants. One criticism that has plagued the theory since its inception is that the standard of living is not a universal, objective yardstick. Judgements about what makes for a high quality of life vary from culture to culture. One investigation in Shanghai found that even the poorest spent up to a third of their income on festivities, leisure, drugs and other ‘sundry items’, a much higher share than amongst workers in European cities with higher earnings. Which of the two were better off? Importantly, it was the universalist standard which attracted the greatest amount of followers, and only in the last two decades have subjective and culture-specific approaches to well-being made a comeback. What made the standard-of-living concept so attractive around 1900 was precisely that it offered reformers a yardstick of how far a society had advanced towards the material well-being associated with a modern way of life.

  A report on Bombay mill workers in 1923 was typical. Of these families, 97 per cent lived in a single room. Half of them were in debt to money-lenders. Yet they spent 19 per cent of their earnings on liquor, tobacco, betel nuts and haircuts. Weddings, funeral rites and customary expenses pushed them deeper into debt; a marriage cost Rs 214, or half a year’s wages. Such behaviour was plain wrong, the investigator concluded. People needed to be weaned off old customs and irrational spending habits. They were caught in a vicious circle of idleness and stimulants, lacking the necessary desire to accumulate things. To become better workers, they first had to acquire a modern ethic of consumption: ‘Spending wisely may be regarded as the crux of the whole labour problem’. ‘When once the workers have unsatisfied desires for something different from idleness they are on the road to efficiency where each step taken makes the next easier.’76

  That idea that material desire prompted people to be more industrious had been commonplace in
the eighteenth century, as we have seen. It was only now, though, in the late nineteenth century, that an economic theory of consumption began to emerge. Adam Smith’s famous remark that ‘consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production’ was about all he had to say on the topic. For his successors, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, economics was about land and production. In the 1840s, the extreme liberal Frédéric Bastiat in France raised the flag for the consumer in his crusade for ‘free exchange’; Bastiat’s dying words in 1850 supposedly were ‘we must learn to look at everything from the point of view of the consumer.’ Still, even that did not amount to much of a theory, since free markets would take care of everything. Mill – the pre-eminent public moralist of the Victorian era and a champion of social justice and representative government as much as economic logic – made sure to nip such laissez-faire dogmas in the bud. Consumption, he repeated in 1844, was not a separate branch of economic analysis.77 The matter was closed. Or so it seemed until the 1870s.

  ‘The theory of economics must begin with a correct theory of consumption,’ W. S. Jevons announced in his Theory of Political Economy in 1871.78 The Ricardo–Mill school had it fundamentally wrong. Jevons had devoted his entire life to throwing off ‘the incubus of bad logic and bad philosophy which Mill’s Works have laid upon us’.79 That as a young lecturer he was forced to teach Mill, while his own early writings were ignored – his first book on logic sold four copies in twice as many months – did not help. Still, ethics and economics went together for Jevons, as they had for Mill. The goal of maximizing pleasure was balanced by a Unitarian commitment to doing good. Measuring demand, protecting consumers and improving the working conditions of young mothers were all part of the same job.