Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  4. See Dominik Schrage, Die Verfügbarkeit der Dinge: Eine historische Soziologie des Konsums (Frankfurt am Main 2009), 43–50.

  5. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago, 1776/1976), bk IV, ch. 8, 179.

  6. The quotation is from Neal Lawson, ‘Do We Want to Shop or to Be Free?’, Guardian, 3 Aug. 2009, 24. See also: George Monbiot in the Guardian, 26 Nov., 4 Feb. 2015, and 5 Jan. 2010; Lynsey Hanley, ‘Shopping: How It Became Our National Disease’, New Statesman, 18 Sept. 2006. See also: Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (New York, 1999); Oliver James, Affluenza (London, 2007); and Neal Lawson, All Consuming: How Shopping Got Us into This Mess and How We Can Find Our Way Out (London, 2009). In a more academic vein, see esp. Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (New York, 1999); Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (New York, 2005); Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-control and Well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950 (Oxford, 2006); and Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (Cambridge, 2007).

  7. Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (New York, 1979), 3. See also the US Center for Consumer Freedom, https://www.consumerfreedom.com.

  8. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003). Compare: David Steigerwald, ‘All Hail the Republic of Choice: Consumer History as Contemporary Thought ’, Journal of American History 93, no. 2, 2006: 385–403.

  9. Tony Blair, Guardian, 24 June 2004, 1. See further: Tony Blair, The Courage of Our Convictions: Why Reform of the Public Services is the Route to Social Justice (London, 2002). The earlier point on social democrats paraphrases C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1956).

  10. Two milestones are Mary Douglas & Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (London, 1996, 2nd edn); and Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things (Cambridge, 2008). See also: Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA, 1974/1984). For different academic approaches, see: Daniel Miller, ed., Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies (London, 1995); Martyn J. Lee, The Consumer Society Reader (Malden, MA, 1999); and Juliet B. Schor & Douglas B. Holt, eds., The Consumer Society Reader (New York, 2000).

  11. Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky, eds., Choices, Values, and Frames (Cambridge, 2000).

  12. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New York, 1958), 203.

  13. The Works of Aurelius Augustine, Vol. II : The City of God (Edinburgh, 1871), 518.

  14. ‘History and Literature’, repr. in T. Roosevelt, History as Literature and Other Essays (New York, 1913), 27. For other approaches, see F. Trentmann, ‘The Politics of Everyday Life’: in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, Frank Trentmann, ed. (Oxford, 2012), 521–47.

  15. Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (New York, 1979/1981), 23, 28.

  16. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer & J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-century England (Bloomington, IN, 1982).

  17. Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth-century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2005).

  18. OECD, Social Expenditure Update, November 2014, http://www.oecd.org/els/soc/OECD 2014-Social-Expenditure-Update-Nov2014-8pages.pdf.

  19. See esp. Robert H. Frank, Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era of Excess (Princeton, NJ, 1999), and the discussion below at 434–9.

  20. Readers interested in this debate might wish to turn to: Angus Deaton, Understanding Consumption (Oxford, 1992); Herbert A. Simon, Models of Bounded Rationality (Cambridge, MA, 1982); and D. Southerton A. Ulph, eds., Sustainable Consumption (Oxford, 2014).

  21. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York, 1899/1953).

  22. For this emerging field, see, e.g., Jukka Gronow Alan Warde, eds., Ordinary Consumption (London, 2001); A. Warde D. Southerton, eds., The Habits of Consumption (Helsinki, 2012); and Elizabeth Shove, Mika Pantzar & Matthew Watson, The Dynamics of Social Practice: Everyday Life and How It Changes (London, 2012).

  23. W. G. Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice: A Study of Attitudes to Social Inequality in Twentieth-century England (London, 1966).

  24. In the United Kingdom in 2013, homes were directly responsible for 77 Mt or 17% of all carbon emissions, more than the entire business sector (16%); most of it was from heating space and water. ‘Directly’, because government statistics treat CO2 emissions from the energy-supply sector separately (38%); see Department of Energy and Climage Change, 2013 UK Greenhouse Gas Emissions, etc., at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/295968/20140327_2013_UK_Greenhouse_Gas_Emissions_Provisional_Figures.pdf.

  25. Thirty-five experts give critical overviews of their regions, periods and topics in: Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, ed. Trentmann.

  26. Two short exceptions with a comparative European focus are: Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Konsum und Handel: Europa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 2002); and Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel, Histoire de la consommation (Paris, 2012).

  CHAPTER 1

  1. Antonia Finnane, ‘Yangzhou’s “Mondernity”: Fashion and Consumption in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 11, no. 2, 2003: 395–425. I am grateful to Antonia Finnane for discussion. Alternatively, we could have started with the proliferation of shops, fashion and desire in late-seventeenth-century Japan, captured in the contemporary source: Ihara Saikaku, The Japanese Family Storehouse, or the Millionaires’ Gospel Modernized, trans. G. W. Sargent (Cambridge, 1688/1959).

  2. Neil McKendrick et al, The Birth of a Consumer Society; Braudel entitled his discussion of the lack of fashion in China ‘When Society Stood Still’, in: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, I, 312.

  3. Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1978); Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York, 1983); John Goldthwaite, ‘The Empire of Things: Consumer Demand in Renaissance Italy’, in: Patronage, Art and Society in Renaissance Italy, eds. Francis Kent & Patricia Simons (Oxford, 1987); Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (London, 1997); Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Chicago, 1991); Christopher Dyer, An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 2005); and Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘The Consumer Economy’, in: Rosemary Horrox & W. M. Ormrod, A Social History of England, 1200–1500 (Cambridge, 2006), 238–59.

  4. Ruth Barnes, Indian Block-printed Textiles in Egypt: The Newberry Collection in the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford, 1997).

  5. In the first half of the seventeenth century, Chinese sugar (powdered and candied) was a growing part of consignments to Europe, as conflict between the Dutch and Portuguese disrupted supply from Brazil; in 1637, over 4 million pounds of Chinese sugar were sent to Europe. Shipments to Amsterdam stopped in the 1660s once Brazil recovered, but they continued to Persia and Japan. See Sucheta Mazumdar, Sugar and Society in China: Peasants, Technology, and the World Market (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 83–7.

  6. 1.3% per annum in the sixteenth century, 0.7% in the seventeenth, and 1.3% in the eighteenth, according to K. H. O’Rourke & J. G. Williamson, ‘After Columbus: Explaining the Global Trade Boom: 1500–1800’, Journal of Economic History 62, 2002: 417–56. See now in greater depth, Ronald Findlay & Kevin H. O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World Economy in the Second Millenium (Princeton, NJ, 2007), chs. 4–5.

  7. Angus Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics (Paris, 2003), 260–3.

  8. John E. Wills, ‘Maritime China from Wang Chih to Shih Lang: Themes in Peripheral History’, in: From Ming to Ch’ing: Conquest, Reign and Continuity in Seventeenth-century China, eds. Jonathan Spence & John Wills (New Haven, CT, 1979), 201–2
8.

  9. Antonio de Morga, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (1609) [ History of the Philippine Islands], quoted at 405–8, available at: http://www. gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/8phip10.txt.

  10. William Atwell, ‘Ming China and the Emerging World Economy’ in: Denis Twitchett & Frederick W. Mote, eds., Cambridge History of China, Vol 8: The Ming Dynasty, 1368–44, Part 2 (Cambridge, 1998), 388–92.

  11. W. L. Idema, ‘Cannon, Clocks and Clever Monkeys’, in: Development and Decline of Fukien Province in the 17th and 18th Centuries, ed. Eduard B. Vermeer (Leiden, 1990).

  12. Jan De Vries & A.M. van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge, 1997), 437, table 10.4; F. S. Gaastra & J. R. Bruijn, ‘The Dutch East India Company’, in: J. R. Bruijn & F. S. Gaastra, Ships, Sailors and Spices: East India Companies and Their Shipping in the 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries (Amsterdam, 1993), table 7.2, 182.

  13. De Vries & Woude, First Modern Economy, 457–8.

  14. Ralph Davis, English Overseas Trade, 1500–1700 (London, 1973).

  15. Richard Ligon, A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London, 1657), 40. I use the original spelling but have dropped the many italics.

  16. Phyllis Deane & William Alan Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688–1959 (Cambridge, 1962), 87; and Ralph Davis, ‘English Foreign Trade, 1700–74’, Economic History Review (2nd series) XV, 1962: 285–303.

  17. For the importance of this ‘miracle food’, see: Sucheta Mazumdar, ‘China and the Global Atlantic: Sugar from the Age of Columbus to Pepsi–Coke and Ethanol’, Food and Foodways 16, no. 2, 2008: 135–47.

  18. See Richard Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, MD, 2009); Robert S. DuPlessis, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997); and Harry A. Miskimin, The Economy of Later Renaissance Europe, 1460–1600 (Cambridge, 1977).

  19. Patricia Fortini Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture and the Family (New Haven, CT, 2004), 149 f.

  20. See Marta Ajmar-Wollheim & Flora Dennis, eds., At Home in Renaissance Italy (London, 2006), esp. the chapters by Reino Liefkes on ‘Tableware’ and Marta Ajmar-Wollheim on ‘Sociability’, 254–66, 206–21.

  21. Pietro Belmonte, Institutione della sposa (1587), quoted in Ajmar-Wollheim, ‘Sociability’, in Ajmar-Wollheim & Dennis, eds., At Home in Renaissance Italy, 209.

  22. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York, 1860/1958), 364 & 369–70.

  23. Ajmar-Wollheim & Dennis, eds., At Home in Renaissance Italy; and Jardine, Worldly Goods.

  24. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford, 1939/1994).

  25. Ajmar-Wollheim & Dennis, eds., At Home in Renaissance Italy.

  26. Paula Hohti, ‘The Innkeeper’s Goods: The Use and Acquisition of Household Property in Sixteenth-century Siena’, in: Michelle O’Malley & Evelyn Welch, eds., The Material Renaissance (Manchester, 2007), 242–59.

  27. The inventory is given in Isabella Palumbo-Fossati, ‘L’interno della casa dell’artigiano, e dell’artista nella Venezia del cinquecento’, Studi Veneziani (new series) 8, 1984: 126–8

  28. Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence, 381.

  29. Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice, 173–82.

  30. Gasparo Segizzi, who died in 1576; see Palumbo-Fossati, 109–53, esp. 138–45.

  31. Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence, 384.

  32. Bruno Blondé, ‘Tableware and Changing Consumer Patterns: Dynamics of Material Culture in Antwerp, 17th–18th Centuries’, in: Majolica and Glass from Italy to Antwerp and Beyond, ed. Johan Veeckman (Antwerp, 2002).

  33. Jardine, Worldly Goods, 33–4.

  34. Goldthwaite, ‘The Empire of Things’.

  35. The conservatism was noted by contemporary observers such as the humanist Benedetto Varchi, cited in Paolo Malanima, Il lusso dei contadini: consumi e industrie nelle campagne toscane del sei e settecento (Bologna, 1990), 24.

  36. Robert C. Davis, Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal (Baltimore, MD, 1991), 100.

  37. Elizabeth Currie, ‘Textiles and Clothing’, in: Ajmar-Wollheim & Dennis, eds., At Home in Renaissance Italy, 349.

  38. Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400–1600 (New Haven, CT, 2005), quoted at 234.

  39. Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance, 68–72; Garzoni quoted at 68.

  40. Plato, The Republic, Book II, ‘The Luxurious State’ (372–37CE), trans. R. E. Allen (New Haven, CT, 2006), 55–6. See further: Christopher Berry, The Idea of Luxury (Cambridge, 1994); and William Howard Adams, On Luxury: A Cautionary Tale (Washington, DC, 2012, 1st edn).

  41. Matthew 6:19–21 (King James Bible). See also: The Works of Aurelius Augustine, The City of God (Edinburgh, 1871).

  42. Patricia Allerston, ‘Consuming Problems: Worldly Goods in Renaissance Venice’ in: O’Malley & Welch, eds., The Material Renaissance, 22.

  43. 1564, cited in O’Malley & Welch, eds., The Material Renaissance, 19.

  44. Vincent Cronin, The Florentine Renaissance (London, 1972), 288f.

  45. This paragraph draws on Patricia Fortini Brown, ‘Behind the Walls: The Material Culture of Venetian Elites’ in: John Martin & Dennis Romano, Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-state, 1297–1797 (Baltimore, MD, 2000), quoted at 324 & 326.

  46. Paola Pavanini, ‘Abitazioni popolari e borghesi nella Venezia cinquecentesca’, Studi Veneziani (new series) 5, 1981: 63–126, esp. 111–12, 125–6.

  47. Ulinka Rublack, ‘Matter in the Material Renaissance’, Past & Present 219, 2013: 41–84.

  48. Kent Roberts Greenfield, Sumptuary Law in Nürnberg: A Study in Paternal Government (Baltimore, MD, 1918), 109.

  49. Greenfield, Sumptuary Law in Nürnberg.

  50. Sheilagh Ogilvie, ‘Consumption, Social Capital and the “Industrious Revolution” in Early Modern Germany’, Journal of Economic History 70, no. 2, 2010: 287–325, 305.

  51. 24 Hen. VIII. C. 13 (1532–3), in: Statutes of the Realm, Vol. III: 1509–45 (London, 1817), eds. T. E. Tomlins & W. E. Taunton, quoted at 430.

  52. Frances Elizabeth Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England (Baltimore, MD, 1926), 231f.

  53. Greenfield, Sumptuary Law, 109, 128–30.

  54. Madeline Zilfi, ‘Goods in the Mahalle’, in: Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550–1922, ed. D. Quataert (New York, 2000).

  55. Roy Porter, ‘Consumption: Disease of the Consumer Society?’, in John Brewer & Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London & New York, 1993), 58–81; Dominik Schrage, Die Verfügbarkeit der Dinge: Eine historische Soziologie des Konsums (Frankfurt am Main, 2009), 43–51; Frank Trentmann, ‘The Modern Genealogy of the Consumer: Meanings, Identities and Political Synapses’, in: Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges, eds. John Brewer & Frank Trentmann, (Oxford & New York, 2006), 19–69.

  56. Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (Basingstoke, 1996), quoted at 73.

  57. Andreas Maisch, Notdürftiger Unterhalt und gehörige Schranken: Lebensbedingungen und Lebensstile in württembergischen Dörfern der frühen Neuzeit (Stuttgart, 1992), 366–70.

  58. Hans Medick, Weben und Ueberleben in Laichingen, 1650–1900: Lokalgeschichte als allgemeine Geschichte (Göttingen, 1996), esp. 387–437.

  59. Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the ‘Ancien Régime’ (Cambridge, 1989/1994, 56.

  60. Sheilagh C. Ogilvie, A Bitter Living: Women, Markets and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 2003); and Ogilvie, ‘Consumption, Social Capital and the “Industrious Revolution” in Early Modern Germany’.

  61. Matteo Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci: 1583–1610, trans. from the Latin by Louis J. Gallagher (New York, 1583–1610/1953), 25, 550.
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br />   62. Semedo, The History of That Great and Renowned Monarchy of China (1655; 1st Portugese edn, 1641), at https://archive.org/download/historyofthatgre00seme/historyofthatgre00seme.pdf.

  63. Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley, CA, 1998), 123, and for the following, more generally.

  64. Semedo, History of That Great and Renowned Monarchy of China, 23.

  65. Brook, Confusions of Pleasure, 198. See also: Bozhong Li, Agricultural Development in Jiangnan, 1620–1850 (Basingstoke, 1998).

  66. Sarah Dauncey, ‘Sartorial Modesty and Genteel Ideals in the Late Ming’ in: Daria Berg & Chloe Starr, The Quest for Gentility in China: Negotiations beyond Gender and Class (London, 2007), 137.

  67. Daria Berg, Women and the Literary World in Early Modern China, 1580–1700 (London, 2013).

  68. Wu Jen-shu, Elegant Taste: Consumer Society and the Literati in the Late Ming (Taipei, 2007). Wu Jen-shu, ‘Ming–Qing Advertising Forms and Consumer Culture’ (forthcoming), with thanks to Wu Jen-shu for sharing this paper.

  69. Brook, Confusions of Pleasure, 6, 220.

  70. See Clunas, Superfluous Things, 37 f.

  71. The Plum in the Golden Vase, or Chin P’ing Mei, trans. David Tod Roy (Princeton, NJ, 1618/1993), Vol. I, 126, 133–4.

  72. Brook, Confusions of Pleasure, 153–4.

  73. The cost of funerals, Shen Bang said, could run into thousands of taels (a low-ranking official earned 35 silver taels a year); see Dauncey ‘Sartorial Modesty’, in: Berg & Starr, The Quest for Gentility in China, 134–54.

  74. Ping-Ti Ho, ‘The Salt Merchants of Yang-chou’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 17, 1954: 130–68, quoted at 156.