The Global Lives of Things

The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World

Anne Gerritsen, Giorgio Riello

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317374558
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire prémoderne

The Global Lives of Things considers the ways in which 'things', ranging from commodities to works of art and precious materials, participated in the shaping of global connections in the period 1400-1800. By focusing on the material exchange between Asia, Europe, the Americas and Australia, this volume traces the movements of objects through human networks of commerce, colonialism and consumption. It argues that material objects mediated between the forces of global economic exchange and the constantly changing identities of individuals, as they were drawn into global circuits. It proposes a reconceptualization of early modern global history in the light of its material culture by asking the question: what can we learn about the early modern world by studying its objects?

This exciting new collection draws together the latest scholarship in the study of material culture and offers students a critique and explanation of the notion of commodity and a reinterpretation of the meaning of exchange. It engages with the concepts of 'proto-globalization', 'the first global age' and 'commodities/consumption'. Divided into three parts, the volume considers in Part One, Objects of Global Knowledge, in Part Two, Objects of Global Connections, and finally, in Part Three, Objects of Global Consumption. The collection concludes with afterwords from three of the leading historians in the field, Maxine Berg, Suraiya Faroqhi and Paula Findlen, who offer their critical view of the methodologies and themes considered in the book and place its arguments within the wider field of scholarship.

Extensively illustrated, and with chapters examining case studies from Northern Europe to China and Australia, this book will be essential reading for students of global history.

Part I
Objects of global knowledge

1
Itineraries of Materials and Knowledge in the Early Modern World

Pamela H. Smith

In the production of things, and, more generally, in all human acts of making, materials – which possess particular properties that enable a certain range of manipulations by the human hand – undergo a series of transformations, first into the ‘raw materials’ of human use by means of specialized practices and technologies, then into objects and things, and, finally (or, rather, concurrently), humans assign meanings to these things by integrating them into systems of knowledge and belief (or, ‘theories’). This is a reciprocal rather than linear process, and this chapter seeks to follow this complex and often partially obscured itinerary of materials, techniques, and ideas as they travel across geographic and epistemic space in Eurasia to form an ‘amalgam’ or ‘assemblage’ that I will label a ‘material complex’.

In the first part of the chapter, I develop a picture of the interaction of humans and materials; in the second part, I provide a case study of a material complex in Europe. The chapter continues by giving a cursory and somewhat eclectic overview of the movement of such material complexes across Eurasia; and in the final part, I suggest an itinerary through which the material complex treated in part two formed.

Humans and materials

In the reciprocal process between matter, hand, cognition, and intellect, natural materials and the human body mingle. Indeed, tool use and the acquisition of skills can perhaps ultimately be viewed as evolutionary processes of interaction between humans, the human body, and the environment.¹ An example can be found in the ancient human activity of wood cultivation and management, in which the matter of made things is grown by practices like pollarding every year for narrow poles, by coppicing every five to seven years, for larger poles every twenty years, and fostering the decades-, sometimes centuries-long growth of individual tall trees for ships’ masts, and house frames. Joiners and carpenters employed the properties of living wood in their practices also; for example, in splitting wood along its growth rays, or in making a join strong by inserting pins of dry wood into holes of green wood. As the green wood dried, it gripped the pin ever tighter.² The still-living wood is part of the process of making. Where in these practices of wood cultivation does growing end and human making begin?

The human body is an integral part of this continuum of growing and making. Consider its uses in the early modern workshop: the body functioned as a tool in myriad ways – for warming, blowing, handling, manipulating, sensing, tasting, and providing force and dexterity, just to name a few of its functions. The human body was also a source of substances employed in manufacture – including urine (the urine of pre-pubescent children possessed different properties from that of adults – again growth is important), excrement, blood, ear wax, and saliva; and the body was a model for natural processes – for the fermentation, digestion, concoction, purging, and excretion of the human body provided a conceptual framework for the transformation of materials in nature. Moreover, the quotidian stuff that sustained growth in the human body – including bread, butter, eggs, milk, honey, figs, and garlic – was also employed on a daily basis in workshop practices. And it was by means of the body and its learned gestures and techniques that the embodied and collaborative knowledge of craft was produced and reproduced, passed on from one generation to the next.³

European craft recipes measured in proportion to the human body, expressing volume in terms of ‘four drops of spittle’, or ‘two-fingers wide’.⁴ Time in craft practices was measured by reciting pater nosters, which, together with the admixture of holy water, could also be viewed as a prophylactic. A lock of hair was used to measure the temperature of material being heated,5 and human touch could measure whether an object was ‘cool enough to be held for a short time in your hand’, before being subjected to the next process.⁶ All five bodily senses were fully employed in the workshop: vitriol could be identified by its biting, sharp-to-the-taste, pungent-to-the-tongue, astringent nature, while rock alum had ‘a bitter taste with a certain unctuous saltiness’.⁷ Other measurements relied upon hearing: ‘Put your cuttlefish bone very close to the fire, if you hear little cries it means that your bone is dry enough’,⁸ and, in another, ‘If the tin cries very much it means you added enough lead and not too much’.⁹ In a process for hardening mercury, the material in the crucible was supposed to sound a loud bang to sign that it had had enough of the fire.¹⁰ The purity of tin was tested by biting to see whether it made cracking sounds, ‘like that which water makes when it is frozen by cold’. Good iron ore could be indicated by presence of a red, soft, fat earth that made no crackling noise when squeezed between the teeth.¹¹ In a dramatic account of casting bells, a medieval metalworking text advises the caster to ‘lie down close to the mouth of the mold’ as the metal is poured into the bell mould, ‘and listen carefully to find out how things are progressing inside. If you hear a light thunderlike rumbling, tell them to stop for a moment and then pour again; and have it done like this, now stopping, now pouring, so that the bell metal settles evenly, until that pot is empty’.¹² An anonymous goldsmith’s treatise advises the assayer to make certain that an acid bath has dissolved all available silver in an alloy by listening carefully to see if the glass vessel makes a ‘bott, bott, bott’ sound when tapped.¹³

The workshop functioned as an extension of the capacities and products of the human body. But the body was more than a tool in production – it was also implicated in the work: the bodies of metalworkers and the very matter upon which they laboured interpenetrated each other: bad breath could prevent the adhesion of metal gilding, and, conversely, metal fumes were known to shorten the lives of metalworkers, and records of their practice give evidence that they wore masks and ate bread and butter before starting work. Why? Because bread was viewed as a perfectly tempered food that filled the stomach and prevented the subtle metal vapours from being drawn into the body. At the same time, the hot, wet qualities of butter counteracted the miasmic exhalations of the minerals and metals rising up from the ground or billowing out from the smelting furnace. In eating butter, these artisans operated within the Greco-Roman-Arabic health worldview based on an Aristotelian framework of the four elements and qualities. In this scheme, butter was hot; metal vapours were cold.¹⁴ This was also the framework for mine manager and author of De la Pirotechnia (1540), Vannoccio Biringuccio’s explanation for what happened when bronze was poured into a cold mould – the cold, moist mould overcame the nature of bronze and turned it back to its primordial earthy-watery state.¹⁵

The human body and natural materials shared many properties. To take one example from metalworking: The idea of temper was crucial in the mental world of early modern Europeans. ‘Temper’ meant to balance by mixing, and a person’s temperament was determined by a balance of the four qualities – hot, wet, dry, cold – and their instantiation in the humours: black bile, phlegm, blood, and yellow bile. Each individual’s unique combination of the four qualities and humours could be tempered by diet, exercise, purging, and so on (the six non-naturals), and this process of tempering was crucial to human health. Metals too partook in this system and their balance of qualities could be rectified by tempering, as steel was tempered (sometimes using the urine of pre-pubescent boys), and copper was given temper and tone by adding tin in making the alloy, bronze. Minerals and humans alike received their temper from the movements of the heavens, for the sun was a source of growth for all living things – gold grew better along riverbanks warmed by the sun and in south-facing veins, and, in the common understanding of health and identity in early modern Europe, the celestial spheres and bodies determined the temperament of human beings at their conception and birth, just as they did for metals. This was a theological vision as well as a cosmological one, and it was codified in objects (Figure 1.1), as well as images and texts (Figure 1.2), and it gave rise to all manner of practices, such as praying before going down in a mine, a practice that continued into the twentieth century, baptizing mines and invoking God and the saints before a bronze pour.¹⁶

Metalworkers viewed the matter they worked as capable of growth. They daily employed processes in the production of goods that we conceptualize as typical of organic growth, such as in a pigment recipe for a gold colour that calls for mixing mercury with a fresh hen’s egg and then putting it back under the hen to heat slowly,¹⁷ or the use of constant slow heat produced by thermophilic bacteria in putrefying horse manure for the slow heat needed for some metalworking procedures.¹⁸ Formations brought out of the veins in the body of the earth, such as the pure strands of native silver, were self-evident proof for the growth and ripening of metals in the earth (Figure 1.3).

FIGURE 1.1 Handstein with mine scene and crucifixion. Bohemian, mid-sixteenth century, silver, gilding, wood, mineral specimens, including proustite, argentite, marcasite, lautite, malachite, quartz, fluorite. H. 27.1. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna KK 4167.

Artisanal manuals and recipe collections mixed procedures for grafting and growing plants, fermenting liquids, and healing humans and animals with instructions for producing objects from ingredients we would now call inorganic because they were viewed as operating according to the same principles. Blood and metal were related as well, and blood appears among the ingredients and operations of numerous metalwor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures, maps and tables
• Preface
• Contributors
• The global lives of things: material culture in the first global age
• PART I Objects of global knowledge
• PART II Objects of global connections
• PART III Objects of global consumption
• Afterword: How (early modern) things travel
• Afterword: Objects and their worlds
• Afterword: Things in global history
• Index