Empire of Things

Frank Trentmann

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780062456335
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

What we consume has become a central—perhaps the central—feature of modern life. Our economies live or die by spending, we increasingly define ourselves by our possessions, and this ever-richer lifestyle has had an extraordinary impact on our planet. How have we come to live with so much stuff, and how has this changed the course of history?

In Empire of Things, Frank Trentmann unfolds the extraordinary story of our modern material world, from Renaissance Italy and late Ming China to today's global economy. While consumption is often portrayed as a recent American export, this monumental and richly detailed account shows that it is in fact a truly international phenomenon with a much longer and more diverse history. Trentmann traces the influence of trade and empire on tastes, as formerly exotic goods like coffee, tobacco, Indian cotton and Chinese porcelain conquered the world, and explores the growing demand for home furnishings, fashionable clothes and convenience that transformed private and public life. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought department stores, credit cards and advertising, but also the rise of the ethical shopper, new generational identities and, eventually, the resurgence of the Asian consumer.

With an eye to the present and future, Frank Trentmann provides a long view on the global challenges of our relentless pursuit of more—from waste and debt to stress and inequality. A masterpiece of research and storytelling many years in the making, Empire of Things recounts the epic history of the goods that have seduced, enriched and unsettled our lives over the past six hundred years.

PART ONE

1

Three Cultures of Consumption

How fashions and comforts had advanced since his youth, a sixty-year-old chronicler marvelled in 1808. Napkins were no longer just for ‘very refined dinner guests’ but found on tables everywhere. Rich men paraded about town with their watches dangling from elaborate hooks. Once the habit of the few, tobacco was now smoked by everyone and stored in precious boxes. Some novelties were so recent they could be dated, like the craze for wind screens on houses that had started ten years earlier. Others could be measured by the inch. The sleeves of women’s jackets used to be one foot wide. Now, it was fashionable to have them six inches wider. The height of fashion was the ‘hundred-pleats skirt’, ‘a new style’, made of crêpe, which ensured it would fall ‘very softly’. But change was not confined to the upper levels of society. Even ordinary people were wearing ‘new and curious clothing’. One example was the easily removable collar that put new life into an outdated coat. Another was a short-sleeved linen jacket perfect for the summer season and, we are told, especially popular with fat people. ‘Frivolous servants’ dressed up in black double-threaded silk trousers. There was, perhaps, no better sign of the wave of new fashions than the keeping of animals as trendy pets.¹

Our chronicler was not writing from Paris or London but from Yangzhou, a prosperous Chinese city on the lower Yangzi river, a little over 200km inland from Shanghai. In his writings, published in 1808, the poet Lin Sumen recorded a fast-changing world of goods, something that in the next two centuries came to be seen as a hallmark of Western modernity. Of course, what was fashionable on the streets of Yangzhou was not exactly the same as in a Paris salon or a London pleasure garden. Lin, for example, describes a ‘butterfly shoe’, graced by a large satin butterfly on heel and toe, with an inner lining of English wool or Ningbo silk. Popular pets were chickens from Canton and rats from ‘the West’. Still, substitute the manifold designs of English shoe-buckles for differently shaped butterflies; silver snuffboxes for tobacco holders made of jade; exotic parrots and goldfish for ‘Western’ rats; add the legion of European commentators complaining of servants imitating the dress of their masters; and the differences between the two scenes rapidly fade.

Histories of consumption have mainly mirrored those of the rise of the West. Just as it was the cradle of modernity, we used to be told, the West was also the birthplace of consumer society. For all their differences, the influential historians Fernand Braudel and Neil McKendrick saw fashion as the heart of Western capitalism, the force behind its dynamism, desire and innovation. Eighteenth-century France and Britain, they were convinced, had fashion and, with it, modernity; China did not. McKendrick dated The Birth of a Consumer Society confidently to the third quarter of the eighteenth century, and located it in Britain.²

But was consumer society ‘born’ in eighteenth-century Britain? Researchers have collected indisputable evidence of the rising volume of goods in eighteenth-century Britain and its American colonies. Yet historians working on earlier European periods were not entirely happy to see their subjects treated as static or defective, little more than a ‘traditional’ backdrop to the main drama of the birth of modernity in Hanoverian Britain. A race got under way, as one after another claimed a ‘consumer revolution’ for their own period. Stuart historians have spotted it in seventeenth-century England, Renaissance scholars traced its roots to fifteenth-century Florence and Venice, while medieval historians detected its embryonic stirrings in a new taste for beef and ale and playing cards. Scholars of China added that the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), too, had a cult of things and deserved to be recognized as ‘early modern’.³

The birth metaphor alerts us to the importance historians attach to origins, and to the tunnel vision this can produce. The focus on national origin has tended to distract historians from comparison across cultures and to reduce the past to an antecedent of the present, a stage on the road to today’s throwaway society. This has made it sometimes difficult to appreciate what was distinctive about the use and meaning of goods in earlier times. The next two chapters attempt to provide a more rounded, evolutionary view that allows us to see parallels as well as the ultimate divergence in the global diffusion of goods between 1500 and 1800. There was no single modern consumer culture. Renaissance Italy, China in the late Ming dynasty (1520s–1644), and the Netherlands and Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries all saw a notable increase in possessions. All had shops and lexicons of taste. Each was dynamic, but in different ways. Which direction the flow of goods took was, in part, shaped by states and markets, income and prices, urbanization and social structure. Ultimately, however, as I hope to show, it was the values that these societies attached to things that set them apart from each other and made some hungrier consumers than others.

THE WORLD OF GOODS

One of the achievements of the three centuries between 1500 and 1800 was to join together distant continents in a world of goods. Trans-regional trade already flourished in earlier periods. The Silk Road had connected Asia with the Mediterranean since 200 BCE. By 800 CE, the Indian Ocean was a dynamic, integrated trading zone. This early phase used to be associated by historians with pepper and spices, fine silks and other luxury goods. It is now clear that sugar, dates, cloth and other bulk goods such as timber were a significant part of cargo even then. By the twelfth century, dyed and block-printed cottons from India were traded in Cairo and East Africa.⁴ Venice, Florence and Genoa acted as gateways between Europe and the Orient, pulling in oriental silks and Turkish carpets in exchange for European metals and furs. What was new after 1500 was not only that the Americas were opened up but that all these trading zones became connected in a truly global manner. A good deal of getting and spending continued to be in regional markets, but these now received an injection of global goods. Tea, porcelain and even sugar flowed from China to Europe and the Americas as well as Japan.⁵ American tobacco, turkey, maize (corn) and the sweet potato went to China; cotton textiles from Gujarat and the Coromandel coast found new customers in Europe and her Atlantic colonies, in addition to established markets in Japan and East Asia.

Trade and consumption, of course, are not the same thing. One is about the exchange of goods. The other is about people’s acquisition and use of them. Still, the former is a major facilitator of the latter, and so an important backdrop to our story. In the three centuries between 1500 and 1800, global trade was expanding at an unprecedented rate, growing by 1 per cent a year on average.⁶ It added up: in 1800, twenty-three times as many goods were floating on the world’s oceans as there had been three centuries earlier. These growth rates are particularly impressive when we bear in mind that this was in a period before the Industrial Revolution, in a world which did not know of large, sustained economic growth. By one estimate, the GDP of both Europe and China grew no more than 0.4 per cent a year in these three centuries, and even this reflects mainly population growth. If adjusted per person, their annual rate of growth of GDP drops to 0.1 per cent and 0 per cent respectively.⁷ In such an environment of low or zero growth, the rise in trade made a big difference. It brought more goods in greater variety, and even some goods that had never been seen before, such as printed cottons from India and cocoa from the New World. And by widening the channels of commerce, trade encouraged specialization and the division of labour. Instead of mainly consuming the fruits of their own labour – like most peasants growing their own food had for most of the Middle Ages – more and more people sold and bought goods on the market. The growth of trade did not trigger a complete transformation. Even in advanced European societies, many housewives continued to sew and knit at least some of their family clothes and hand them down well into the twentieth century. Elsewhere, some peasants continued to live from hand to mouth. But the rise of commerce did lead to a shift in the balance and orientation of consumption as well as its volume. Choosing and buying things in the market became more significant, home production and gift giving less so. In this sense, commerce and consumption went hand in hand.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the main trade current was from East to West. Unlike Spain and England, the Ming was not a global empire. Ocean trade was banned for most of the dynasty; a formal ‘sea ban’ was introduced in 1371 in an attempt to root out pirates and smuggling, and not abolished until 1567. The ambitious seven voyages to India and the Persian Gulf by the eunuch Zheng He between 1405 and 1433 commissioned by the Yongle emperor were exceptional, and subsequent rulers reverted from an active policy of mercantile expansion. In reality, however, traders continued to find a way through informal and illegal channels. Foreign merchants were officially not allowed to enter the Middle Kingdom except as members of a diplomatic mission. In addition to offering tribute goods to the Chinese court, many such embassies effectively operated as trade delegations. Smuggling took place on a much larger scale. The pirate trader Wang Zhi had several hundred vessels and a 100,000-strong crew under his command in the mid-sixteenth century.⁸ Many Chinese merchants simply got around the ‘sea ban’ by basing themselves on the islands off the south-eastern coast of China; one main route for textiles was via Ryukyu (today, Okinawa). The first European merchants to set up a trading post were the Portuguese, at Macao, also on the south coast, in 1557. A few years later, in 1573, Spanish galleons began to anchor at Manila in the Philippines. In 1609, Antonia de Morga, the president of the Crown of Castile’s tribunal (audiencia) in the East Indies listed the emporium of Chinese goods that the junks unloaded there for sale to the Spanish. Some of these were in the luxury range: ivory, velvets embroidered with gold, pearls and rubies, pepper and spices. Yet there was also:

white cotton cloth of different kinds and qualities, for all uses . . . many bed ornaments, hangings, coverlets, and tapestries of embroidered velvet; . . . tablecloths, cushions, and carpets . . . copper kettles . . . little boxes and writing-cases; beds, tables, chairs, and gilded benches, painted in many figures and patterns; . . . numberless other gewgaws and ornaments of little value and worth, which are esteemed among the Spaniards; besides a quantity of fine crockery of all kinds; . . . beads of all kinds . . . and rarities – which, did I refer to them all, I would never finish, nor have sufficient paper for it.⁹

The international marketplace was becoming more crowded with things. But until the middle of the eighteenth century, transactions were lopsided. Europeans paid China not in goods but largely in silver, mined and shipped from the New World. Silver was a crucial lubricant in the growth of markets, because it oiled the wheels of commerce and monetized society, making it easier to buy and sell goods. It was also one thing that China was desperately short of. Its own silver mines were limited, while the demands of the imperial bureaucracy, for which it was the lifeblood, were limitless. Chinese merchants were hungry for the silver that foreign traders brought with them in exchange for Chinese porcelain and textiles. Until the 1520s, the bulk came from silver mines in central Europe and Japan. In the next century, this would be outshone by the bullion from New Spain. Spanish officials had their fingers so deep in corruption that it is impossible to know how much silver was actually shipped in addition to that which they chose to record. But it is clear that the galleons were creaking under the weight as they sailed from Acapulco in the New World to Seville in the old, and on to Amsterdam and London, where the Dutch and English East India Companies put it on their ships sailing to Asia to pay for spices, porcelain, silk and cotton. In the early seventeenth century, at least 60,000kg of Spanish silver reached China every year. In 1602, one official in Acapulco told the Spanish Crown that 345,000kg had been sent to Manila.¹⁰ Still, even then China was not hermetically sealed. In the classic novel The Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong Lou Meng) (1791), European clocks and textiles make an appearance, as do Western wine and even a Western spotted dog.¹¹

This was not a simple success story. Trade wars, piracy and treacherous oceans disrupted the traffic of goods. Vasco da Gama’s fleet first reached Calicut on India’s south-western Malabar Coast in 1498. Two centuries later, the biggest of the European chartered companies in the East Indies, the Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC), still had only two hundred ships. As late as 1700, all European ships combined brought back from Asia 230,000 tons of goods a year, an amount that would fit into two big container ships today. In the early eighteenth century, the VOC dispatched no more than thirty to forty ships a year to Asia. But ships were getting bigger and returning with bigger cargoes; in an average year in the 1680s, VOC ships returned with 9,800 tons from Asia; by the 1700s, it was more than double that (22,000 tons).¹² More boats and goods were crossing the Baltic and Mediterranean, and the continuing importance of these markets must not be forgotten; the Dutch controlled the herring trade in the seventeenth century; the fish was caught mostly in the North Sea and then exported, together with salt, to the Baltic and the German states. Direct comparisons between the European and Asian trade are fraught with difficulties. The voyages, the cargo, its quality and value were all radically different. It is 13,500 nautical miles to sail from Amsterdam to the Dutch East Indies, but only 641 to reach Copenhagen. The profits on a ton of pepper or porcelain vastly exceeded that on a ton of herring. However small comparatively in weight and volume – the VOC’s share of all Dutch commerce never exceeded a quarter – it was the precious value of the goods that made the Asian trade so significant. By one estimate, their combined annual value had reached 20 million guilders by the mid-eighteenth century, greater than that of everything the Dutch brought back from the Baltic.¹³

From the late seventeenth century, commerce started shifting towards to the Atlantic world, and this pull was nowhere stronger than for the English economy. In the 1630s, the bulk of goods England sold abroad had been woollens, to the rest of Europe. By 1700, these were being outpaced by the exotic crops from the new world: sugar, tobacco and, to a lesser extent, coffee.¹⁴ But the Atlantic world provided more than cheap new commodities harvested by slaves. It also, and in contrast to China and im...