Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  This new era of global exchange had a profound effect on daily life. A single plant could have transformative effects. In seventeenth-century China, the arrival of the nutritious and high-yielding sweet potato from America allowed millions of peasants to switch from growing rice to cultivating silk, which, in turn, could be traded for other goods. (Sweet potatoes were eaten baked or boiled, dried and preserved, made into flour for noodles and even brewed into wine.)17 American corn, similarly, freed up land and hands, enabling Chinese peasants to pick tea leaves and cultivate sugar for the market instead of having to grow their own rice to survive. There were losers as well as winners. When the Dutch introduced price controls for cash crops, Indonesia and Malaysia plunged from prosperity to poverty, as peasants reverted from selling sugar, pepper and cloves on the market and buying cloth and other goods in exchange to a hand-to-mouth existence of subsistence farming. In the Atlantic world, Europeans’ appetite for sugar spawned an organized form of capitalism based on slavery and the cultivation of a single crop. This was the most extreme form of commodification. People’s thirst for goods in one continent was quenched by enslaving millions of humans as goods for sale in another. What difference empire made to consumer culture, and vice versa, is a subject that will receive sustained attention in a later chapter. Before that, we need to discover where the demand for things was coming from in the first place.

  MAGNIFICENCE AND MAJOLICA

  The expansion of interregional and then global trade intersected with the commercialization of everyday life. Signs of the latter can be observed in Renaissance Italy in the fifteenth century and in late Ming China, as well as in seventeenth-century Britain and the Netherlands. At a time when the vast majority of people in Europe and the rest of the world led a rural existence, struggling for survival, these precocious societies were hotspots of consumption. In each of them, people acquired more things than they had had before. The spread of markets and the division of labour that came with it enabled growing numbers to buy items they had not made themselves. In economic terms, these developments could be summed up as a growth in demand, and, as we shall see, high wages and the ability to buy more goods were important, especially in the Low Countries and England. But we must attend to quality as well as quantity if we want to understand the role goods played in these societies, that is, we must follow their meaning, value and function. Demand was shaped by culture and social structure, and these differed in these societies. While all benefited from greater trade and spending, Renaissance Italy, Ming China and early modern Britain and the Low Countries ultimately developed different cultures of consumption. It is to these differences that we now turn.

  Between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries, Europe enjoyed a commercial revolution in which Florence, Venice and Genoa emerged as the prosperous link between the Byzantine and Muslim world and the courts and fairs scattered across a predominantly agrarian Europe. Initially, traders from these North Italian cities brought back from the Levant silk, spices and other luxury goods which they exchanged for grain, furs and metals from Europe. The next two centuries saw a reversal of fortunes. The European economy expanded while that of the Levant declined. Tuscany developed a flourishing wool industry, favoured by its marshy maremme south of Pisa which attracted sheep from the Apennines. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Lucca, Florence and Venice had learnt the art of making silk fabrics, paper and glass themselves. Alongside banking and commerce, it was these artisanal trades that made these cities prosper and expand, turning Northern Italy into the most urbanized region in Europe. Florence began building its wall in the late thirteenth century: two centuries later, it enclosed an area fifteen times as big. The city fed its citizens with grain from Puglia and Sicily. By 1575, Venice’s population was close to 200,000, twice its size before the Black Death hit in 1348. The fortune of these cities was tied to their luxury trades, and these, in turn, were tied to Europe’s uneven recovery from the bubonic plague. At first, the demographic catastrophe reduced the pressure on land and raised the wages of workers lucky enough to survive. By 1500, growth had come to a halt, as the population had recovered and each acre had to feed more mouths. Prices were rising, especially for food. This hurt ordinary workers, but it benefited nobles in Scandinavia and central Europe, as well as the aristocratic landowners in Italy and, by extension, the Florentine and Venetian artisans who were making the luxury goods for their palaces and tables.18

  Possessions were becoming more numerous and refined. Increasingly sophisticated tableware was symptomatic of this trend. Households accumulated more spoons, forks and drinking glasses. In 1475, the Florentine banker Filippo Strozzi ordered four hundred glass beakers from Murano. In the same year, the silk merchant Jacopo di Giannozzo Pandolfini bought a set of twelve silver forks and spoons. When Domenico Cappello, son of the Venetian admiral Niccolò, died in 1532 – a time when Europeans elsewhere had never held a fork, let alone owned one – he left behind 38 table knives with silver handles, 12 decorated and gilded spoons and forks, and 42 plainer forks.19 Instead of individual plates, the elite table was increasingly graced with a complete service. By the late sixteenth century, that of the Marquis of Squarciafico in Genoa, contained 180 pieces of pewter and 104 dishes of different sizes. The neighbouring Brignole family could claim over 115 plates of silver. Some new objects made their appearance, such as the eggcup or silver and gold spazadente and stuzicatoio da orecchi, which allowed more elegant cleaning of teeth and ears. Pewter was sometimes ordered from London and stood on fine linen cloth from Flanders. Most of the silver spoons and bowls, the glass and pottery, however, were the product of local craftsmen, such as those enamelling gilded glass goblets in Venice or glazing the colourful majolica pottery in Montelupo in Tuscany and Casteldurante in the Marche (see Plate 1); in the sixteenth century, local textiles also gained the upper hand over imported ones. What made these objects precious was their increasingly sophisticated design and decoration rather than their material or novelty.20

  Silver and tableware were signs of an emerging culture of domestic sociability and politeness. Rooms were increasingly separated by function, creating distinct spaces for sleeping and eating and for libraries and picture galleries. In their homes, merchants and aristocrats introduced a special room for more intimate entertaining: the salotto. By the late sixteenth century, the home and its possessions displayed a family’s character as well as its riches. A guidebook of the period for the new bride advised her to ‘guide’ her guests ‘around the house and in particular [to] show them some of your possessions, either new or beautiful, but in such a way that it will be received as a sign of your politeness and domesticity, and not arrogance: something that you will do as if showing them your heart’.21

  Politeness looked outward but also inward, for it put a new premium on private comfort and self-fashioning. In his classic The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), Jacob Burckhardt, the Swiss pioneer of cultural history, was among the first to note the growing attention to personal beauty and self-fashioning in cinquecento Italy: ‘No sort of ornament was more in use than false hair, often made of white or yellow silk.’ Alongside hair extensions – some made of real hair (capelli morti) – false teeth and perfumes, Burckhardt observed the wider interest in cleanliness, manners and comfort, unique at the time. In Bandello’s novellas, he noted, ‘we read . . . of soft, elastic beds, of costly carpets and bedroom furniture, of which we hear nothing in other countries.’ Linen was abundant and beautiful. Everywhere, ‘art enobles luxury’, from the toilet-table with ‘numberless graceful trifles’ to carpets with intricate designs. Foreign visitors were impressed when they received their own clean napkin at meals.22 In more recent years, historians have filled in Burckhardt’s depiction of domestic comfort. In the course of the sixteenth century, armchairs appeared alongside traditional stools. There was an influx of Turkish carpets, books, prints and musical instruments. Children played with spinning tops and wooden horses, while adults would entertain the
mselves with backgammon or the riskier (and illegal) new betting game biribissi. And precious objects came to be viewed not only in their own, separate terms but as part of a tasteful ensemble that had to be built up over time with knowledge as well as money. For connoisseurs like the Florentine humanist Niccolò Niccoli with his rich book collection, and Isabella d’Este, the Marchioness of Mantua, who assembled coins, vases and statues, acquisition became a life project.23

  Previous accounts have often traced the ‘civilizing process’ to the influence of the court,24 but it was in fact far more widespread than a court could reach. Artisans in Genoa, for example, left behind six, sometimes twelve silver spoons. Most had a bed, a table, sheets and linen.25 When a fairly modest innkeeper died in Siena in 1533, his own bedchamber contained a bed with a pair of curtains and coverlet, and a chest with several decorative bedspreads. In addition to seventeen shirts, his wardrobe included a silk headdress, satin gloves, a velvet hood and a pair of sleeves made of embroidered silk damask.26 In Venice, fifty years later, death – and the inventory that was drawn up to record his household possessions for inheritance purposes – gives us a snapshot of the living conditions of an artisan in Venice, the woodcarver Andrea Faentino, who had done some work for the great architects of that city. Unlike a growing number of his contemporaries, Faentino worked and lived in the same space, in a rented house. He was working on two sculptures of apostles and angels when he died. Like his contemporaries, he stored most of his possessions in a cassa, or chest, but his four were made not of cheap, ordinary wood but of more precious walnut. They contained clothing, blankets, textiles and shoes. He also owned twelve gilded knives with ivory handles and eight silver forks. In the kitchen there were four walnut stools and a table described as ‘old’ in the inventory. He had two pans, two salt shakers, forty pieces of pewter and fifty-eight white majolica plates – the recent fashion had been for whiteware over coloured plates. His bed, by contrast, was modest and lacked the soft refinement found in merchant homes. On the wall, however, hung not only a simple painting of the Madonna but also one of a woman with a lute, and another of ‘il Turco’, revealing the widespread influence of oriental images at the time. Faentino also had an impressive number of books on religion, architecture – including a book by Leon Battista Alberti – and history (one about the Albanian national hero George Skanderbeg, who led Pope Pius II’s crusade and contained the Ottoman Muslim expansion until his death in 1468). And he owned a lute.27

  Faentino’s material world was one of modest comfort, quite inferior to that of merchants and aristocrats. In 1620s Florence, for example, Piero d’Agnolo Guicciardini, who had made his riches in the local wool and silk industry, had 151 pictures on display in just one room of his town house.28 A century earlier, the poor noblewoman-turned-courtesan Elisabetta Condulmer had six gilded chests filled with linen, abundant silver spoons, down-filled mattresses, and, alongside the Adoration of the Magi, paintings of the nude Andromeda and of naked men.29 In Venice in the 1570s, even a better-off illuminator of manuscripts owned twenty-five paintings (one of Nero), a mirror and a map of the world as well as rugs from Cairo and Persia.30 Still, however limited or old, Faentino’s possessions were clearly part of a shared material culture which included tableware, books and music-making – a lute or harpsichord could be found in most Venetian households at the time – as well as an appreciation of pictures as objects of art to be owned and displayed rather than used purely for religious or devotional purposes.

  It can be tempting to think of pre-modern societies as extremes of inequality, where a few rich lords feasted off the many ragged poor, and this was true for much of Europe, still then predominantly rural. Urban Northern Italy was different. Florence in 1500 was no more unequal than the United States in 2000. The city consisted not of two cultures, with a sharp divide between the elite and the homogeneous plebs. Rather, most Florentines found themselves somewhere on a spectrum that ranged from the marginalized poor to more comfortable artisans and shopkeepers. Books were not only bought by the patrician elite but by bakers, carpenters and metalmakers. In small doses, some artisans were even sharing a taste for a few exotic goods, such as oriental rugs. Imported Hispano-Moresque ceramics found ready buyers among shoemakers, blacksmiths and textile workers; one wool weaver owned a set of 7 jars, 13 bowls and 34 plates.31 A similar picture can be found in the bustling commercial centres of Northern Europe such as Antwerp, which saw a rapid diffusion of pictures and majolica in the seventeenth century.32

  Still, to see in the Renaissance the ‘seeds of our own . . . bravura consumerism’ would be to go one step too far.33 While possessions and ideals of comfort had begun to fill the home, they remained part of a civic culture that continued to be oriented towards public display and posterity, not private pleasure or the lure of novelty. Its animating spirit was magnificence, its goal perpetuity. The spending on personal possessions was trivial compared to the outlay on monumental town palaces and public banquets. These were the main drivers of Renaissance consumption. The Palazzo Strozzi, for example, begun in 1489, cost the Florentine family half as much as Henry VII’s royal palace at Richmond.34 Aristocrats tried to outshine each other with the most richly decorated chapel, but the goal was to demonstrate one’s magnificence and virtù, not simply to show off one’s wealth. The point of reference was Aristotle, who had praised the appropriate display of private wealth as a sign of civic virtue and pride in a community governed and defended by like-minded brave, propertied citizens. The patrician elite in Renaissance Italy were pioneers in shifting the symbolic currency of power from people to things. Unlike landed aristocrats elsewhere in Europe, the Strozzis and fellow nobles asserted their status through splendid objects and buildings, not by keeping a large camp of retainers. Suitably presented, paintings and vases could reflect the cultured character of a citizen at home. Yet private pleasure and comodità (comfort) for their own sake remained suspect. They had to mirror a devotion to the public good. The admired life was that of the active citizen who increased the splendour and strength of his city by erecting monumental buildings, commanding an army and sponsoring communal feasts and public works. Large-scale consumption was safe – and could be enjoyed – when it occurred in the pursuit of such public ends. In that sense, a richly decorated chapel like that of the Salviati family in San Marco, Florence, was very different from – say – a modern Ferrari. Luxury stood in the service of posterity, to engrave the family name in the annals of the city for generations to come. The civic humanism of the Renaissance favoured solid things. Money was spent to last.

  The conservative character of Renaissance consumption can be seen in the type, function and circulation of goods. Though Italian cities imported oriental silks and by 1500 had started to produce their own for the European market – the first chapter in what would become a Western success story of copying and replacing Eastern wares – silk was exceptional. Overall, material culture was one of notable continuity. There was more of everything, and a few new items arrived on the scene, such as the upholstered chair, but a household in 1600 still mostly had the same kind of things as two hundred years earlier. It was a culture of refinement rather than novelty. The design on goblets became more elaborate, the wood carving on furniture more ornate, the wall hangings more splendid, but the materials and type of goods hardly changed.

  As well as being useful, and sometimes decorative, goods functioned as assets. In a cash-poor economy, and especially in times of inflation, clothes, linen and silverware were important ways to store value. For rich and poor, the pawnshop served as a local bank. If an individual needed some cash, they pledged their clothes or household goods, then, a few months later, redeemed them. Because goods were storehouses of wealth, they needed to be durable. A cloak, a ring or a detachable velvet sleeve was of little use if it was so fashionable that in a year’s time it would have lost its value as a pledge. The vast majority of people dressed like their grandparents.35 When Renaissance people accumulated goods, then, it was n
ot because they had discovered fashion and went through things more quickly but because they were building up their assets. In 1633 in Venice, one oar-maker left his widow 43 shirts, 25 sheets, 63 tablecloths and napkins and 105 pewter plates.36 Most textiles and silver spoons in inventories like this one were probably never or rarely used but stored away as material life insurance. Linens, of course, were worn out through regular use and had to be replaced, but silks and other high-quality goods were carefully maintained and reused for as long as possible. When in 1580 the Milanese Livia Tollentina was widowed, she recycled her married wardrobe to upholster her coach and make ecclesiastical hangings.37

  Gifts, pawns, personal loans and securities connected high and low in a circle of mutual dependence. The Castellani, an elite Florentine family, are a good example. In 1460, Francesco di Matteo Castellani deposited his wife Lena’s embroidered dress with a money-lender to raise cash to pay back a loan. Yet Lena was set to attend an aristocratic wedding, so he simultaneously borrowed a large pearl set in gold, a diamond set ‘in the Parisian style with white and red flowers and green foliage’, and, for good measure, a ruby set in gold. In reverse, he loaned a family heirloom and cloth hangings bearing his coat of arms to a noble friend who had brokered his sister’s marriage. To a local schoolmaster, he sent freshly purchased manuscripts of Suetonius and Justinian, and, on feast days, lent some of his clothes and swords to local blacksmiths. Possessions were always on the move.38

  Possessions thus circulated within a social orbit of reciprocity and trust, rather than expressing an act of individual choice. Their free flow was further restricted by moral boundaries. In Renaissance thought, to be virtuous and independent, a citizen had to be self-sufficient. Leon Battista Alberti and other writers idealized the citizen who consumed the fruits of his own estate without needing to resort to shops and strangers. The lesson of the ancients was that Rome was strongest when it was simplest. Too many possessions produced over-sensitive weaklings incapable of defending their republic. In reality, aristocratic men certainly did shop in markets, but such excursions were more about civic bonding than shopping for leisure, as the historian of Renaissance shopping Evelyn Welch has shown. Drawing on Cicero, Renaissance morals approached trade with a double standard that justified a social order with patrician merchants at the top and plebeian shopkeepers at the bottom. On a large scale, commerce was virtuous and added to the glory of the community. Merchants brought back their wealth to their landed estates. On the small scale of a shop, by contrast, trading was ‘vulgar’, the Venetian writer Tomaso Garzoni stressed in the late sixteenth century. Patrician merchants might have made their wealth in trade, but they retained a foothold in the country, on their estate, which provided them and the community with food. Shopkeepers just sold. Could they be trusted? That shops were a vital link in the chain of distribution, connecting merchants and customers, and, indeed, creating demand, would have been anathema to contemporaries. Shopkeepers continued to labour under a stigma of low status. In Milan in 1593, the Senate banned them from entering the nobility.39