Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  19. Chamberlayne, The Manner of Making Coffee. For Red Sea piracy, see K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 1978), 361.

  20. James Howell, 1650s, cited in The Vertues of Coffee. Pepys’s diary, 24 April 1661.

  21. James Howell, 1650s, cited in The Vertues of Coffee.

  22. Habermas, Transformation; Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, 2005); Hochmuth, Globale Güter; James Livesey, Civil Society and Empire (New Haven, CT, 2009); Jean-Claude Bologne, Histoire des cafés et des cafetiers (Paris, 1993).

  23. P. ‘Considerazioni sul Lusso’, in: Il Caffè (Milan, 1764), 110, my translation.

  24. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT, 1998), 206–8.

  25. Michael North, Genuß und Glück des Lebens: Kulturkonsum im Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Cologne, 2003), 209.

  26. Jean de La Roque, An Historical Treatise Concerning the Original [sic] and Progress of Coffee, as well as in Asia as Europe (1715; London edition, 1732), repr. in: Ellis, ed., Eighteenth-century Coffee-house Culture, Vol. IV , 277–312. For de La Roque, see Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, Orientalism in Early Modern France: Eurasian Trade, Exoticism and the Ancien Regime (Oxford, 2008), 172f.

  27. Anne McCants, ‘Poor Consumers as Global Consumers: The Diffusion of Tea and Coffee Drinking in the Eighteenth Century’, Economic History Review 61, 2008: 172–200; Wouter Ryckbosch, ‘A Consumer Revolution under Strain: Consumption, Wealth and Status in Eighteenth-century Aalst’, PhD thesis, Antwerp (2012); John Styles, ‘Lodging at the Old Bailey: Lodgings and Their Furnishing in Eighteenth-century London’, in: Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830, eds. John Styles & Amanda Vickery (New Haven, CT, 2006); and Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760 (London, 1996, 2nd edn).

  28. Edward Eagleton, 1785, quoted in Hoh-cheung Mui & Lorni Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-century England (London, 1987), 257. For variety, see Jon Stobart, Sugar and Spice: Grocers and Groceries in Provincial England, 1650–1830 (Oxford, 2013), 50–6.

  29. Hochmuth, Globale Güter, 134, 142.

  30. Robert Batchelor, ‘On the Movement of Porcelains: Rethinking the Birth of the Consumer Society as Interactions of Exchange Networks, China and Britain, 1600–1750’, in: Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives, 95–122.

  31. The above draws on Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-century Britain (Oxford, 2005), 52–75, 128–49; Chaudhuri, Trading World of Asia; Chuimei Ho, ‘The Ceramics Trade in Asia, 1602–82’, in: Japanese Industrialization and the Asian Economy, ed. A. J. H. Latham & Heita Kawakatsu (London, 1994), 35–70; Fang Lili, Chinese Ceramics (Beijing, 2005).

  32. Jonas Hanway, Letters on the Importance of the Rising Generation of the Labouring Part of Our Fellow-subjects (London, 1757), II, letter XXX, 174–85.

  33. Legrand d’Aussy, Histoire de la vie privée des François (Paris, 1815; 1st edn 1783), 145, my translation.

  34. La Roque, Progress of Coffee, 366.

  35. Dr Fothergill to J. Ellis, 2 September 1773: in John Ellis, An Historical Account of Coffee (London, 1774), 38, repr. in Ellis, ed., Eighteenth-century Coffee-house Culture, Vol. IV.

  36. Postlethwayt, The African Trade (1745), quoted in Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC, 1944/1994), 52.

  37. Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, 2002); ‘Roundtable, Reviews of Joseph Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England’, International Journal of Maritime History XV, no. 2, Dec. 2003: 279–361. Patrick O’Brien, ‘Fiscal and Financial Preconditions for the Rise of British Naval Hegemony 1485–1815’, working paper 91 (2005), http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/economicHistory/pdf/WP9105.pdf.

  38. S. D. Smith, ‘Accounting for Taste: British Coffee Consumption in Historical Perspective’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27, 1996: 183–214.

  39. La Roque, Progress of Coffee; Zedler’s Universal-lexikon, quoted in Annerose Menninger, Genuß im kulturellen Wandel: Tabak, Kaffee, Tee und Schokolade in Europa (16.–19. Jahrhundert) (Stuttgart, 2004), 317.

  40. Fothergill to Ellis, 2 September 1773, in Ellis, An Historical Account of Coffee (London, 1774), 30.

  41. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, England and America (New York, 1834), 84.

  42. As in the case of the wool industry in the West Riding of Yorkshire.

  43. Berg, ‘Pursuit of Luxury’. I write ‘favoured’ because consumer demand in the empire was not by itself a sufficient cause for the Industrial Revolution. At the same time, the many feedbacks between overseas and domestic developments make it unhelpful to draw an overly sharp distinction between exogenous and endogenous factors. For Europe’s advance in science and technology, see Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, NJ, 2002).

  44. Jan De Vries, European Urbanization, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1984); Paul Bairoch, De Jéricho à Mexico: Villes et économie dans l’histoire (Paris, 1985); Peter Clark, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History (Oxford, 2013). Li Bozhong’s recent research suggests that as many as 20% of the population in the Jiangnan region might have been urban during the Qing era. My point here is about degrees, not absolutes. China did not lack towns and cities, it just had fewer of them.

  45. Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760, table 4.2. As she notes, the exceptions were less conspicuous items such as books.

  46. Andrew Hann & Jon Stobart, ‘Sites of Consumption: The Display of Goods in Provincial Shops in Eighteenth-century England’, Cultural and Social History 2, 2005: 165–87, esp. 177.

  47. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (1714; London, 1989), Remark (M), 152. A widespread observation, e.g. John Rae: ‘In town Molly Seagrim would have been admired as a fantastical fine lady; in the country she got herself mobbed’: Statement of Some New Principles on the Subject of Political Economy (Boston, 1834), 280.

  48. Stephen D. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning (Chicago, IL, 1960); see also P. D. Glennie & N. J. Thrift, ‘Modernity, Urbanism and Modern Consumption’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10, 1992: 423–43.

  49. According to Wim van Binsbergen, in Wim M. J. van Binsbergen & Peter L. Geschiere, eds., Commodification: Things, Agency and Identities (The Social Life of Things Revisited) (Münster, 2005) quoted at 33. See also: Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things’, in Appadurai, ed., Social Life of Things, esp. 84. Whether this is a satisfactory view of Descartes or Kant is a different matter. That the Cartesian self was more than the mind is explored in Karen Detlefsen, ed., Descartes’ Meditations: A Critical Guide (Cambridge, 2013).

  50. Bruno Latour, ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik’, in: Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA, 2005); Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA, 1993); see further, Frank Trentmann, ‘Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices and Politics’, Journal of British Studies 48, no. 2, 2009: 283–307.

  51. The term is Cook’s, on whose book, Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT, 2007), I have drawn here.

  52. Brook, Vermeer’s Hat, quoted at 82. See also: Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches.

  53. Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Forraign Trade (London, 1664), 108.

  54. Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Experimental Natural Philosophy (Oxford, 1663) in: Works of the Honorable Robert Boyle (1744), 56.

  55. Bishop of Rochester, Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London (London, 1667), 381, 384.

  56. Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse of Trade (London, 1690), 14–15.

  57. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (1714; London, 1989), 68, 69.

  58. As does Clun
as, Superfluous Things, 146.

  59. Daniel Defoe, A Plan of the English Commerce (Oxford, 1728/1927), 77, 144–6. John Cary, An Essay on the State of England (Bristol, 1695), esp. 147. See further, Richard C. Wiles, ‘The Theory of Wages in Later English Mercantilism’, Economic History Review, new series, XXI/1 (April 1968), 113–26; Paul Slack, ‘The Politics of Consumption and England’s Happiness in the Later Seventeenth Century’, English Historical Review CXXII, 2007: 609–31; Cosimo Perrotta, Consumption as an Investment I: The Fear of Goods from Hesiod to Adam Smith (London and New York, 2004).

  60. Berry, The Idea of Luxury; Perrotta, Consumption as Investment; Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, eds., Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke, 2003).

  61. Michael Kwass, ‘Consumption and the World of Ideas: Consumer Revolution and the Moral Economy of the Marquis de Mirabeau’, Eighteenth-century Studies 37, no. 2, 2004: 187–213. See also: James Livesey, ‘Agrarian Ideology and Commercial Republicanism in the French Revolution’, Past and Present, no. 157, 1997: 94–121.

  62. Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois (1748), bk VII.

  63. David Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’ (1741), repr. in: Political Essays (Cambridge, 1994), 108, 112. See also: ‘Of Commerce’, 93–104.

  64. Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, 107.

  65. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), 116. For Spinozism, see Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment (Oxford, 2001). See also: Annette C. Baier, ‘David Hume, Spinozist’, Hume Studies XIX/2 (Nov. 1993), 237–52.

  66. ‘Novelty, and the Unexpected Appearance of Objects’, Henry Home/Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (London, 1762/1805, I, 211–21, quoted at 221. Compare Addison’s essay on the pleasures of the imagination in the Spectator, no. 412.

  67. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London, 1759), Part IV, ch.1. I quote from the 1976 edited reprint of the 6th edn (1790), 179–87.

  68. Smith, Wealth of Nations bk II, ch. 3, 362–7.

  69. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 412 (bk III, ch. 2) and 437–40 (bk III, ch. 4). See further, Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ, 1977).

  70. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9; 18th edn, 1829, London), II, ch. 1/11.

  71. Anne Granville Dewes, quoted in Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2009), 127. In addition, see Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 183–94; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, ‘Hannah Barnard’s Cupboard: Female Property and Identity in Eighteenth-Century New England’, in: Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, eds. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel & Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997), 238–73; Sandra Cavallo, ‘What Did Women Transmit? Ownership and Control of Household Goods and Personal Effects in Early Modern Italy’, in: Moira Donald & Linda Hurcombe, eds., Gender and Material Culture in Historical Perspective (Basingstoke, 2000), 38–53.

  72. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and the Origins of Environmentalism (New Haven, CT, 2013), 18–26, 237–9.

  73. Jonathan Lamb, ‘The Crying of Lost Things’, English Literary History 71, no. 4: 949–67; Mark Blackwell, ed., The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-century England (Lewisburg, 2007); Julie Park, The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-century England (Stanford, 2010).

  74. Bernard Mandeville, A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases (New York, 1976 repr. of 1730 edn; 1st edn 1711), 233.

  75. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, ‘The Physiology of Hypochondria in Eighteenth-century Britain’, in: Cultures of the Abdomen: Dietetics, Obesity and Digestion in the Modern World, eds. Christopher Forth & Ana Cardin-Coyne (New York, 2010). Roy Porter, ‘Consumption: Disease of the Consumer Society?’ in: Consumption and the World of Goods, eds. John Brewer & Roy Porter (London and New York, 1993), 58–81.

  76. William Winstanley, The New Help to Discourse (London, 1684, 3rd edn), 272, 282, 293–4.

  77. Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Politeness for Plebes’, in: John Brewer & Ann Bermingham, eds., The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800 (London, 1995), 362–82.

  78. See Susan Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan (Berkeley, CA, 1997).

  79. Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1990), 222.

  80. The Connoisseur, 1756, quoted in Robert W. Jones, Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-century Britain (Cambridge, 1998), 13–14. For the culture of sensibility and refinement, see John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination (New York, 1997).

  81. Thomas Sheraton, Cabinet Dictionary, 1803, quoted in Amanda Vickery, ‘ “Neat and Not Too Showey”: Words and Wallpaper in Regency England’, in: Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830, eds. John Styles & Amanda Vickery (New Haven. CT, 2006), 201–24, 216. See also in the same volume: Hannah Greig, ‘Leading the Fashion: The Material Culture of London’s Beau Monde’, 293–313.

  82. Zheng Yangwen, The Social Life of Opium in China.

  83. John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (Edinburgh, 1771/1806), 89, 100–102. See further Mary Catharine Moran, ‘The Commerce of the Sexes’, in: Paradoxes of Civil Society, ed. F. Trentmann (New York, 2000), 61–84, and Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in 18th-century Britain (Cambridge, 2009).

  84. The best discussion now is T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York, 2004), although the repetitive use of the label ‘consumers’ is out of historical context.

  85. John Dickinson, The Late Regulations Respecting the British Colonies (London, 1766), 27.

  86. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–87 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998), 573–7.

  87. Richard Wrigley, The Politics of Appearances: Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France (Oxford, 2002), ch. 5; and Leora Auslander, Cultural Revolutions: The Politics of Everyday Life in Britain, North America and France (Oxford, 2009), ch. 5.

  88. John Thelwall, Poems Written in Close Confinement in The Tower and Newgate (1795), sonnet V.

  89. Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, repr. in Marx, Early Political Writings, ed. J. O’Malley (Cambridge, 1994), 28–56.

  90. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, I (Frankfurt am Main, 1987; repr. of 1872 edn; 1st edn 1867), 35, 17.

  91. Marx, Das Kapital, I, 50, my translation.

  92. Karl Marx, Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Briefwechsel, 21 January 1858, my translation.

  93. MEGA, Briefwechsel, vols. V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, letters from Marx to Engels, 27 February 1852; 15 July 1858; 28 April 1862; 27 May 1862; 8 January 1863; 4 July 1864 15 July 1858, my translations. See also: Peter Stalybrass, ‘Marx’s Coat’, in: Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces, ed. Patricia Spyer (London, 1998), 183–207; Francis Wheen, Karl Marx (London, 1999), ch. 8.

  94. Nicholas Crafts T. C. Mills, ‘Trends in Real Wages in Britain, 1750–1913’, in: Explorations in Economic History 31, 1994: 176–94.

  95. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New York, 1958), 37.

  96. T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London, 1817, 5th edn), III, book IV, ch. 8, 302–4. See further, E. A. Wrigley, ‘Malthus on the Prospects for the Labouring Poor’, Historical Journal 31, no. 4, 1988: 813–29.

  97. M. von Prittwitz, Die Kunst reich zu werden (Mannheim, 1840), 485, see also 488–91, my translation.

  98. Wilhelm Roscher, Principles of Political Economy (1878), 191, 230, 552; the first German edition was published in 1854.

  99. [Anon.], Hints on the Practical Effects of Commercial Restrictions on Production, Consumption, and National Wealth, with Remarks on the Claims of the Silk Trade. By a Consumer (London, 1833), 14, 24–5, italics in the original.

  100. Albert Tanner, Arbeitsame Patrioten, wohlanständige Dame
n: Bürgertum und Bürgerlichkeit in der Schweiz, 1830–1914 (Zurich, 1995), 284–92, 323–6; Moser quoted at 328.

  101. Tanner, Arbeitsame Patrioten, von Fischer quoted at 303, my translation.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. See now: Steve Pincus, ‘Addison’s Empire: Whig Conceptions of Empire in the Early 18th Century’, Parliamentary History 31, no. 1, 2012: 99–117. See also: Carl Wennerlind & Philip J. Stern, eds., Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire (Oxford, 2013).

  2. Peter M. Solar, ‘Opening to the East: Shipping between Europe and Asia, 1770–1830’, Journal of Economic History 73, no. 3, 2013: 625–61. For a visual illustration of the European empires’ changing trade routes between the 1750s and 1820s, drawing on a thousand ship logs, see the maps created by the EU CLIWOC project at: http://pendientedemigracion.ucm.es/info/cliwoc/Cliwoc_final_report.pdf.

  3. Pomeranz, Great Divergence; Parthasarathi, ‘The Great Divergence’; P. H. H. Vries, ‘Are Coal and Colonies Really Crucial?’ Journal of World History 12, 2001: 407–46; and Findlay & O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World Economy in the Second Millenium, 330–64.

  4. William T. Rowe, China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing (Cambridge, MA, 2009), ch. 6.

  5. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, ch. 11.

  6. There were tensions between the two in the 1830s–’40s. Even then, however, for many liberals, justice to Africa and free trade in Britain were symbiotic: poor Britons would have little sympathy for freed slaves if it meant their sugar was going to be more expensive to protect the West Indies. The sugar duty had to go. See Richard Huzzey, ‘Free Trade, Free Labour and Slave Sugar in Victorian Britain’, Historical Journal 53, no. 2, 2010: 359–79.

  7. Nick Draper, The Price of Emancipation (Cambridge, 2009).

  8. The differential impact of slavery and domestic service on consumption deserves more attention than it has received, or we can give it here. ‘Objectification’ should be understood as a general direction, a process rather than an accomplished fact. Speed and degree varied; captifs were widespread in Guinea into the twentieth century, and it was still common for children to be sold in China before 1949. Sombart rightly noted the process of objectification (Versachlichung) for early-modern Europe but exaggerated when he diagnosed it as the triumph of women (Sieg des Weibchen); Sombart, Luxus und Kapitalismus (Munich, 1912), 112. Their husbands simply invested themselves in other articles (wine, cigars, smoking jackets, horses, libraries, etc). Servants, of course, continued to be part of European middle-class households into the 1950s, but their role is different from that of client slaves. Servants in the twentieth century were mainly substitutes for washing machines and other labour-saving technologies. They were rarely liveried manifestations of status. Ultimately, they complemented and maintained a culture of things rather than distracting from it. For a detailed study of how control of people and wealth was translated into social rank and spiritual worth among the Igbo in Eastern Nigeria, see Jane I. Guyer, Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa (Chicago, 2004).