ABSTRACT
The world is a big place. Our knowledge of the material lives of its inhabitants is patchy and fragmented. This is, perhaps, no more apparent than in our highly uneven understanding of consumption in different cultures in the new era of globalization that followed on the age of exploration five centuries ago.While we know in fine detail the precise number of porcelain cups, knives and forks, books, furniture and gowns owned by merchants, lawyers, and even some artisans in eighteenth-century England and Spain (Brewer and Porter 1993;Weatherill 1996; Torras andYun 1999) we know virtually nothing about the possession let alone use of things by hundreds of millions of Chinese people in the same period, other than estimates of their overall standard of living (Pomeranz 2005).Yet, our historical understanding has suffered as much from an excess of knowledge as from its deficit. As scholarship on particular areas and problems has deepened, new divides have opened up, between periods, disciplines, and indeed about the very stuff of consumption. Three projects currently co-exist that are characterized by different vantage points, global
goods, and moralities. First, for the seventeenth and eighteenth century, a fresh interest in the global history of consumption has reintegrated the Indian Ocean and China into a history of material culture previously monopolized by Britain and Holland. The career of Indian cottons is symbolic of this more interactive understanding of the entanglement between East andWest. If we fast forward to the twentieth century, it is as if the world has shrunk. Historical
accounts are overwhelmingly of individual nations, cities, even districts and particular shops; comparative studies are few and far between (Haupt 2002; Capuzzo 2006).With some notable exceptions (Burke 1996), the central axis for transnational flows in this second group is that between the United States and Europe, the story of an “Irresistible Empire:America’s Advance through 20th-century Europe” (de Grazia 2005), symbolized by Hollywood and the supermarket. Whereas recent accounts of the eighteenth century emphasize mutual entanglements – with Britain as much in the role of follower as leader – the multi-directional flow of consumer cultures, and dispersed centres of technologies and creativity, the Americanization story remains overwhelmingly a one-way street. A third narrative is that of consumerism as a new lifestyle, the defining mode of
contemporary society where consumption is crucial for self-fashioning and lifestyle, the actualization of the self, and the rise of a consumer-citizen.While it has been connected to competing social theories (late modernity, postmodernity, liquid society, governmentality), this story remains the shared orthodoxy for most in the social science community today (Giddens 1991; Baudrillard 1970/98; Featherstone 1991; Bauman 2007; Miller and Rose 1997). This literature presumes a sharp break between contemporary consumer society and earlier histories. With a few notable exceptions (Fine 2002; Sassatelli 2004), the past is primarily held up as a stylized model of standardized mass production and class cultures in contrast to more fluid, reflexive contemporary consumer culture. Americanization and global consumerism are not necessarily the same; anthropologists and
geographers in particular have emphasized how local cultures play an active role in shaping the global (Wilk 2006;Miller 1995b;Watson 1997;Massey 1994). Still, rather than tracing hybridity or glocalization, the few historians who have linked past and present directly have tended to do so via a stage model where Americanization launches an unsustainable global consumerism based on fossil fuel, cars, and an addiction to shopping (Mazlish 2005; Stearns 1997; 2001). Consumerism, in this view, is characterized by “unlimited material desire,” no longer balanced by other values (Mazlish 2005: 132). Consumerism has tended to be upheld as an ideal type, even historical telos, associated with Western excess and selfish materialism, against which all kinds of other commercial cultures are judged. The problem is that consumerism is a slippery,morally charged category rather than a tight,
historically helpful term of analysis. It rose to prominence during the ColdWar and expressed the anxieties of observers about the pathologies of consumer society rather than the realities of how people lived their lives in affluent societies. Various scholars have cautioned against the arbitrary and moralistic portrayal of consumerism, stressing instead the ongoing centrality of family, sociality, routines, and politics (Douglas and Isherwood 1996;Miller 2001; Gronow and Warde 2001; Soper and Trentmann 2007). But it is this “consumerist” approach that is amongst the very few treatments of the subject that has made it into global history readers and surveys and continues to inform public commentary, a fact worth recognizing at the outset of our inquiry. One reason for this mismatch lies in the continuing gulf between different disciplines. Where many social scientists continue to invoke a model of modern mass society that no longer commands consent amongst historians, historians of twentieth-century globalization now run the risk of working with a model of “consumerism” that many anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers have similarly discarded. Genuine multidisciplinary work remains the exception (Appadurai 1986; Miller 1995a; Brewer and Trentmann 2006). These approaches to consumption express more general differences about the genealogy of
modernity and about the practice of history itself. The recent turn to a global history of consumption in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been part of a more general effort to move beyond Eurocentric narratives of modernity. European modernity was not the sui generis result of a unique meeting of scientific mentality and the rule of law (Weber). Nor was it primarily the product of capitalist exploitation of other lands (Marx). Rather it was a transnational achievement that mobilized non-European knowledge, goods, technology, labour, and resources – some of it through trade (such as Indian textiles), some of it through coercion (slave plantations) (Berg 2004b; Pomeranz 2000). By contrast, the interest in Americanization and its twin “global consumerism” continues to treat the United States as origin and centre. It is a self-critical inversion of the “Rise of theWest”, which replaces the positive telos of liberty, law, and commerce with a negative one of unbounded materialism. Decentring the Anglo-American story of consumer society has implications well beyond
the eighteenth century. It raises questions about the “modern” qualities of consumption, its
origins, dynamics, and consequences, with implications for the geographic distribution of agency, ethics, and political responsibility. If many regions and traditions have shaped the world of goods, it may be too simple to view “consumerism” as an alien import or to focus on the ethical responsibility of affluent consumers in the North. This chapter, then, is an invitation to cross several divides at once: between East andWest,
between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, and between history and the social sciences. In their seminal essay,Glennie and Thrift already challenged the association between“modern” consumer society and industrialized mass-production, drawing on research on urbanization and the slow, piecemeal nature of industrialization in eighteenth-century Britain. Consumption, they pointed out, expanded in an artisanal setting, driven by people’s need to communicate identities in increasingly complex urban environments, rather than by emulation (Glennie and Thrift 1992). This essay adds a global dimension to the critique of the “modern” model, and its intellectual twin, late modern consumer culture. I want to place the parallel narratives of global consumption alongside each other to show how new research on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries further undermines the conventional link between consumer society, modernity, and industrial mass production. Far from being new, signs of late modern consumerism, creolization, self-fashioning, and diversity were already integral to this earlier global moment. This, in turn, raises questions about the role assigned to markets, commodification and individual choice in the spread of consumption, relative to the role of empire, social networks, and politics.
