Abstract
For a decade or two, early modern consumption has been back on the scholarly agenda. In the slipstream of Werner Sombart, earlier work was mostly theoretical and highly Eurocentric in nature. In the mid-1990s the massive American project on ‘Culture and Consumption in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’ was a game-changer.2 As in almost all projects on the early modern West, however, the industrial revolution looms on the horizon. Hence, as a mere pre-history of the Great Divergence, most of the attention has focused on the experience of early modern Britain. During the past few years, Maxine Berg in particular has contributed significantly to a better understanding of early modern British consumption by emphatically bringing Asian agency into the story. Berg seeks to understand the contribution of Asia in the making of Europe on the basis of European consumption of Asian products. The project, Europe’s Asian Centuries, aimed not only to map but also understand the changing patterns of consumption in the context of a cross-cultural dialogue between Europe and Asia that intensified during the early modern period.3
For my part, in thirty years’ residence, I never could find out one single luxury of the East, so much talked of here, except sitting in an arm-chair, smoaking a hooka, drinking cool water and wearing clean linen.1
Joseph Price (1783)
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Notes
Cited in Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Edition, 1996), p. 424.
For details and some useful criticism, see Craig Clunas, ‘Modernity and Global and Local: Consumption and the Rise of the West’, The American Historical Review, 104 (1999), pp. 1497–1511.
Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Jan de Vries, ‘The Economic Crisis of the Seventeenth Century after Fifty Years’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 40.2 (Autumn, 2009), pp. 151–94.
Peter Kriedte, ‘Vom Grosshändler zum Detailliten. Der Handel mit “Kolonialwaren” im 17. Und 18. Jahrhundert’, Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftgeschichte (1994), pp. 21–4.
Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2008).
Jan de Vries, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution’, The Journal of Economic History, 54.2 (June 1994), pp. 249–70.
See for example Anne E.C. McCants, ‘Exotic Goods, Popular Consumption, and the Standard of Living: Thinking about Globalization in the Early Modern World’, Journal of World History, 18.4 (2007), pp. 433–62.
See the contributions of Frits Scholten and Mary de Jong in Ebeltje Hartkamp-Jonxis (ed.), Sits: Oost-west relaties in textiel (Zwolle: Waanders, 1987).
Heleen B. van der Weel, ‘In die kunst en wetenschap gebruyckt: Gerrit Claeszoon Clinck (1646–1693), meester kunstschilder van Delft en koopman in dienst van de Verenigde Indische Compagnie (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002).
Ebeltje Hartkamp-Jonxis (ed.), ‘Sits en katoendruk, handel en fabricage in Nederland’, in Hartkamp-Jonxis, Sits, pp. 31–41; Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Reillo, ‘East and West: Textiles and Fashion in Early Modern Europe’, Journal of Social History, 41.4 (2008), pp. 890–92.
J.J. Voskuil, ‘De verspreiding van koffie en thee in Nederland’, Volkskundig Bulletin, Vol. 14 (1988), pp. 68–92. For a more recent survey, see Anne E.C. McCants, ‘Poor Consumers as Global Consumers: The Diffusion of Tea and Coffee Drinking in the Eighteenth Century’, Economic History Review, 61.1 (2008), pp. 172–200.
Jan van Campen & Ebeltje Hartkamp-Jonxis, Aziatische Weelde: VOC-kunst in het Rijksmuseum (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2011), pp. 12–23; 69–80.
This builds heavily on Jan de Vries, ‘Luxury in the Dutch Golden Age in Theory and Practice’, in Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (eds), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 41–57.
John U. Nef, Cultural Foundations of Industrial Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958).
Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004; first published in 1991) and Timothy Brooke, The Confusion of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). See also the important work of Antonia Finnane: Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Changing Cloth in China (London: Hurst, 2007).
For example, Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
See Jos Gommans and Jitske Kuiper, ‘The Surat Castle Revolutions: Myths of Anglo-Bania Order and Dutch Neutrality, c. 1740–1760’, The Journal of Early Modern History, 10.4 (2006), pp. 361–90.
Jan Luiten van Zanden and Maarten Prak, ‘Towards an Economic Interpretation of Citizenship: The Dutch Republic between Medieval Communes and Modern Nation-States’, European Review of Economic History, 10 (2006), pp. 111–45.
Also based on Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s discussion, referring to the work of the 1970s of Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Peter Marshall, Michael Pearson and Ashin Das Gupta in the volume he edited: Merchants, Markets and the State in Early Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990): pp. 11–12.
Prasannan Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India 1720–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001), pp. 9–42.
K.N. Chaudhuri, ‘Some Reflections on the Town and Country in Mughal India’, Modern Asian Studies, 12.1 (1978), 77–96; André Wink, ‘From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean: Medieval History in Geographic Perspective’, Comparative Studies on Society and History, 44 (2002), pp. 416–45.
James Heitzman, The City in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 97. See also the process described in Frank Perlin, The Invisible City: Monetary, Administrative and Popular Infrastructures in Asia and Europe, 1500–1900 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1993), mainly applicable to the late eighteenth century.
For the Italian context, see Mark Jurdjevic, ‘Virtue, Commerce, and the Enduring Florentine Republican Moment: Reintegrating Italy into the Atlantic Republican Debate’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 62.2 (2001), pp. 721–43.
Based on Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, Vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible (London: Fontana Press, 1985), pp. 311–33.
Piet Emmer en Jos Gommans, Rijk aan de rand van wereld: De geschiedenis van Nederland overzee 1600–1800 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker 2012), pp. 103–20.
This argument mainly builds on Chris Bayly’s contributions in his Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 57–63, 144–51, and ‘The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society, 1700–1930)’, in: C.A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 172–210.
Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka Period Tamilnadu (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 80–82; 168
One way to proceed is suggested by the pioneering work of Rudi Matthee on Iran: The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Jean Law de Lauriston in his Mémoire sur quelques affaires de l’Empire mogul (1763), cited in Guy Deleury, Les Indes florissantes: Anthologie des voyageurs français (1750–1820) (Paris: Robert Laffont 1991), pp. 260–64.
Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin, The Wonders of Vilayet: Being the Memoir, originally in Persian of a Visit to France and Britain in 1765, translated by Kaisar Haq (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2001), p. 125.
Westward Bound: Travels of Mirza Abu Talib, edited by Mushirul Hasan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 113–14.
Om Prakash, ‘The Indian Maritime Merchant, 1500–1800’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 47.3 (2004), pp. 435–57.
For a recent illustration, see Stephen Markel and Tushara Bindu Gude (eds), India’s Fabled City: The Art of Courtly Lucknow (Munich: DelMonico Books — Prestel Verlag, 2011).
Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta, ‘The Early Modern Great Divergence: Wages, Prices and Economic Development in Europe and Asia, 1500–1800’, Economic History Review, 59.1 (2006), pp. 2–31.
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Gommans, J. (2015). For the Home and the Body: Dutch and Indian Ways of Early Modern Consumption. In: Berg, M., Gottmann, F., Hodacs, H., Nierstrasz, C. (eds) Goods from the East, 1600–1800. Europe’s Asian Centuries. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403940_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403940_21
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