A History of Global Consumption

1500 - 1800

Ina Baghdiantz McCabe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317652649
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In A History of Global Consumption: 1500 – 1800, Ina Baghdiantz McCabe examines the history of consumption throughout the early modern period using a combination of chronological and thematic discussion, taking a comprehensive and wide-reaching view of a subject that has long been on the historical agenda. The title explores the topic from the rise of the collector in Renaissance Europe to the birth of consumption as a political tool in the eighteenth century.

Beginning with an overview of the history of consumption and the major theorists, such as Bourdieu, Elias and Barthes, who have shaped its development as a field, Baghdiantz McCabe approaches the subject through a clear chronological framework. Supplemented by illlustrations in every chapter and ranging in scope from an analysis of the success of American commodities such as tobacco, sugar and chocolate in Europe and Asia to a discussion of the Dutch tulip mania, A History of Global Consumption: 1500 – 1800 is the perfect guide for all students interested in the social, cultural and economic history of the early modern period.

Figure 1.1 Christopher Columbus, Genoese explorer, discovering America, 12 May 1492 (1590). Artist: Theodor de Bry. © Print Collector/Getty Images.

1 Collecting the World

For you must know that all the spicery, and that cloths of silk and gold, and the other valuable wares that come from the interior, are brought to that city [Ayas]. And the merchants of Venice and Genoa, and other countries, come thither to sell their goods, and to buy what they lack.

Marco Polo¹

The spices, silk and gold described by Marco Polo in the thirteenth century marked the imagination of Europe’s merchants and explorers for centuries to come. The quest for rare goods and expensive spices was the object of cross-cultural exchanges and exploration since antiquity, but it became a global phenomenon after the fifteenth century. Until then Europe’s economy has been described as a “gift economy”. Both trade and gift giving were very important aspects of medieval culture. Gifts and gift-giving practices have been studied since the late 1950s, inspired by the work of the French sociologist Marcel Mauss. Under his influence, several scholars have argued that gift giving was a special form of transaction that took place for social prestige alone and not for material or tangible profit. The famous historian of medieval France, Georges Duby, pushed Mauss’ ideas even further by making a fundamental difference between gifts and trade. In his view, gifts were given and reciprocated because of social obligation. Other scholars have pushed this dichotomy even further by dividing medieval history into an earlier period, that of a “gift economy”, and a later period, that of a “profit economy”. In this view, in the early period, gifts were exchanged as an expression of power and social prestige without a specific calculated economic value. For Duby and his followers, society in the early Middle Ages was founded on networks that circulated the gifts of dependants to their political protectors, of magnates to kings, of kings to aristocrats and of the rich to the poor.² Although most of this book examines consumption during a “profit economy”, a brief examination of gift giving is in order, as the early collections of luxury goods and gift giving are entwined.

Travel Accounts, Letters and Gifts

Even though Marco Polo belonged to a trading family, his descriptions are also devoted to gifts. In his description of the court of the Mongols in China, the Venetian traveler Marco Polo wrote that the Mongol Great Han received gifts of more than 10,000 white horses of great beauty and price. He also describes that on the same day there was a procession of the Han’s elephants, 5,000 of them all draped in fine cloths embroidered with decorations of beasts and birds. According to Polo, each one of these elephants bore on its back two strong boxes filled with the Han’s plates and apparel for his white-robed court. Following the elephants came innumerable camels draped with cloths and laden with provisions for a courtly feast. Marco Polo described how the Han had organized thirteen feasts, one for each of the thirteen lunar months, attended by 12,000 barons who were his dependants. Polo continues to describe the treasures of the Han, such as gold belts and shoes of fine leather and precious embroidered robes. Starting with Polo’s travel account, Asia became the site of luxury in Europe’s imagination. Whether it was for gift giving or for trade, European merchants undertook long journeys to reach the objects, textiles and gems that would be displayed by the European elites.³

The port of Ayas in Little Armenia was Marco Polo’s port of departure and the hub of Mediterranean maritime trade at a time when the Mediterranean dominated the Oriental goods trade to Europe. If the fifteenth century marked a turning point as the discovery of the Americas permitted global exchanges for the first time, this exchange had longer Eurasian antecedents that prompted Columbus’s departure. When Columbus set out to find the road to India and China’s riches and accidentally “discovered” the Americas, the book he had read was Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century travels to China. A merchant by profession, Polo was made famous by his travel narrative to China. Few knew of a thriving community of Italian traders, merchants much like the Polo brothers, living in China by the mid fourteenth century. A 1342 tombstone of a young child, Katarina Villionis, carved in Latin, was discovered in the early twentieth century. It suggested the existence of children in a thriving foreign merchant community. The tombstone also bore the oldest surviving image of the Virgin Mary in China. Much of China’s medieval relationships with the West have been buried by centuries of scholarly neglect, making Marco Polo’s example seem exceptional.⁴

In 1288, China was about to become a destination of choice for the Franciscans. Among the friars, who walked to China, the best known are Giovanni dal Pian del Carpini (c.a. 1282–1252) and Guilloume de Roubrouck (1215–1270). The accounts of their travels, Carpini’s Ystoria mongalorum and Roubrouck’s Itinera, are early descriptions of the Mongol realm that became the basis for illustrated compendia of travel accounts that were popular objects for wealthy collectors in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Their firsthand accounts were circulating amongst the elite at a time when there was a diplomatic relationship between the ruling Mongol Khans in European accounts in their new capital of Beijing and the Pope in Rome. Therefore any notions of the medieval world as a closed and static society should be left behind; nevertheless until the Americas were part of the European itinerary, exchanges were simply Eurasian and not global.

An exchange of letters and gifts was an important part of diplomacy between Beijing and Rome; both sides persisted in this exchange for almost a century, even when cultural differences and languages were almost insurmountable barriers. Gifts were an important aspect of social relations among the elite and their collection was associated with status.⁵ Inventories of objects collected by the popes indicate that by 1295 there were one hundred exotic items identified as tartarico: silk, metal work and other precious objects of Mongol or Chinese origin. European merchants were usually the companions of choice for the traveling friars on the road to Beijing because they were experienced go-betweens. The language of commerce never lent itself to the nuances of spirituality and the local interpreters and merchants in Beijing never really had any interest or capacity to fully translate papal messages. The Mongols had similar problems communicating with the Franks, as the Europeans were called. A letter from Arghun Khan dated 1285 was written “in a Latin so barbarous” that it was almost untranslatable in the Vatican. In this difficult manner of exchange, objects and gifts had exceptional power.⁶

The China unified under the Mongol Kublai Khan in 1279 had suffered more than a century of domestic turmoil, but contacts were now a priority and gifts continued to be a major aspect of these contacts. Collecting rare objects was an important symbol of status for the European elites in medieval times. The Crusades had already brought in exotic spices, sugar and expensive textiles, the last of which became the most important marker of wealth. Most expensive among them was silk, and within the silks, the most precious was gold or silver embroidered brocade. Records indicate that Chinese silk and objects became part of the European elite’s collections as early as the thirteenth century.⁷

Peace after the Mongol conquest of a large part of Asia brought a new order that made these exchanges possible. In China, as in Europe, a new class of merchants, many of them foreign, became socially important. In China this was unprecedented and eliminated much of the power of the Chinese elite as the Mongols extended patronage to foreigners. The Chinese Song aristocracy had settled in the city of Hangzhou, which had become the artistic center of China. Kublai Khan overran the city of Hangzhou and abolished the traditional Confucian based rules of advancement within the government. He promoted foreigners or Mongols rather than the native Chinese. One of the first official acts of Kublai Khan after the fall of Hangzhou was to remove the imperial library, move it to his imperial capital of Beijing, and open it to viewing by artists. This imperial library was the repository of many objects of China’s long and rich cultural past; it contained writings, scrolls and antique paintings by venerated masters. Even if many artists withdrew from public life under the Mongols, as it has been argued, others accepted official positions at the library and the tradition of producing paintings and precious scrolls continued, as they were then allowed to draw inspiration from the finest examples of China’s past. A major change under Mongol rule was key: there were crowds of nouveau riche pouring into the new capital of Beijing to become patrons of the arts. This new elite was consuming the highest form of luxury goods: art objects. Under the Song dynasty, only imperial patronage had flourished but now a new artistic school burgeoned as merchants, foreign traders and city dwellers became patrons of the arts and profited from the new trading policies of the Mongols.⁸ Merchants had been very low in the social hierarchy of Chinese society but the new international trade, facilitated by the pax Mongolia, transformed the previous social hierarchy.

The study of the history of consumption examines the habits of this rising elite, composed of both wealthy merchants and well-established aristocrats, that was new to both China and Europe. The rise of merchants in international trade was at the basis of the creation of a “profit economy”. However, travel and cross-cultural contact were facilitated by this new world of exchange, although at first exchanges, mainly gifts, remained rare by modern standards. When Rabban Sauma, a Nestorian Christian envoy of the Arghun, arrived in Rome in 1287, he brought princely gifts for the Pope. After a journey of thirteen years, he arrived to the unfortunate news that Pope Honorius IV had just died and no successor had been chosen.⁹ After a long wait, Rabban Sauma’s diplomatic contact was Pope Nicholas IV who belonged to the Franciscan order. The new Pope was trained in Assisi, had diplomatic skills and a gift for languages. Nicholas IV had a taste for glowing mosaics and rich liturgical fittings that probably came from his sojourn in the rich Byzantine capital of Constantinople in the 1270s. Nicholas IV was to initiate a strong tradition of travel for his order; he sent missionaries to the Bulgarians, Ethiopians, Tatars, Chinese and Mongols.¹⁰

Travel was rarer in the other direction. The itinerary of Rabban Sauma from Beijing, the new Mongol capital, was daunting considering that he was a monk in his mid sixties when Arghun, Kublai Khan’s great nephew, ordered him to take the long journey to Rome. We know that Pope Nicholas IV sent Rabban Sauma home to Beijing richly laden with gifts and relics. Pope Nicholas’s generosity was legendary within his own order but the exact nature of Rabban Saumas’s reciprocal gifts can only be guessed. Inventories taken over the following years, after the visit of 1287, document the wealth of luxury items from Mongol-dominated China in the treasury of the Vatican and at Assisi. The first comprehensive inventory of papal treasures in 1295 had an entire rubric devoted to cloth from Tartary, nasij. Nasij is a brocaded silk embroidered with gold thread. This was a luxury item desired by the Mongols for both wearing and gift giving, so much so that they enslaved whole villages of Muslim weavers deported to northern China to produce this fine fabric. In Assisi the most important piece, a cloth to drape around the high altar, a dossale, was a spectacular piece of embroidered scarlet silk over twenty feet long. Lauren Arnold speculates that the silk dossale might have been one of the gifts brought to Rome by Rabban Sauma.¹¹ Precious oriental objects and textiles such as the dossale spoke to a vibrant medieval interchange of luxury goods, but collection of these exotic luxury items remained only possible for the very top of the elite within this traditional “gift economy”.¹²

Sartorial Splendor and Social Rank in the Sixteenth Century

Even if Thorstein Veblen used the term “conspicuous consumption” for the nineteenth century, it has been argued that consumption to display rank was already a familiar habit for the wealthy during the Renaissance. The self-promoting and propaganda value of appearance was not lost on the European elites. Some chose to dress to impress to enlarge their prestige. The influence of a royal house or lord was reflected not only by the clothing of the ruler but that of his retinue, who often wore the colors of the house in a livery. Initially because of sumptuary laws, silks and brocades were reserved in many societies for the nobility and for the high-ranking ecclesiastics. The merchant families in the Italian cities of Florence and Venice would be influential in having their merchant class participate in this forbidden sartorial splendor through wealth alone. The Medici, who eventually became bankers, had been involved in the cloth trade. Most of the heavy state dresses worn by Europe’s princes and lords were of exotic brocade, velvet and silk. They were trimmed with gold, silver and precious stones and could be obtained by the courts of Europe only through imports. Giorgio Riello argues that fashion in the Italian cities was greatly influenced by contact with these imports.¹³

The Ottoman markets were crucial to these imports. Silk was a major import during this period. Silk cloth was the central commodity consumed by elites in all of Eurasia. It was not this high quality cloth reserved for the elite that made the greatest share of the total European cloth trade. Ordinary cloth, broadcloth, dominated in terms of commercial value. Broadcloth was consumed by a larger group of people, mostly in Northern Europe. At this time, the production of broadcloth had been perfected in Flanders and England so that the buyer could have a reasonable idea of what quality to expect. These advantages help...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Collecting the World
• 2 American Gold: Sugar, Tobacco and Chocolate
• 3 Consuming the New World: Settlements and Transformation
• 4 Domesticating the Exotic: A Fashion for Coffee, Tea and Porcelain
• 5 Treasures from the East: Tulips and the Fashion for Asia’s Luxury Goods
• 6 Consumption as a Global Phenomenon: Colonial Dreams and Financial Bubbles in Europe, China’s Consumer Culture
• 7 Resisting Exotic Luxuries: Simplicity and Boycotts in the Age of Revolutions
• Bibliography
• Index