Concepts of Value in European Material Culture, 1500-1900

Bert De Munck, Dries Lyna

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317162391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

In contemporary society it would seem self-evident that people allow the market to determine the values of products and services. For everything from a loaf of bread to a work of art to a simple haircut, value is expressed in monetary terms and seen as determined primarily by the 'objective' interplay between supply and demand. Yet this 'price-mechanism' is itself embedded in conventions and frames of reference which differed according to time, place and product type. Moreover, the dominance of the conventions of utility maximising and calculative homo economicus is a relatively new phenomenon, and one which directly correlates to the steady advent of capitalism in early modern Europe. This volume brings together scholars with expertise in a variety of related fields, including economic history, the history of consumption and material culture, art history, and the history of collecting, to explore changing concepts of value from the early modern period to the nineteenth century and present a new view on the advent of modern economic practices. Jointly, they fundamentally challenge traditional historical narratives about the rise of our contemporary market economy and consumer society.

Chapter 1
Locating and Dislocating Value: A Pragmatic Approach to Early Modern and Nineteenth-Century Economic Practices*

Bert De Munck and Dries Lyna

Introduction: Value between Economy and Culture

How people attribute value to objects and actions is crucial for understanding not just economic practices but virtually all human behaviour. Hence, anthropologists, via the concept of value, explore the most fundamental attitudes towards artefacts and objects in a given society – such as when assessing the degree to which the circulation of objects should be framed within either a gift or an exchange economy.¹ Historians have an even more complicated relationship with value. It is now generally agreed that value has an economic and a cultural dimension in which the two elements are never entirely distinct; however, the classical political philosophers and historical sociologists, from Smith to Marx to Weber, each variously described a changing relationship between culture and economy in European history – a development in which culture was gradually becoming subordinate to market forces. Especially notable in this respect was Karl Polanyi, who regarded the emergence of capitalism as a process in which social relations eroded and the (European) economy became ‘disembedded’.²

Yet ever since Polanyi’s seminal work was published in 1944, historians and anthropologists have noted the persistent entanglement of markets on the one hand and culture and social institutions on the other. For example, historians studying gift exchange have drawn attention to the monetary and instrumental dimensions of gifts. In medieval towns gifts could be expressed in monetary terms, and such terms continue to serve a gift function in our own culture.³ Something similar applies to non-Western societies, where money could alter social relations and systems of meaning even as it was appropriated into systems of gift exchange.⁴ Moreover, Polanyi’s view is difficult to reconcile with the proliferation of institutions which, as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, support and shape economic practices rather literally.⁵ From the perspective of culture and systems of meaning, one could argue that, in advanced capitalism, markets are over-determined, that is, shaped by institutions and culture alike.⁶ Even for neo-classical economists, for whom value is reduced to utility or consumer preferences, culture has the final say – for the notorious ‘black box’ of preference or taste is largely a cultural category (otherwise, all consumer preferences would be reducible to biological needs).⁷ Hence, the challenge is still to understand how the relationship of social contexts, institutions and culture, on the one hand, and economic practices, on the other, transformed in the runup to the modern industrial and consumer society.

The aim of this book is to link economic practices to broader historical transformations from the late Middle Ages through the nineteenth century. A central problem for current research is academic specialization and the wide variety of sub-fields in which the relationship of economy and culture is addressed. While for classical economists the origin of value is ultimately found in (utilitarian) consumer preferences and determined via price mechanisms, anthropologists have pointed to social institutions and cultural systems of meaning as the ultimate source of (the perception of) value. Marxist scholars have situated value in the labour of producers, although in a market economy such value is again subsumed in market exchange.⁸ While the sheer range of approaches affords certain advantages, a dearth of cross-fertilization inhibits adequate understanding. For example, both labour historians and historians studying material culture confront the questions of classical historical sociology; however, because of their separate approaches, they fail to fully account for one of the main issues, namely, the role of labour and skills in the value of products.⁹ Likewise, because changing conceptions of visuality are examined apart from economic history and almost exclusively by art and science historians, our resultant understanding of the value of material culture, especially as it is displayed in houses, on the street and in shops, is likely to be inadequate.¹⁰ In order to surmount this problem, we have decided to tackle the issue of ‘value’ from a broad multi-dimensional perspective, in an attempt to, in a way, encircle it. As such, we will confront the issue of value head-on, at the point where it is still largely implicit in other historical research or, as in most current examinations, just beyond the historian’s focus.

Locating Value in Historical Literature: On Institutions and Material Culture

Economic historians now stress the interconnection of institutions (including families, clans, and social and religious networks and organisations of all sorts) and economic practice.¹¹ Whereas an earlier, Marxist perspective regarded institutions (from the family to the state) as parts of a hegemonic system intended to naturalize class differences and consolidate owners’ exploitation of capital, virtually all institutions (including guilds and even feudalism) are now recognized as embedding economic transactions.¹² Institutions, by binding the contracting partners socially and culturally or by functioning as a type of third party, serve to ensure that contracts will be honoured and hence stimulate actors to engage in transactions in the first place. Moreover, institutions are said to have the capacity to resolve information asymmetries. As one party (usually the buyer, but sometimes also the seller, particularly in cases of assurances and the like) is likely to hold less information about product quality than does the other, the former will either refrain from buying or be willing to pay only a relatively low price. In this context, instruments such as hallmarks and certificates – and their related rules and regulations – help to provide information about quality, and therefore generate trust.¹³

This perspective has obviously opened a range of relevant research questions. For example, historians and archaeologists have examined how marks, brands and other signs affixed to products resolved problems of information asymmetry. As such investigations have shown, these processes are especially related to the socio-cultural context of production and distribution, and to the meanings attached to human and social qualities.¹⁴ Yet this has hardly resulted in a more effective understanding of value. Indeed, the idea of ‘providing information on product quality’ is based on the assumption that product quality is an inherent or objective quality of a product. It presupposes that product quality is ‘out there’, ontologically independent and external to the instruments rendering the information in question.

The issue of value has been more straightforwardly addressed by historians investigating material culture and consumer preferences. Such research has tended to lean somewhat uncritically on one-dimensional sociological concepts like ‘emulation’, ‘conspicuous consumption’ (Thorstein Veblen) and ‘distinction’ (Pierre Bourdieu).¹⁵ These concepts have the merit of having helped generate a wealth of information about the material culture of historical groups, yet the underlying (if often implicit) framework that they present is that of an overly simple shift: one from a situation in which material culture consolidates and reproduces the status quo of a society of orders, to a situation in which material culture, through innovation and fashion, helps dislodge these same orders.¹⁶ Economic historian Jan De Vries has described this shift as one from ‘old’ to ‘new luxuries’, situating it in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century urban centres in northwest Europe, where the widespread availability of cheaper ‘new’ luxuries such as porcelain, decorative silverwork, paintings and populuxe goods stood out.¹⁷ For De Vries, this is related to changes in the allocation of labour (the so-called ‘industrious revolution’) and both labour and consumption increasingly being located outside the home, but as soon as an anthropological perspective is included, the long-term trend is often considered a shift from patronage and a gift economy to commodity exchange.

Moreover, historical literature on material culture largely reduces value to a semiotic problem. Although a more straightforward focus on objects and materiality has recently developed – such as in emphasizing the shifting perceptions of luxury or the increasing importance of comfort and ‘sense value’¹⁸ – the shifting value of different types of materiality has not been directly addressed. The cultural turn, and post-structuralism in particular, has instead induced an approach in which objects are regarded as ‘signs’ and value is generally synonymous with meaning.¹⁹ The value of a product is thus considered to be dependent upon its position amidst a range of products, that is, the result of its place in a differential system of signs. Value itself, however, is attributed by subjects who are themselves subject to culture, that is, a system of meaning external to the object in question.

Either way, historical approaches risk constructing teleological views. While institutions are seen as having helped bridge the gap between ‘natural’ price or value (as something inherent and already there) and the actual price (which, in the absence of reliable institutions, would be too high), buyers are depicted as customers who gradually become emancipated from a society of orders. In current literature, consumption is connected either to the act of creating an individual or collective identity or to the modern pursuit of comfort, pleasure, intimacy and the like.²⁰ Consequently, it is as if the natural correspondence between supply and demand finally emerged in the early modern period. In the meantime, the changing relationship of producers to their products has hardly appeared on the historical agenda. Historians have abundantly examined processes of proletarianization,²¹ yet late medieval and early modern products continue to be regarded as having been already entirely commodified, stripped of possible gift-like dimensions and religious connotations. In the same vein, money is generally considered to have functioned as a neutral medium for the creation of equivalencies and for making products commensurate, rather than as an unstable, shifting category within the field of tensions between a precious type of possession, a debt relation and its abstract value.²²

Studies of one product category in particular have challenged this paradigm of continuing product commodification and externalization of value during the early modern period. Whereas historical literature from the 1980s onwards increasingly reoriented towards the consumption of goods, art historians – and by extension social and economic historians analysing the art market – expanded upon their pre-existing interests in the sphere of production, and, more specifically, in the complex and dynamic interplay between artists and society, on the one hand, and the intrinsic relationship between artists and their works of art, on the other.²³ Often inspired by interdisciplinary research methods that became en vogue in recent decades, this literature not only contextualized artistic value in relationship to market forces and fluctuating modes of art consumption, but also incorporated the social, cultural and economic contexts in which artists functioned.²⁴ Although diverse in historical and geographical scope, these assessments share an underlying paradigm of artistic emancipation, an idea born in Renaissance Italy and further developed in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century France and the Low Countries. According to this paradigm, over the course of the early modern period, artists gradually became emancipated from their artisanal backgrounds; painters in particular strove to distinguish themselves from ‘mechanica...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• The History of Retailing and Consumption General Editor's Preface
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Locating and Dislocating Value: A Pragmatic Approach to Early Modern and Nineteenth-Century Economic Practices
• Part I Expanding Markets and Market Devices
• Part II Conventions, Material Culture and Institutions
• Part III The Old and the New
• Index