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STOREP ANNUAL CONFERENCE. GAETA, 31 May – 2 June, 2013
HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH: DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO CONSUMPTION AND LEISURE
Title: Luxury Goods and Global Economic History 1600-1900
1. Luxury and Economic History: Paradoxes.
Luxury spending in recent decades has been closely associated with
globalization. But luxury spending has a long and deep history, and
one associated from very early periods with long-distance trade.
Luxury goods have always been of obvious significance to historians
of the prehistoric, ancient and medieval worlds. Andrew and Susan
Sherratt followed those mundane bronze age beakers that travelled in
the slipstream of the gold, silver and precious jewels that traversed
Eurasia in 2000 B.C.. But Immanuel Wallerstein dismissed these
luxury goods as mere preciosities on the route to modernization from
the early modern world, and few economic historians of the 18thC to
modern world give them any regard at all.
Indeed luxury has only periodically attracted the notice of economists.
Economic theory has traditionally regarded such goods as exceptions;
economic historians have followed in perceiving such goods as
relating only to the consumption of elites, and therefore not central to
their concerns. Donald Winch has commented that even the mass
consumer society which emerged in the later nineteenth and twentieth
centuries had little influence on the thinking of professional
economists. It did affect the dissidents and those of heterodox views;
Veblen, Ruskin, and Hobson introduced discussion of ‘conspicuous
consumption’, they discussed pathologies of consumption and ‘underconsumption’.
The key text stimulating this conference, Keynes’ Economic Possibilities for
our Grandchildren, in 1929, predicted that rising productivity meant that a
fifteen hour work week would suffice to provide most with their necessities and
most of the superfluities they desired. But goods in the meantime were
upgraded, quality differences extended, luxury branding developed, and new
products invented. This process responded to psychological and sociological
characteristics of status differentiation that made the demand for quality
universal and inexhaustible.
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Keynes ignored the creation of new and endlessly variable consumer goods that
would continue to motivate individuals to earn enough to afford them.
Consumption of material goods was also habit-forming. A consumer, excited by
a new product, once its possessor quickly became accustomed to it, and moved
on to aspire after the next thing. Consumer choice becomes the key marker of
social inclusion and exclusion. Aspirations are associated with luxury and
designer goods, with lifestyle choices of affluence and distinction.
Manufacturers brand their products, seeking to obscure homogeneity. They give
nearly every category of good they produce a premium brand; their products
signal distinction and the pursuit of status.
Recently the economist, A.K. Sen and the economic historian, Avner Offer have
addressed the relationship between consumption and well-being. Sen has put
forward the idea of adequacy rather than abundance in his concept of
‘capabilities and functionings’. Goods basic to well-being are those connected
to nutrition, living space, clean water, sanitation, education and health care.
Indeed the US with the highest income per head in the world scored fourteenth
on the Human Development index of 2008 which took into account these goods
of well-being. Both have argued that well-being requires social connection and
inter-personal regard. Well being is not about maximizing the short-term
arousal provided by maximum consumption, but about balancing consumption
to a level of optimal satisfaction. (Offer, ‘Consumption and Well-being’ in
Trentmann, Oxford Handbook on Consumption, pp. 658-660).
And yet luxury has become a new issue of the late twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, associated as it is with rising social and global inequalities, and
environmental destruction. This luxury spending in recent years has also
globalized. Many of those desirable and distinctive goods, from crafted fashion
textiles to tropical holidays, have been produced in poor parts of the world for
high-income earners in the West. New systems of ‘fast fashion’ rely on farflung sites of production. But new wealth generated in the rapid growth
trajectories of the last ten years in China, India, and South-East Asia has created
new groups of the super-rich and of aspirant middle classes. This current phase
of luxury spending is also a phase of critique, of retrenchment, and recycling in
face of environmental change, and of luxury taxes.
Luxury in the age of globalization bears close parallels to the later seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, leading into industrialization in Europe. Then too
luxury expenditure emerged in a global context. The East and Asia then had a
very specific place in Europe’s new luxuries; the populations of China, Japan,
India, South east Asia and Africa were then affected by factors of global
consumption and trade, just as current populations are. There is thus good
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reason why economists and economic historians should give it close
consideration.
My research has argued that the first phase of long-distance maritime trade from
Asia to Europe in tea, silk, cotton and porcelain transformed European
consumer and material cultures, in turn stimulating the product imitation and
innovation that led onto Europe’s own industrialization. Europe’s luxury was
about trade in fine goods with the wider world, and especially with Asia. My
focus is on the Asian provenance of those goods rather than on American
sourced colonial groceries: sugar, chocolate, coffee and tobacco in changing the
diets and food practices of Europeans. Asia’s luxury goods did more than this:
they changed the clothing, household domestic and display practices, and above
all, industries of Europe. The exotic in those luxury goods associated with longdistance sea voyages and East India Companies continued, for many Europeans,
to depict the meaning of Empire through the nineteenth century. Arindam Dutta
in his The Bureaucracy of Beauty has written ‘Economists may bristle, but
empire is about taste: gold, silver, spices, silk, tea, textiles, the view, furniture,
opium, coffee, bananas, paisley, arabesques....’
Eastern Luxuries
There is a long history connecting luxury with foreign imports, and this passed
into the mercantilist debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Ancient luxuries were associated with sociable settings for the display of
precious goods. The ancient Greek symposia displayed and used gold and silver
drinking vessels and wine craters. Wealthy merchants and elites in Renaissance
Italy conveyed their status through a taste in ancient oriental ceramics, imitated
in fine majolica and in silverware and glass.
But it was not just imports, but imports from the East that gave luxury its
particular caché in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Silk was
Europe’s classic ancient luxury import from China. The fabled Silk Route
conveyed all manner of luxury and other goods, but silk marked its identity with
exotic luxury.
Chinese silk continued to be imported into Europe throughout the early modern
period and the eighteenth century, though Italy had long become the major
producer for the West from the fifteenth century onwards. By the later
seventeenth century there were new imports of cotton calicoes and muslins, of
porcelain and lacquerware. These attained great popularity during the eighteenth
century, and were soon imported in large quantities by Europe’s East India
Companies and sold as decent, high-quality semi-luxuries available in a wide
range of patterns, styles, qualities, and prices.
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Asian models also stimulated Europeans to produce their own imitations in both
production processes, designs, and marketing strategies. For Asian luxury goods
were highly successful transmitters of technology, designs, and aesthetics. Such
goods transmitted cross-cultural characteristics across great distances. Porcelain
services replaced silver plate during the European and civil wars. In Islamic
lands they substituted for the gold and silver proscribed as materials for eating
vessels under Koranic traditions. Indian calicoes adapted to tastes for
chinoiserie, designs and markets adapted readily to an already established
fashion for Chinese art. Merchants placed orders for patterns picked out on a
white ground rather than the traditional Indian red or coloured backgrounds.
Lacquerware furnishings had a seductive appeal, especially the cabinets with
two doors enclosing a set of small (sometimes secret) drawers and a small
central cupboard, a suitable vessel for holding ornamental and exotic
collectables or secret and private correspondence and small or intimate
treasures.i
Luxury Debates
The celebrated luxury debates of the eighteenth century focussed on cities and
sexuality. Mandeville found a new cultural setting for luxury in populous cities
where most individuals were unknown to one another. David Hume celebrated
the ‘politeness’ that could develop in the enlarged public sphere of cities, and
Adam Smith found in new towns and cities the middling class markets for new
commodities created by industry and the division of labour. Markets for luxury
fuelled by the vanity, fashion and sexuality of women were also educated in the
senses and taste by women’s role in the civilizing process.
The Eastern provenance of these luxury goods also aroused the interest of
Europe’s savants, travellers, producers, and merchants. Enlightenment writers,
natural historians, and travellers investigated and recounted the customs and
manners of the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa, of China, India,
and South-East Asia, including the cultures of the courts, the transformation
during the early modern period of huge cities from Istanbul to Edo, and their
varied and highly sophisticated consumer cultures drawing on all the world’s
commodities.
European curiosity in these cultures extended to investigation of production
processes capable of supplying high domestic populations as well as extensive
wider world trade in high-quality goods. Luxury goods, often perceived at the
time as the master works of single craftsmen, were discovered to be the outputs
of large-scale production units organized with intense division of labour, such
as Jingdezhen, the porcelain city; or the composite products of a whole series of
tribal, religious, and caste communities, again highly specialized through an
intense division of labour. Yet the porcelain was harder and finer than any
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European substitutes; writers marvelled at muslins so delicate they could hardly
be seen, and cottons printed in unusual colour palettes with dyes unaccountably
fixed.
Acquiring Asian Goods
The discovery of and desire for Asia’s luxuries were not the same as their
possession. This required an enormous expansion in trade and distribution over
the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The rise of Europe’s
East India Companies, monopolies to be sure, but competing with each other
and considerably bolstered by significant private trade, brought more luxury
goods to Europe, made them accessible to broader groups of the wealthy elites,
and in Britain and the Netherlands to the middling and sometimes artisan
classes. Such luxuries became cheaper relative to staples, thus increasing the
relative incomes of the wealthy even as those of the poor declined.
The Asia-Europe trade considerably developed the institutions and organization
of international markets, and in the realms of economics, reduced transactions
costs over the period. The East India Companies functioned as early versions of
multinational corporations, both in developing markets for Asian luxury goods,
and in organizing supply and shipping. Merchants developed and adapted
designs in anticipation of European taste, and interacted in Asia with gobetweens, banyans and Hong merchants, using pattern books, textile swatches,
musters and models to transmit to the manufacturing communities on the
ground. They imported large quantities, judging quantities and markets on
information gathered at the quarterly East India Company auction sales.
Between 1500 and 1795 11,000 European ships set out for the Cape route to
Asia – 8,000 returned – some were wrecked, but many of these 3,000 stayed for
the intra-Asian trade. Tea, textiles, porcelain, lacquerware , furnishings, drugs
and dyestuffs made for a systematic global trade carried in quantities which by
the later eighteenth century came to 50,000 tons a year, as estimated by Jan de
Vries. This made for just over one pound of Asian goods per person for a
European population of roughly 100 million.
If we look to textiles and porcelain alone, we see the prodigious amounts of
these goods reaching Europe from the seventeenth century. Riello’s recent
estimates show 1.3 million pieces of cotton textiles reaching Europe by the late
1680s, and 24.3 million pieces over the period 1665-1799. 1
The indicators for porcelain are similar. The British alone imported
between 1 and 2 million pieces a year of Chinese porcelain by the early
eighteenth century. The Dutch imported 43 million pieces from the beginning
of the seventeenth century to the end of the 18th century. The English, French,
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Giorgio Riello, Cotton: the Fabric that Changed the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p.
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Danish and Swedish companies imported another 30 million pieces; in one year
1777-8 European ships unloaded 700 tons of porcelain.
A driving force in the extension of the China trade was the tea trade. Over the
later seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries tea imports increased
steadily, amplified over the period by smuggling. By the 1770s smuggling
dominated the tea trade; in 1783 legal tea in EIC warehouses was 5.9 millions
lbs. and in the same year 7-8 million lbs. were smuggled in. The Tea
Commutation Act reduced the duty from 119% to 12.5%, and legal tea in the
warehouses rose to 16.3 million lbs in 1785, and 21 million pounds by 1800-1.
We need also, however, to put the Asian trade in wider perspective. There
was steady decadal growth of c. 1% per annum up to the estimated figure of
50,000 tons in the late eighteenth century; the trade was growing faster than
Europe’s population, but not by a great deal. 50,000 tons could be fitted into
one of today’s container ships. We can compare this with Europe’s growing
trade with the New World – this grew at 2.2% per year, and the rise in the
number of slaves transported from Africa to the New World also grew by 2.1%
per annum.
But yet these Asian imports by the mid eighteenth century were by no means
marginal to the European economy. Jan de Vries estimates that another
measure, the cumulative value of British, French and Dutch imports from Asia
came to only 11.5% of their total aggregate imports. Imports from the Western
Hemisphere were c. 30% of total imports; by value Europe’s imports from the
Americas was nearly three times that from Asia.2 De Vries concludes that it is
likely that the greatest impact of this trade was to stimulate new European
consumer wants, and indeed it is striking that the growth of demand for almost
every Asian commodity generated the search and development of alternate
sources of supply outside Asia:
Total Value of Imports to Britain, France, and the Dutch Republic in the 1770s
(millions of guilders)3
Source of Imports
of Total Imports
Britain
W.Hemisphere
32.3
57.4
71.9
Asia
24.2
8.6
2
3
France
Jan de Vries, ‘The Limits of Globalization’, p. 728.
Ibid., p. 729.
Netherlands
22.4
20.0
Total %
151.7
52.8
11.2
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Total
151.1 171.1 147.4
This 50,000 tons had a wide impact on European consumers. European
consumption of non-European goods in the 1640s affected only the most elite
consumers, and consisted mainly of pepper, spices and exotica. By the 1780s
European households consumed annually non-European goods valued at 14-15
English shilling or 8 Dutch guilders per household for Europe’s c. 120 million.
Of course this consumption was highly unequal by region and class, but its
impact was high including reorganizing the structure and timing of meals,
drawing poor and rural householders to the shops that were the only source of
the goods, raising the utility of cash incomes, and providing a whole range of
new goods for import tariffs and excise taxes.
Wider Global Impact of the Asia trade
Historians are now becoming aware of wide impact of Asian-sourced luxury
goods on European consumption and even industrial structures. What is equally
important, however, is the wide global impact of this trade. It affected Spanish
America and China; India and Africa. As European trade with Ming and Qing
China expanded, commercialization brought new luxury expenditure among the
Chinese mercantile classes as well as the literati.
Private kilns in Jingdezhen expanded to provide not just the blue and white
export ware sold on world markets, but the diverse and high quality wares for
urban domestic markets. The Manila galleon which brought Spanish-American
silver into China’s domestic economy and fuelled her trade to the wider world
also brought Chinese luxury goods, porcelain and silks into Acapulco and
Manila to be traded not just on to Europe, but to the hinterlands of Spanish
America. This was a sophisticated trade in Chinese goods especially geared to
the elaborate and ornate consumer rituals of creole and Spanish cultures in
Mexico and other parts of Spanish America.
Equally, the European trade in Indian textiles was part of a wide Indian Ocean
trade that affected India, Africa and South East Asia as much as it did Europe.
The expansion of trade following on the East India Companies trade in the later
17th and early 18thC. suggest an impact in Bengal amounting to 40% of the
growth in the region’s economy in that period. Bengal by the later 17thC. was
India’s largest single manufacturing centre and entrepot for world trade; added
to it were major export economies on the Coromandel coast and
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Gujarat/Mahashtra. The Indian economy throughout this period of greatly
expanded trade with Europe was highly commercialized. Highly specialized
textile villages were fed and housed with goods from great distances. The raw
cotton woven by Bengal weavers was transported from Gujarat.
European trade in textiles also added to a substantial trade in Indian textiles to
East and West Africa, a trade marked by sumptuary codes, by luxury and by
rapid fashion changes. African consumer tastes dictated many varieties of
textiles in East-Central and South-East African markets. Such textiles bestowed
moral and social qualities; they were markers of high and low status. Indian
weavers, brokers and merchant networks in the interior of Gujarat were very
closely connected with the African consumers of their cloth. (Machedo, ‘Cloths
of a new Fashion’ in Riello and Roy). Fashions changed swiftly and were
negotiated between Gujarati Vaniya merchants and African middlemen .
If we turn back to the impact of this Eastern trade on Europe, we see its wide
effect on consumer cultures. The impact of the rapid growth of and considerable
extent of this trade in luxury goods from Asia to Europe between the later
seventeenth and later eighteenth century was to transform what Europeans
formerly perceived as exotic Eastern curios into quality commodities in a great
variety of designs and grades of fineness. The impact of that Asian luxury goods
trade was furthermore to provide the model for consumer markets in Europe for
quality goods that were not high luxuries for elites only.
Luxury and Consumption: the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
Luxury consumption in early modern Europe, as in the social and cultural life of
Asia, Africa, the Americas and the Pacific was constrained by sumptuary laws
and codes or customs. The sumptuary laws imposed by European governments
were directed to preventing public display above one’s social station. The use
and display of rare and precious objects, frequently acquired through longdistance trade were marks of elite status. But merchants and others acquiring
new wealth frequently clashed with local sumptuary structures. The laws grew
extensive in the later Middle Ages just as commerce expanded. Tensions
focused especially on the divide between indigenous and foreign goods; and
sumptuary laws became associated with protectionist economic regulation.
Injunctions centred on silk, furs, gold, silver and jewels, and exotic
commodities from India, China, and Persia.
It was impossible to stem the flow of these Eastern luxuries. By the beginning
of the seventeenth century in England sumptuary laws were a dead letter, the
Netherlands never had them, and while they held on in some other parts of
Europe they were increasingly difficult to enforce.ii
Fashion and Luxury
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Luxury goods encountered a new fashion dynamic by the later sixteenth
century. Silks, now manufactured, brocaded, and embroidered in Europe
‘became a disputed medium of style’; their ‘fashioning’ was still labourintensive.iii A closely approximate imitation arrived with the new wave of
Asian-European seaborne trade: printed and painted cotton calicoes. The fabrics
were light like silk, the colours vibrant, and the patterns and designs infinitely
variable. These new goods from the East shook the old framework of the
sumptuary dispute. Such goods came from afar, but they were not the rarities
represented by silk; their value and status from the start was ambiguous, and
they quickly moved to the forefront of new priorities over novelty and fashion.
By the eighteenth century fashion was part of the language of luxury. Fashion
dictated values. Fashion goods in turn drew on imitative impulses, product
innovation, and creative adaptation. The key goods which came to feature in the
consumer revolution, clothing and domestic items, were furthermore connected
to sociability: fashionable clothing; the glass, chinaware, and silver
accoutrements of the tea and dining table; the mirrors, ornamental ware, and
seating furniture of dining and drawing rooms. These reflected the rise of
middling groups and urban politeness.
States, markets and global export ware
The luxury goods imported from Asia brought to Europe a new knowledge of
an export ware sector. These goods introduced to Europe lessons of complexity
and of simplicity in product design and technology. Asia produced fine cottons,
silks, porcelain, and other fine goods for world markets, deploying complex
skills and adapting designs to capture the tastes of consumers from Malacca to
Cairo, and from Lisbon to Amsterdam. These products offered a new design
complexity that seemed readily adaptable to different cultures and fashions.
European producers came to match Indian and Chinese luxury by providing
other desirable characteristics: high output at affordable prices, variety and
novelty, rapid turnover, warehouse selling, precision, exactness and order.
Luxury now had an alternative, a high-quality cotton in a varied product mix
produced by machinery. Luxury and a global history of those goods from the
East, long neglected by economists and economic historians, thus played a key
role in the industrialization of the West.
Current Globalization
That shift from a world where Asia’s luxury products drove the search for
the technologies and industrial organization leading into the industrialization of
Europe and North America was followed by two centuries of Western
domination of world manufacture. The twenty-first century has seen a new
Asian ascendancy: Europe has lost those manufacturing catalysts of textiles,
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ceramics, and metal goods back to Asia. And the West, now facing the
manufacturing and technological challenge of China and the rising capacity of
India, is also experiencing new anxieties over its place in the world economy.
New issues of world recession have connected consumption and production in
ways hitherto unimagined. Luxury brands once rooted in Europe, for example
Wedgwood pottery, are now manufactured in distant parts of the world.
Consumption crises raise questions over the location of global manufacturing
and the fates of industrial workforces, as in the recent events in Bangladesh.
These issues of globalization have a deep history; issues of needs and wants, of
consumption and luxury were issues of global history which set the very origins
of European industrial and consumer revolutions.
.
i
Berg, Luxury and Pleasure, 51–6; Oliver Impey, Chinoiserie: The Impact of Oriental Styles
on Western Art and Decoration (Oxford: The Ashmolean, 1977), 20–6; Robert Finlay, ‘The
Pilgrim Art: the Culture of Porcelain in World History’, Journal of World History, 9 (1998),
141–89, 178–9; Giorgio Riello, ‘The Indian Apprenticeship: the Trade in Indian Textiles and
the making of European Cottons’, in Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy (eds.), How India
Clothed the World (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 309–47.
ii
Ibid., 891; see also Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions. A History of
Sumptuary Law (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996); N. B. Harte, ‘State Control of Dress’,
in D. C. Coleman and A. H. John (eds.), Trade, government and Economy in Pre-Industrial
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England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1976), 132–65; De Vries, The Industrious
Revolution, 46, 136.
iii
Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello, ‘East & West,’, 75–103.