History of Consumption

Pauper inventories were made by poor law officials to record the possessions that people on poor relief owned. These inventories have been known to exist for decades, yet they are notoriously difficult to find and have been under-utilised by generations of historians.

For the first time, this book contains transcriptions of 230 pauper inventories from Norfolk. The sources are fully contextualised and indexed, alongside four comprehensive chapters which outline the source's importance and usefulness to readers. Pauper inventories are powerful documents which reveal new insights into the living conditions of the destitute and show that being poor did not necessarily equate to owning very little. The sources will be of use to economic, social and cultural historians who study a wide range of topics including consumption, material culture, production, everyday life, poverty and welfare.

The attached PDF shows the reader examples of these pauper inventories.

Vom Heimwerken bis zum Kuchenbacken: Warum stellen viele Menschen selbst her, was sie auch kaufen könnten? Der Blick auf Praktiken des Selbermachens eröffnet eine ganz neue Perspektive auf die Konsumgeschichte. Diese historische Studie (1880-1990) zeigt Selbermachen als Praxis, als großen Markt und als »moral economy«, in der Versorgungsfragen an Vorstellungen über richtiges und falsches Handeln, Identitäten und Rollenbilder gekoppelt waren. So wird sichtbar, wie sehr gesellschaftliche und wirtschaftliche Ordnung von der Frage geprägt sind: Selbermachen oder Kaufen?

本書透過蘇州的菜館、茶館、旅館，與煙館等四種休閑行業的研究，呈現淪陷時期蘇州「畸形繁榮」的城市生活，翻轉過去對抗戰時期淪陷區城市經濟凋敝、工商與金融萎縮、城市建設遭受破壞嚴重等既定印象。蘇州此現象從社會結構的變遷與社會心理的角度來解釋，在於淪陷後成為偽政權轄下的江蘇省省會，吸納大量的流動人口，特別是公務員與來自上海、紹興的群體，再加上當時普遍瀰漫對未來的不確定感與逃避現實的心理，帶動蘇州的休閑產業的消費。但其社會的另一面，卻是謀生不易、自殺率增高、暴力充斥、勞資糾紛持續、物化女性，以及貧富兩極化等現象。再由下而上的角度，來重新評估偽政權的性質，蘇州例子顯示偽政權的統治較諸戰前更深入城市生活中，包括實施保甲制與通行管制之外，還有嚴格控管城市衛生、公共休閒空間，以及調控市場物價與實施消費配給等。而休閑產業者為了生存，在日常生活中，透過消極不配合以及黑市與茶會等管道，反抗政府的各種剝削與管制政策。淪陷時期的蘇州正體現了歷史上戰爭影響城市的另一種型態，筆者稱之為「戰爭下的繁榮城市」。

Wu Jen-shu, “Heaven” after the Catastrophe: Urban Life in Suzhou under Japanese Occupation. Taipei: National Taiwan University Press, 2017.

Using local newspapers, travel guide books, dairies, travel logs, oral history and archival documents, this study depicts the leisure life of Suzhou after the city was occupied by the Japanese during the Sino-Japanese War in 1937–1945, and reveals a complicated picture of the urban life in occupied Suzhou, with a focus on four leisure industries, tea houses, restaurants, hotels, and opium dens. As demonstrated by these four industries, the leisure life in Suzhou was far from being sluggish under the Wang Jingwei regime, but had been blossoming once the social order was recovered. This work shows that the change of the social structure and wartime social mentality were the main factors for “Suzhou splendor”. After Suzhou was made the capital of Jiangsu province under the puppet regime, the influx of war refugees and civil servants serving the new regime contributed greatly to the leisure industry. Furthermore, the carpe diem spirit that prevailed during the wartime was another major reason for the blooming of the consumer culture. While mainly focusing on the abnormally bustling leisure industry, this book depicts a more complicated picture of Suzhou’s urban life: the subsistence living the vast majority facing, high suicide rate, prevailing social violence, frequent conflicts between the employers and employees, objectified women, and the widening gap between the rich and the poor. This book also examines the relations between state and society in Suzhou under the Wang Jingwei puppet regime. From a bottom up approach, this study finds that the penetration of the puppet regime was deeper than that of the previous governments. Many aspects demonstrate the tighter grip of the puppet state on the society, such as the neighbourhood administrative system (pao-chia) and travel bans, strict control on urban hygiene and public leisure space, market price regulation and consumption ration system. Under the dominance of the state, owners of the leisure industry had been adopting several measures to resist the controls imposed by the state. Such measures include passive cooperation, black market trade, and Teahouse Trade Association, to serve as what James Scott called the “weapons of the weak.”
This monograph makes good contribution to the history of consumption as well as studies of China during the occupation period. Currently research on occupied China has been focusing mainly on Shanghai, whereas the author channels our attention to Suzhou. While the collective memory of the cities under Japanese occupation has been dominated by the massive war atrocities such as “the rape of Nanjing,” this study uses Suzhou as a case study to echo the new scholarship on the multi-layered effects the War had on Chinese cities.

Today, we mostly talk about food in the negative. How did it happen that food, contrary to its physiological function, is perceived as a threat to health and non-eating a salvation? Nutrition and diet saw a revolutionary change in the late nineteenth century. Historians have, however, not paid much attention to the fact that this change has had a significant impact on non-eating practices. Since 1850, the availability of food has improved to such an extent that non-eating has been able to acquire a socio-cultural function that went beyond religious fasting and food taboos. As a result, societies began to organise themselves on the basis of non-eating. This collection of essays makes a case for studying practices of non-eating in the modern age as palpable yardsticks for social order. The different forms of food avoidance being discussed in this special issue shed light on aspects of self-responsibility, public regulation and construction of meaning for individuals and communities at large, and thus allow historians to decipher and examine processes of change in societies.

This article examines Barbara Johnson's Album, a prolific record of the dress consumption of a vicar's daughter. The album contains over a hundred samples of dress fabrics acquired by Johnson between the ages of eight and eighty-five. Interrogated alongside the Johnson family correspondence and didactic tools produced by Johnson's mother, this article argues that the album acted as a material form of account book, conceived as a moral, financial and material regulator. Considered within the emerging framework of material knowledge and consumer skill, the album provides important evidence of how consumers maintained and developed their material literacy.

Abstract | This article analyses the continuity and importance of the textiles of pre-Hispanic origin in the economic colonial order of the Central Andes of the New Kingdom of Granada during the XVI and XVII centuries. Through the study of the official documentation that accounts for the link of cotton mantas to the colonial tax system, the trade and the exchange values are examined. First, we analyse hints of the volume of mantas delivered by the indigenous groups as a tribute in species, which allows us to observe the flexibility of the fiscal system characterized by the negotiation, the non-fulfillment of the official rates and the protection of the interests of the different actors involved. Second, we establish who were some of the final consumers of the product and what conditions surrounded the trade and transportation of the textiles. Finally, we show the types of exchanges that involved the cotton mantas, and the values these acquired in the local and regional markets. These three thematic axes show the active and relevant presence of the indigenous textile manufacturing in the local, provincial and inter-provincial context, as well as the network of political, economic and commercial relations that stimulated this productive activity during this colonial period.

Resumen | Este artículo analiza la continuidad e importancia de los textiles de origen prehispánico en el orden económico colonial de los Andes centrales neogranadinos durante los siglos XVI y XVII. A través del estudio de la documentación oficial que da cuenta de su vinculación al sistema tributario colonial, el comercio y sus valores de intercambio se examinan, primero, indicios sobre el volumen de mantas entregadas por los grupos indígenas como tributo en especie lo que permite observar la flexibilidad del sistema fiscal caracterizado por la negociación, el incumplimiento de las tasas oficiales y la protección de los intereses de los distintos actores involucrados. En segundo lugar, se establece quienes eran algunos de los consumidores finales del producto y las condiciones alrededor del comercio y transporte de los textiles. Finalmente, se exponen los tipos de intercambios que involucraron a las mantas de algodón y los valores que estas adquirieron en los mercados locales y regionales. A partir de estos tres ejes temáticos se muestra la activa y relevante presencia de la manufactura textil indígena en el contexto local, provincial e interprovincial, así como el entramado de relaciones políticas, económicas y comerciales que dinamizaron esta actividad productiva durante el periodo abordado.

As key players in the transatlantic slave trade, the monarchies of Hueda and Dahomey (in modern-day southern Benin) connected themselves to global commodity flows. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, imported merchandise fueled practices of conspicuous consumption and ritualized largesse, the performance of which was pivotal in consolidating their rulers’ power. Focusing on specific items (tobacco, porcelain) and behavioral practices (smoking, spitting), this article examines how these goods were materially and symbolically integrated into courtly culture and associated with the religious beliefs and ritual practices of Vodun. In order to track recurring aspects of courtly scenography, to compare the signification of bodily practices in different parts of the world, and to identify material links engendered by global trade, it combines microhistorical investigation based on written records with archaeological findings, anthropological observations, and the analysis of visual sources and sculptural artifacts. The essay argues that royal palaces constituted crucial laboratories of aesthetic change and new cultures of elite consumption. In this process, exogenous elements not only enriched the material culture of the palaces, celebrating the monarchs’ global splendor; they were also charged with new meanings that inscribed foreign goods and related practices into specifically regional cultural codes.

Historia Crítica, journal of the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), announces a call for papers for a thematic issue on "The cost of living: Knowledges, practices, experiences, and conflicts." We are happy to announce that Eduardo Elena, professor at the University of Miami (United States), will serve as guest editor for this issue. Articles will be received between February 15 and April 15, 2022.

I distinguished four main chronologically overlapping stages in carpet mobility dynamics. At the first stage, a growing number of rugs were imported to Poland-Lithuania from the markets of Istanbul and Edirne. Its golden age lasted from the 1560s to the 1650s. The scale of the carpet import was so significant that the Diet (Sejm) included Persian and Ottoman carpets in the "Regulation of sale prices" (1620, 1633).
At the second stage, the fashionable types of carpets were commissioned to merchants who visited particular places in Asia Minor to buy carpets directly from the producers. At this stage, the consumers’ demand influenced production – some sorts of carpets, some motifs and colors were in higher demand in Poland-Lithuania than others were. Therefore, producers tried to meet the tastes of the growing Polish market. On the other hand, Ottoman authorities found it necessary to regulate the carpet trade with the infidels (1610). Consequently, many prayer rugs produced for export were woven without recognizable Islamic symbols – lamp, Kaaba and Islamic calligraphy. In this way, the carpet producers met both the market demand and the state religious regulations.
At the third stage, the consumers – kings, noblemen, and bishops – commissioned carpets bearing their coat-of-arms. The upper classes looked for something more exclusive and personalized in order to demonstrate their superior status through exclusive access to luxury. Nothing of this kind ever happened in Russia, nor in the very countries where carpets were woven – the Ottoman Empire and Persia. The spread of vogue for carpets bearing a coat-of-arms reflects a particular political model in Poland-Lithuania and the “golden liberties” the nobility enjoyed there. At this stage, the merchants had established direct contacts with carpet workshops in the Ottoman Empire as well as in Persia.
Finally, carpets were produced in the manufactories established by some dignitaries in their domains in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some artisans were invited from the Middle East to initiate and manage the production process.
Therefore, the vogue for oriental carpets led to the mobility not only of goods, but also of ideas, techniques, and artisans. Moreover, this mobility was not unilateral but bilateral, since Polish consumer taste helped to introduce new elements into oriental carpet weaving.

Estudio de las imágenes, tanto laicas como sobre todo religiosas que, a partir del último cuarto del siglo XIV, comenzaron a llenar las casas valencianas, prestando especial atención a su naturaleza, uso, procedencia y distribución por el interior de los hogares, con un carácter marcadamente social.

Saray helvahanesine ve burada üretilen ürünlere yönelik bilgilerimiz nispeten yeterli olmakla birlikte İstanbul’daki helvacı esnafının örgütlenmesi, sayıları, üretim sürecinde kullandıkları malzemeler, şehir halkının helvacı dükkânlarında veya pazarlarda bulabildikleri ve sıklıkla tercih ettikleri helvalar hususundaki malumatımız yetersiz ve oldukça karışıktır. Bu bildiride, İstanbul ve Üsküdar’a ait şeriyye sicilleri ile ahkâm defterlerinden bu esnaf örgütünün yapısı ve ürettikleri ürünlerin ortaya konulması hedeflenmektedir. Sunumda ayrıca, daha önce helvacıların yamağı pozisyonunda olan kurabiyecilerle helvacılar arasında yaşanan sorunlar da ele alınacaktır. Osmanlılar zamanında doğum ve ölümler yanında, mübarek gün ve gecelerde ikramı gelenekselleşen ve helva sohbetleriyle sosyalleşmenin ve kültürel paylaşımın bir aracı hâline gelen helvanın sarayda çok sayıda çeşidi tüketilirken başkentlilerin özellikle üç çeşit helvayı ağırlıklı olarak tercih ettikleri görülmektedir. Bunlar tahin, ceviz/koz ve susam helvalarıdır. Bununla birlikte İstanbul ve Bilâd-ı Selâse’de 98 dükkânda hizmet veren helvacı esnafının ürettiği helvalar bunlarla sınırlı değildir ve ayrıca hem helvacılar hem de yamakları baklava, kurabiye ve revani gibi tatlılarla da şehir halkına hizmet sunmaktaydılar.

A household account book of Maria de Luna, queen of Aragon, dated 1403, serves as a guide to her everyday life and especially her diet. Its contents give us details that normally go unnoticed, about the court, the quantities and qualities of their foods, the means of preparing them, and the spectacle of the queen and her courtiers at table. The peripatetic nature of the queen’s household brought her to different towns in the interior of the kingdom of Valencia, and the document provides important – and rare – evidence of the impact of the court on these small markets, and the strategies for providing foods of the highest quality to meet the demands of the queen. The household is compared with others of similar rank in the Iberian Peninsula and nearby.

Stimulated by wide-ranging theories on its cultural and economic significance, the history of early modern consumption in the Low Countries has received a remarkable amount of attention in historiography during the last three decades. During this period the growing body of empirical evidence, as well as shifting theoretical frameworks, have gradually altered our understanding of early modern patterns of consumption, their causes and consequences. The current article presents a review of the main tendencies in the field of early modern consumption history, and the challenges to this historiographical field these have presented. Based on these challenges, the article suggests new avenues for future research.

Studies of the trade between the Atlantic World and Asia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries typically focus on the exchanges between Atlantic European countries – especially Portugal, the Netherlands and England – and Asia across the Cape route. In The Atlantic World and the Manila Galleons. Circulation, Market, and Consumption of Asian Goods in the Spanish Empire, 1565-1650, José L. Gasch-Tomás offers a new approach to understanding the connections between the Atlantic World and Asia. By drawing attention to the trans-Pacific trade between the Americas and the Philippines, the re-exportation of Asian goods from New Spain to Castile, and the consumption of Chinese silk, Chinese porcelain and Japanese furnishings in New Spain and Seville, this book discloses how New Spanish cities and elites were main components of the spread of taste for Asian goods in the Spanish Empire. This book reveals how New Spanish family and commercial networks channelled the market formation of Asian goods in the Atlantic World around 1600.

In this thesis, I argue that the perception of exoticness regarding things brought into Europe from overseas is a historical construction concurrent with the arrival of items at the ports of Lisbon and Seville. I claim that it is necessary to go beyond the exoticness attributed to these goods in order to understand the consumption practises in early modern Iberia. For that purpose, this thesis offers a methodology on how to investigate consumption. It takes into consideration the historical complexity of the moment of interaction between a consumer and a thing. In other words, the main aim of my dissertation is to explain the entanglement between the driving forces that lead to consumption and the mechanisms for accessing non-European goods.

This paper uses evidence from German-speaking central Europe to address open questions about the Consumer and Industrious Revolutions. Did they happen outside the early-developing, North Atlantic economies? Were they shaped by the “social capital” of traditional institutions? How were they affected by social constraints on women? It finds that people in central Europe did desire to increase market work and consumption. But elites used the “social capital” of traditional institutions to oppose new work and consumption practices, especially by women, migrants, and the poor. Although they seldom blocked new practices wholly, they delayed them, limited them socially, and increased their costs.

Download the open access version from the publisher's website:
https://www.wallstein-verlag.de/9783835336469-peter-paul-baenziger-die-moderne-als-erlebnis.html

Fun and diversion instead of industriousness and moderation: How people rearranged work and leisure around 1900.

In the decades around 1900, the everyday life of large parts of the population underwent profound changes, affecting both work and consumption. Using more than one hundred diaries from the German-speaking countries, the book examines how people perceived their everyday life. In their eyes, life should above all be fun and provide diversions – in leisure time as well as at work. Together with colleagues, they wanted to have a good time. At the same time, the bourgeois values of moderation and industriousness, by which so many diaries of the 19th century were characterized, played only a subordinate role. Bänziger follows the history of this modern attitude towards life. He provides insights into the thoughts, actions and feelings of people from different social groups and thus focuses the “small” historical actors.

Keywords: self, gender, work, consumerism, family, everyday life, ego documents, bourgeois society, modernity

Le vieux modèle de la société de consommation touche à sa fin. L'envie s'essouffle et le besoin se tarit, la machine marketing ne trompe plus personne, les consommateurs sont las et l'environnement demande grâce. Pourtant, dans les associations ou sur Internet, une génération a décidé de prendre les choses en main, de s'investir au quotidien pour redéfinir les rapports à l'entreprise ou à la politique et bâtir un nouveau monde des possibles. Cette génération émergente, portée par les nouvelles technologies, mais qui s'inscrit moins dans une classe d'âge que dans une communauté de valeurs, Thierry Maillet l'a identifiée et lui a trouvé un nom : Génération Participation.