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Exotic Goods, Popular Consumption, and the Standard of Living: Thinking about Globalization in the Early Modern World*
ANNE E. C. MCCANTS
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
| In recent years a consensus has emerged in the relatively young subdiscipline of "world history" that the long-distance exchange of commodities, money, ideas, and tastes that we all recognize as an essential feature of the contemporary world is in fact an old phenomenon. Indeed, making this case may well be the raison d'être
for the emergence of the field in the first place. Its leading practitioners have overwhelmingly emerged out of historical fields representing the various geographical regions located outside of Europe and North America and/or from the time period now widely (if problematically) known as early modern.1 The themes and chronologies of their fields have thus not been dominated by the fact of a nineteenth-century industrial revolution. They have identified the pivotal moments of their historiographies very differently than have most modern Western historians whose key questions have been framed around the problems (when, why, where, how, and to what effect) of industrialization more than any others. World historians are not willing merely to settle for the re-placement of the epicenter of globalization outside of Europe or in an earlier time period; they want in fact to "re-orient" (to borrow from the title of an important work in this field) the very questions that are asked, and the kinds of data thought suitable for or worthy of comparative historical analysis.2 |
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At least since the publication of Jean Baptiste Say's Treatise on Political Economy in 1803, Western economists, with only a few exceptions (most notably John Maynard Keynes), have privileged the study of the productive process over that of consumption. That is to say, even before the Industrial Revolution had played itself out fully in historical time, the scholarly stage was set to understand it primarily as an expansion of output resulting from the intensification of inputs, from a more efficient organization of those inputs, and most especially, from new technologies associated with machines of all types powered by fossil fuel–burning engines. Thus was born the "wave of gadgets" characterization of the Industrial Revolution by T. S. Ashton's now famous English schoolboy.3 His gadgets were not technologies for better living per se, but rather novelties that allowed Britain to produce more goods, more quickly and more cheaply, than anywhere else. This would translate, eventually anyway, into higher living standards for the masses, but the latter was hardly considered to be the primary metric for assessing the relative strength of economic development across countries. Yet, as many world historians have noted, other metrics might have yielded rather different comparative histories. For example, Susan Hanley's work on Tokugawa Japan and Kenneth Pomeranz's work on Qing China both argue forcefully for comparatively high living standards in their respective studies of these two early modern states, neither of which underwent an Industrial Revolution at all.4 Similar claims have been made for a cultural metric that would likewise favor the great flourishing and expansion of Islamic culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In each of these cases, the comparative histories suggest that framing the problem at hand in new ways is likely to prove very fruitful. Specifically, historians need to (1) develop new chronologies of globalization; (2) recognize that there were multiple geographic centers of economic achievement at different times, a phenomenon that Jack Goldstone has called "efflorescences";5 and (3) develop and use alternative yardsticks of economic success in place of, or at least in addition to, the theoretically unsatisfactory, albeit ubiquitous, measure of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). |
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