Preliminary Programme

The paper is mainly based on an analysis of declarations of import values of individual goods in the toll registers of Hamburg in 1733–1798. We use this material to develop three different stories on globalization and consumption with special reference to Germany.
First, we start with the observation that Hamburg’s import trade became to be dominated increasingly by only two goods, namely, sugar and coffee. Both goods were mainly provided by plantations in the French Antilles. The fusion of two commodities that originated from different parts of the globe into a bitter-sweet stimulant thus constitutes a major element of the changes in consumption patterns occurring in eighteenth-century Germany. We place this process in the context of the Great Divergence thesis: We show that rising coffee imports were made possible in part by their decline in relative price, which in turn resulted from unlimited supplies of land and partly of forced labour in the New World. In Hamburg’s hinterland, coffee was distributed outside towns predominantly by organizers of export-oriented textile production who gave coffee and sugar as payment in kind to outworkers.
The second story relates to the Consumer and Industrious Revolution thesis. Households were prepared to spend more money on traded consumer goods and possibly even to spend longer working hours to make consumer goods affordable. In Hamburg the number of separate items mentioned in the toll registers strongly increases between the 1730s and 1790s, suggesting that product differentiation of traded goods was under way. Imports of home and fashion goods increased strongly. Nevertheless, their share in total trade remained very small, suggesting that in contrast to the Netherlands and Britain the consumer revolution remained confined to a narrow elite.
The third story is based on the observation that Hamburg’s toll registers also suggest a globalization of goods serving dietetic or medical purposes. Not all, but at least some of these goods record high import growth rates. The globalization of the paraphernalia of bodily well-being cannot be placed in the narratives of the Great Divergence or Consumer and Industrious Revolution theses. It appears that — similar to colonial groceries — the goods in question were placed in the more general context of a nutritional system in their respective regions of origin, whereas they served more specific functions supported by learned knowledge in Central Europe. For a sample of items that record relevant trade values we draw on works in pharmaceutical botany and general merchant manuals to unravel processes of knowledge production that identified these goods in other continents and shaped their specific dietetic or medical use in Europe.
We conclude that the globalization of consumption was a pervasive process because it was shaped by several processes that operated contemporaneously but had little in common, and that the globalization of goods serving bodily well-being is an important element in the emergence both of modern consumer culture and modern medicine. (Show less)

Global trade made possible the greater importation of vital raw materials and commodities from the Americas, Asia and Africa into early modern Europe. The abundance of alternative materials had effected on European textile industries. Imports allowed cheaper clothes and accessories, making them available for broader markets and created more competition in production and consumption. Concurrently, in the second half of the 1600s, the French king accelerated the promotion of fashion more generally for socio-political reasons. Using alternative materials and imitations, he created a dress code for the upper classes and nobles in Paris and Versailles, which was exported to other European courts by means of cultural propaganda.
As a result, the Viennese court fell under the influence of French culture and clothing. Despite all official political antagonism the Viennese court nobility participated in pan-European developments of culture and fashion and adopted French styles in the course of the 17th century. This paper considers French fashion commodities like the beaver hat and its global dimensions. The journey of the raw materials from North America, Africa and the Levant to France will be traced and their several stations of processing examined; finally, the export to Viennese consumers will be considered, all of which are well documented. Global commodities in fashion affected not only consumption patterns, but peoples’ lifecycle choices and the movement of manpower as well. French professionals migrated to Vienna and had to cope with reactions of the local hat makers for example. Clothes and accessories worked increasingly as a feature of social inclusion or exclusion, particularly within the new loyal and (recatholized?) newly Catholic court nobility under Leopold I.
(Show less)

This paper considers the role of mariners in collective sartorial contests, as well as the impact of empire in recasting male dress. Over two centuries, deep-sea, long distance mariners grew exponentially in numbers. These unruly plebeian men dressed distinctively, rolling in and out of ports in tens of thousands by the 1700s. Their leisure, shore-going clothes actively subverted hierarchies of dress, creating something new. Their trousered figures became emblematic of a new manly style. Seafarers habitually wore trousers, adopted at sea by officers and in the tropics by genteel men. At the same time the officer class among the military embraced similarly structured garments they termed “pantaloons”. In diverse world locales, experimentation with other clothing systems, with other forms of male apparel, loosened the once hegemonic power of breeches and hose. Trousers ultimately gained social and political cachet and the imperial experience of generations reformed the contested meaning of men in trousers. (Show less)

In 1583, Tristan Sánchez was newly appointed to the Royal Treasury at Lima and registered upon his departure from Seville crimson damasks and blue taffetas in considerable quantities in order to sell them in Peru. The dyes used for the linen and silk fabrics probably were imported previously from Mesoamerica, as Middle American dyes influenced European fashion and taste from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. Amy Butler Greenfield has vividly described the success-story of cochineal, a red dye from Mexico, and addressed especially the competition among European monarchies to obtain this colorant (2005). But cochineal was by no means unique and imperial contest was overshadowed by intensive European and Transatlantic trade. Like cochineal, indigo-blue from Guatemala, red-wood from Brazil and yellow-wood from Campeche entered European markets rapidly after 1500. Indeed, dyes were the most important and valuable imports from the New World besides gold and silver. Castilian merchants like Simon Ruiz discussed the prices and the availability of American dyes in Europe in their correspondence of the 1580s. Often, the colorants were mentioned first as their trade was less risky than that of precious metals.
This paper considers the impact of American colours on the European dyeing industry, on European dyestuff production and on fashion in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It shows to what extent these exotic colours shaped European material culture in the old and the new worlds and thus formed the basis for the imitation of Asian goods during the period that followed.
(Show less)