Preliminary Programme

The early globalization of German rural territories is still a neglected research area. Although Northwestern German regions took part in international and global markets as providers of linen fabrics, the consumption of global goods in rural households in these areas is yet a research desideratum. This is even more surprising since the relatively close distance to international ports like Rotterdam, Hamburg and Bremen should guarantee a sufficient supply with global traded commodities in the German hinterland. The paper will analyse the emergence of new consumption patterns regarding global goods and commodities, like silk or cotton, of the rural population in the 17th and 18th century in a Northwestern German inland region, the Münsterland, as well as consumption of rural households in general. It is based on the analysis of probate inventories from different research areas – rural and periurban ones – in Northwestern Germany and compares the development of consumption of different global and colonial goods, like allochthonous fabrics or spices. (Show less)

Throughout the last forty years, inventories have become the go-to sources for historians interested in the reconstruction of early-modern material culture. Much ink has been spilt over the assets and flaws of these sources and scholars have formulated precise guidelines on how to approach these inventories applying an adequate amount of methodological rigour in their analysis. In order to remedy the pitfalls of using inventories as primary research material, alternative sources have been pointed out such as archaeological findings or visual representations of interiors. However, the historical records that have stayed strikingly out of sight are auction advertisements. Nonetheless, the same conditions that gave rise to the compilation of a household inventory, such as after death clearances, debt settlements and judicial adjurations, occasioned the public sale of these very same household belongings. Moreover in eighteenth-century France, legal obligations stipulated that all the aforementioned auctions sales taking place on juridical grounds necessarily had to be announced by a poster and by the publication of a notice free of charge in the assigned newspaper. As a consequence, auction advertisements that have been entirely preserved since 1752 offer a unique and inconvenient view of the world of goods of late-eighteenth-century Parisian households. In my research into the Parisian revolutionary auction market, I have had the chance to explore the potential of these sources for the study of material culture and consumption patterns. Compared to probate inventories the biases of auction advertisements are obvious, however, these disadvantages are outweighed by the presence of additional information layers such as the appearance of describing adjectives that associate these objects with broader concepts of value. Accompanied by the necessary source-critical side marks, my presentation will focus on three aspects of auction advertisements: the objects featured in the advertisements, the social distribution of auction sales and the descriptions given to the advertised goods as they often convey other sensibilities than those expressed by inventories. (Show less)

It has become increasingly clear that economic prosperity during the late seventeenth century led to a change in the consumption behaviour in some European countries . Freeing themselves from the stranglehold of scarcity that had long defined their material world, individuals began to consume goods in a previously unthinkable scale. An increased desire to own luxury goods was not confined to high social ranks; lower and middling strata developed a taste for luxury items.
Analyzing a sample of 375 probate inventories from individuals that died between 1755 and 1836, we will focus on the consumption of luxury items in Lisbon. The sample includes inventories from the whole social spectrum and our aim is to study the social diffusion of luxury items, to confront the chronology of the dissemination of consumption of luxury items in Portugal, a peripheral country, with others, and to understand how conspicuous consumption was a channel to define social groups and act as symbolic messenger of social status and identities. (Show less)

The new historical paradigm has reinterpreted the so-called late medieval crisis which, traditionally, has been sought to be a period of social and economic decline, As a result of the works carried out by Stephan Epstein, Richard Britnell, Richard Goldthwaite and Christopher Dyer this period is now understood as a moment of economic growth that resulted from a more integrated and commercialized society. The Black Death and the following epidemics that sharply reduced the population led to a general improvement of the living conditions of the medieval society. Land resources would have been concentrated in fewer hands and wages would have increased which, overall, would have led to a rise of the acquisition power of the lower strata of the society. Artisans and merchants would have profited from the growing demand for manufactured goods that resulted from the increasing purchasing power of the lower ranks of the society in an atmosphere of social competition where subordinate groups sought to emulate their social superiors. They would have further stimulated demand by producing and making available a wider range of commodities. The development of new techniques of production and the use of labor-saving devices as well as the use of cheaper materials augmented productivity and reduced production costs, making affordable a wider range of commodities to a wider social spectrum of consumers. Demand for new commodities would have also increased the number of imported goods. Trade was stimulated by the reduced transaction costs derived from the greater jurisdictional integration of each territory.
Taking into account the existing literature on pre-industrial consumption, this paper will examine the material culture and the consumption patterns of the Catalan society through the analysis of hundred of post-mortem inventories. The chosen location does not only respond to an abundance of documental sources. The Crown of Aragon was one of the highly populated areas within Europe that actively participated in the late medieval commercial network of the Mediterranean.
The analysis will take the Black Death as the starting point of the preexisting standards of living and consumption patterns and it will finish with the beginning of the Catalan civil war in 1462 when the economy of the region collapsed. The main goal of this exercise will be to prove that there was a multiplication of goods and the introduction of new ones among the different social segments of the Catalan society. Special attention will be put into the socioprofessional distribution of goods in order to understand the social barriers that existed to the acquisition of certain types of objects. Because inequality tends to increase according to the size of the urban center–the larger the town is, the more inequality we find-, the present research project will analyze the unequal distribution of goods among the different social strata of the three different urban centers. (Show less)