Preliminary Programme

This paper charts the network of suppliers employed by Duchess Charlotte of Sudermania from the 1780s to the early 1800s, with the overall aim to explore the nature and meaning of royal spending in terms of political agency, social status, and gender. Archival basis for this study are the Duchess’s comprehensive series of invoices, account journals and correspondence. The paper initiates an outline of royal supply chains, enquiring who the Duchess solicited to deliver goods; whether they were long time engagements, and how this may be related to their social status or type of commodity offered. Together with other contemporary cases, among them presented in this session, shopping areas and consumer patterns in Stockholm may be uncovered systematically for the first time, thus illustrating the interplay between court and town around 1800. (Show less)

Previous research on shops and shopping
experiences has been dominated by the study of capitals and urban elites. This paper, however, focus is on the shopping experiences of people living in the Wupper valley, a thriving proto-industrial centre in one of the smaller German territories, the Duchy of Berg. The paper explores consumer choices and retail experiences that could be achieved locally, supply chains and to what extent the middling ranks in the Wupper valley participated in international trends such as the wearing of East Indian textiles (and their European imitations). The archival base for the study are the account books of Wilhelm Boeddinghaus, a merchant buying textiles en gros and selling them en detail, address books and directories as well as inventories listing the textile possessions of people living in the Wupper valley. (Show less)

This paper joins recent scholarly debates in consumption and material culture studies, addressing the issue of consumption and early modern urbanity in Frankfurt am Main. The paper argues that early modern cities were conceived as spaces of consumption where the variety of goods and the heterogeneity of consumers encouraged the rise of specific urban lifestyles and consumer patterns. The paper reconstructs the intricate spatial arrangements of different temporalities, accessibilities and reputations that affected the city’s social order. It addresses the effects of Frankfurt’s sumptuary law that regulated the inhabitants clothing and lavish spending in order to make their material culture correspond to their status. Furthermore, by shedding light on sartorial practices, the paper suggests that clothing was not only a question of status but also expressing ethnicity, age, gender and religious identities. (Show less)