The material world is all around us. We sit amidst and with it, depending on it in ever-increasing ways. Historians in a range of sub-fields are using the material world as a lens through which to explore varied historic phenomena. They are asking not only how the material world came to be produced, exchanged, and acquired, but also what role it played in shaping everything from identities to conflicts, governmentality to knowledge construction and transfer, as well as the practices of everyday life. Sven Beckert's Empire of cotton: a new history of global capitalism (2014); Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger's Empire of tea: the Asian leaf that conquered the world (2015), and Frank Trentmann's Empire of things: how we became a world of consumers, from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first (2016) all analyse key processes connected to the material world.Footnote 1 These publications ask very different historical questions and utilize distinct approaches to explore capitalism, production, trade, and consumption. Beckert's Empire of cotton takes a global perspective to examine the changing geographies and power structures of cotton cultivation and textile production as they switched between Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Ellis, Coulton, and Mauger's work explores a different commodity - tea. Empire of tea examines how Chinese and then Indian tea became essential to British culture from the seventeenth century to the present. Finally, Trentmann's Empire of things examines how, between the fifteenth century and the present day, consumption ‘has become a defining feature of our lives’. It explores not only consumption's changing history and geographies, but also contemporary issues, such as credit, debt, and waste, to understand the longer histories of our present relationship to the material world and its rapid consumption. In many ways then, these books, with their different approaches and questions, do not belong together. They sit more easily within their own sub-fields of cultural and economic history, or within particular approaches: be they global history, new histories of capitalism, or consumption studies. Yet, despite such differences, these works are connected by their focus on processes critical to the material world, such as cultivation, production, trade, and consumption, and the impacts of such processes in the past. Examining these distinct works together, and exploring their underlying assumptions about things, demonstrates that a shift is taking place within historical scholarship concerned with the material world.
Rather than a ‘world of goods’, recent work by Beckert, Ellis, Coulton, Mauger, and Trentmann identifies ‘empires’ of goods, a mark of how analyses of the material world are increasingly invested in exploring power.Footnote 2 The term denotes an earlier tradition of consumption history, which explored the power that objects held over consumers. It also references more recent insights in political economy that stress the power and violence that existed (and exist) within the systems of governance, production, trade, and consumption that produce and mobilize goods.Footnote 3 Finally, ‘empire’ also gestures towards a theoretical shift. It suggests that goods, be they cotton or tea, can be simultaneously understood as ‘things’. It references the latest ‘material turn’, which sees ‘things’ not as inert and passive, but rather as animated, animating, and effective. In this new understanding, ‘things’ are understood as distinct from objects, as having an existence beyond object/subject relations and as entities that can effect change and thus have power.
Historical scholarship is constantly turning. Yet scholars often only recognize ‘turns’ in hindsight, as a means of making sense of the field.Footnote 4 The 1980s are often identified as an important moment, in which history turned towards forms of cultural theory, which built on and utilized the insights of the ‘linguistic turn’.Footnote 5 Alongside deconstructing texts to analyse language and meaning, the cultural turn also sought to unpick the means by which knowledge was constructed and power embedded. The turn to the cultural has also been understood as a moment in which history, amongst other disciplines, turned away from the materialist tradition. Yet, here the language of turns appears divisive. Rather than turning away, some scholars continued to examine the material conditions of life, and came to the material world with new and important questions shaped by cultural history.Footnote 6 Instead of a material turn, therefore, it is more productive to examine how our understanding of the material world has broadened and changed over the last thirty years. It is significant that the recent growing interest in the material world has coincided with the development of theoretical interventions by philosophers, political scientists, literary scholars, and anthropologists, which through stressing the animated and effective nature of materiality are challenging underlying assumptions and prompting new questions.Footnote 7 Within the current resurgence, historians (particularly political and economic historians) are asking not just how people utilized the material world, but also how the material world was built and what it did. Recognizing a broadening, rather than a turn, allows for continued interactions between what might be perceived as distinct and different areas of study. Such interactions are important in cultivating critical material histories that grapple with the social, cultural, political, and economic work that constructs and confronts the material world.
I
Writing histories with a worldwide scope has a long tradition, yet in the last thirty years ‘global history’ has emerged as a particular approach.Footnote 8 Global history is connected to but distinct from world history, which might be understood as ‘serious attempts to treat historical phenomena that arise on a world scale’.Footnote 9 In contrast, global history has emerged at once as a mode of analysis that attempts to consider the development of globalization and the increasingly interconnected nature of the planet, and at another, as a form of historical research that attempts to tell ‘a story without a center’.Footnote 10 Economic historians have been at the forefront of global history, using it as a means to track and highlight connections between economic systems and processes in the early modern and modern period. In the 1990s, members of the ‘California School’ such as R. Bin Wong and Kenneth Pomeranz used global approaches to analyse larger integrated economic systems and pointedly resisted locating Europe at their centre.Footnote 11 Such histories deeply impacted on historical understandings of European economic growth, and during the early 2000s, global approaches were crucial in constructing new historical narratives, which explored how connectivity shaped Europe's rapid economic change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 12 Examining connections and encounters prompted new questions about the movement of people, things, knowledge, and practices between countries and continents. As such, historians of migration, science and technology, and material culture have incorporated global approaches within their analysis to understand systems better, but also people, knowledge, and things in the past.Footnote 13 Such impacts have been felt not only in early modern and modern European historiography but also elsewhere. Historians of earlier periods have begun to explore the significance of global approaches. Medieval scholars have underlined the importance of studying ‘the global’ in its own terms within the middle ages to drive new research areas.Footnote 14
Within global history, commodities have emerged as an important subject of analysis due to their mobility. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai defined commodities as ‘objects of economic value’ where value is not inherent, but rather ‘is a judgment made about them by subjects’.Footnote 15 Exchange is the source of valuation, creating the specific cultural and historical contexts in which values are assigned. Commodification is not permanent: it is a transitional process.Footnote 16 In global history, commodities have been assigned important roles because of their ability to act as ‘context spinners’.Footnote 17 Writing histories of connections across time and space through the frame of a single commodity has given focus to ambitious and complex histories. Global historians have revealed the different geographies through which commodities moved and the diverse economic, political, and cultural systems in which they became embedded.Footnote 18 As such, global history has tended to establish new geographies, although these are often no less ‘centred’.Footnote 19 At the same time, following a commodity through diverse connections and processes has highlighted the importance of commodities, leading to better understandings of the process of commodification and how economic, political, social, and cultural values have been assigned and negotiated across space and time.Footnote 20
Empire of tea considers the long processes by which a particular commodity came to be universally embraced. Globally inflected in approach, Ellis, Coulton, and Mauger explore trade and connections to examine how tea became influential in Britain, inserting ‘itself within Britain's social and economic life’ over the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 21 Empire of tea explicitly understands tea as active and animate, as more than ‘an inert material commodity in these processes, for it actively transforms those subjected to its influence’.Footnote 22 Strikingly, the book is written by literary scholars and is arguably the most interdisciplinary of those under discussion, an approach that significantly enriches and complicates the work. It moves between economic, scientific, cultural, political, social, and literary processes to uncover the multiple ways in which tea became a quintessentially British foodstuff. It was in the eighteenth century that the cultural, social, and economic work of embedding tea happened in earnest. Increasingly regular trade between Britain and China and the joining of the New and Old East India Companies in England in 1702 meant that Britain relied less on Dutch imports and saw its own supply of tea grow. As it grew, the East India Company developed greater infrastructure within London for landing, storing, inspecting, selling, and distributing tea.Footnote 23 At the same time, with the development of customs charges and excise duties on tea, smuggling expanded supplies. Utilizing ports and coastlines around the country, smuggling opened up tea consumption nationwide, and price reduction broadened its consumption among different social groups.Footnote 24 By the Commutation Act of 1784, the link between tea and metropolitan tastes had been broken and tea had become ordinary outside the capital. Yet other processes were also important in encouraging the growth in tea consumption and the naturalization of tea. Natural philosophers’, physicians’, and horticulturalists’ interest in tea plants and cultivation was important, as was the negotiation and scripting of British understandings of tea by essayists, poets, and satirists.Footnote 25 Through such works and tea's prior links to the women of court, tea came to be associated with politeness, women, and conversation. Alongside these positive endorsements, its association with women also meant that tea was perceived as troublesome: a substance that encouraged gossip and dependence.Footnote 26 Whether positive or negative, such discussions provided the cultural work that allowed tea to be understood, accepted, and desired, as its supply increased. Hence, ‘By the late eighteenth century almost everyone in England (and much of the population in other parts of Great Britain and Ireland) drank tea of one kind or another.’Footnote 27 Moreover, in the Victorian period, ‘tea did not merely remain everybody's drink: it became everybody's drink, all of the time’.Footnote 28 Tea became a marker of national character, a status further consolidated by it being increasingly sourced from plantations in the colonial sub-continent, rather than China.Footnote 29 Empire of tea shows the long and difficult process of naturalization by examining a range of activities from literary discussions to economic legislation, marketing infrastructure, and scientific knowledge.
While such cross-disciplinary work is rich, it also underlines the difficulties in writing histories of a single commodity. Commodity histories are problematic in asking particular goods to appear singular rather than as part of a range of goods that worked together to deliver social practices and meet desires. Ellis, Coulton, and Markman note how ‘Tea from China, coffee from Arabia and chocolate from Mexico came into public notice in Britain virtually simultaneously in the 1650s.’Footnote 30 In its earliest iteration, tea entered the market alongside other hot, stimulating beverages obtained from outside Europe. Yet the importance of such confluence is left unexplored. Other commodities could have been included in the analysis to consider how their related introduction (from different geographies and by diverse routes) within particular sites informed one another, allowing the market for hot beverages to grow and prosper in specific ways. As Empire of tea briefly notes, the means by which tea became naturalized within Britain interacted with those that embedded porcelain.Footnote 31 In contrast to single commodity studies, other historians have begun to consider goods together more fully, such as Marcy Norton's work on tobacco and chocolate in the Atlantic World or Bruno Blondé and Wouter Ryckbosch's work on the integration of hot drinks into urban cultures in the eighteenth-century southern Low Countries.Footnote 32 Similarly, research on ceramics has explored the ways in which the success of Chinese porcelains traded through Eurasian networks was shaped by the simultaneous popularity of other commodities.Footnote 33 Further work, which examines interlinked commodities and their appropriation, is needed to reveal the often interdependent nature of their popularity. It may also prove significant in explaining failure: why did certain commodities and practices, such as chewing betel quid, not develop in particular regions?Footnote 34
Alongside the difficulties of writing single commodity histories, recent attempts to broaden the object biographies approach suggests further questions.Footnote 35 Igor Kopytoff's early work on object biographies has proved influential, with commodity histories tending to conceive of commodities in terms of the means by which they are produced, traded, and exchanged and then consumed and used, and how during these stages they simultaneously undergo processes of cultural construction which render and re-render them as commodities.Footnote 36 Object biographies follow commodities from their ‘birth’ (cultivation or production) to their ‘death’ (consumption, use, disuse). However, new materialism (which will be discussed in more detail later) is prompting scholars to reconsider this approach, particularly in terms of how object ‘lives’ align to human ‘lives’ and thus fails to ‘realize the full potential to trace the conjunction of things over time and space’.Footnote 37 Rosemary A. Joyce and Susan D. Gillespie argue for the importance of ‘itineraries’, which trace ‘the strings of places where objects come to rest or are active, the routes through which things circulate, and the means by which they are moved’.Footnote 38 Such an approach takes into account the excessiveness of things, in that they have modes of being that humans are unable to observe but that can ultimately impact humans.Footnote 39 Understanding commodities simultaneously as things prompts scholars to be mindful of such excessiveness and the ways in which modes of being unobservable by humans shaped what commodities were and did for humans. Jennifer Anderson's Mahogany analyses the itinerary of mahogany as a living thing, material, commodity, and good. It explores mahogany as an entity ‘prior’ to the commodification process, but also reveals the ongoing dialogue between raw materials and commodities. Anderson notes that ‘Over time, mahogany depletion and the ensuing search to find new sources fundamentally reshaped how it was valued, used, and perceived.’Footnote 40 Such an approach follows both ‘materials’ as well as the consumed object. Similarly, fully understanding tea as an animate thing that ‘actively transforms those subjected to its influence’ requires greater attention to its cultivation and production in order to recognize a broader range of physical and material impacts, such as the ecological consequences for cultivated land.Footnote 41
Single commodity histories continue to provide an important strand of global history, illuminating connections across time and space. Nevertheless, commodities are rarely ‘single’ but rather consistently interconnect with other goods. At the same time, commodification is never complete: it is a constant and ongoing process that shapes material histories. Engaging with the excessiveness of things is important in writing histories that capture the complexity of the material world and the (often fleeting) particularity of human roles within it. Such questions are distinct from those embarked on by earlier global historians. Nevertheless, global approaches will be crucial to exploring the excessiveness of commodities and things as they existed and travelled across boundaries and borders, forming new geographies.
II
In Empire of cotton, Sven Beckert asserts that ‘only a global viewpoint allows us to understand the great realignment that each of these local stories was part of’.Footnote 42 A global approach not only connects local instances of commodity cultivation and manufacture, it also provides the broad lens needed for comprehending and explaining economic systems. Utilizing this approach, Beckert identifies seven broadly chronological stages of development within the global cotton industry of the early modern and modern period. First, India's domination over cotton production from around the tenth to the early nineteenth century; second, Europe's incursions in the sub-continent, often by force, between 1600 and 1800; third, Europe's attempts to manufacture cotton yarn and cloth itself from the eighteenth century onwards and its use of protectionist policies to cultivate its burgeoning industry; fourth, Europe, and more particularly England's, project of establishing steady supplies of raw cotton from the Caribbean Islands and Brazil and then the southern states of America, which led to England's emergence as the dominant force in the cotton yarn and cloth industry by 1815; fifth, the continued growth of European cotton manufacturing in the nineteenth century leading to further searches for raw cotton supplies, particularly in India, Egypt, Brazil, Argentina, and China; sixth, the increasing abstraction of the market for cotton through trading and, eventually, through speculation; and finally in the twentieth century, as India rose again as a major producer of raw cotton, cotton production began to turn to the global south and the global countryside. Understanding the realignments of capital and power that took place makes local circumstances and experiences more meaningful. It provides crucial insights (explored below) and is made possible by research across an astonishing range of archival sources and geographies. Yet seeking to provide the broader frame within which ‘local stories’ can be connected and understood is problematic: it assumes a parity of knowledge about different ‘locals’ even though many local stories have yet to be explored fully or researched at all. As Robert DuPlessis's recent The material Atlantic ably demonstrates, people living in different ‘local’ sites around the Atlantic Basin responded in remarkably divergent ways to the global trade in textiles and the importation of cotton.Footnote 43 DuPlessis's findings underline the need to engage fully with heterogeneity supplied by the ‘local’, when engaging with broader geographies and connections. Forming broad frameworks, before research examining a more diverse range of geographies and local contexts has been developed, risks a continued distortion of explanatory frameworks and perpetuating historical understandings of global capitalism (and its impacts) that continue to place Europe and North America at their centre.
The new history of capitalism is a growing field within American institutions, and is producing innovative and enriching histories.Footnote 44 Rather than completely ‘new’, this area of research seeks to distinguish itself from older histories of capitalism through asking different questions. As Seth Rockman asserts, ‘the field's intervention is to de-naturalize capitalism, to provide the history of a system that the dominant culture depicts as timeless and irresistible, even in the midst of crisis’.Footnote 45 New histories of capitalism, like Beckert's, resist understanding ‘markets’ as natural and instead look to the various processes and systems that produced and reproduced them. Scholars have been drawn to infrastructure and are examining ‘the submerged architecture – material, legal, and ideological – that makes a highway system or telecommunication network plausible in the first place’. They are more likely to ask ‘“How does it work?” than “What does it mean?”’Footnote 46 Yet new histories of capitalism also seek to offer critical histories that embrace, rather than resist, the insights of cultural and social history. The most important intervention of new histories of capitalism, however, has been to recognize slavery as crucial to capitalism. As such, new histories of capitalism can be linked to research, which has sought to underline the important role of slavery, and the wealth created through the slave trade, in funding industry and finance in Britain.Footnote 47
Shaped by and significantly shaping the new histories of capitalism scholarship, Beckert's analysis of the global cotton industry shows the significance of land, labour, violence, capital, intermediaries, and the state.Footnote 48 In the cotton industry, land was crucial to the cultivation of raw cotton for manufacture. Expropriating new areas of land for cultivation allowed the cotton manufacturing industry to grow quickly during the nineteenth century. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the southern states of America provided an increasingly elastic supply of cotton, as extra lands to the west were expropriated for cultivation, often by forcibly removing or expelling native inhabitants.Footnote 49 As with cultivating land, cotton, as raw material and finished cloth, required much labour to produce. Achieving the levels of labour necessary to grow cotton relied on violence. The systematic exploitation of enslaved people kept cotton growing in ever-increasing quantities and added to European manufacturers’ prosperity.Footnote 50 At the same time, the effort required to process cotton yarn and cloth often brought women and children into the labour force. Alongside land and labour, the cotton industry relied on the movement of capital. Ready funds were needed to purchase everything from seeds to transportation and machinery. The supply and movement of capital (as well as materials and labour) required intermediaries, such as merchants and banias, to ensure that supply chains kept moving over greater distances. The tentative nature of such movements, and the importance of intermediaries, is made clearest by the moments in which capital failed to move, such as in the Indian countryside in the nineteenth century.Footnote 51
Beckert also explores the state and underlines its significance in providing protectionism, raising revenues, policing borders, establishing property rights, and using its military might, but also in mobilizing wage workers, for example through the establishment of contracts and in putting down resistance.Footnote 52 As with other new histories of capitalism, political economy is central to the story of the cotton industry.Footnote 53 The state was fundamental to the development of cotton and often explains why some areas developed a cotton industry and others did not, as in Egypt's inability to create a sustainable cotton textile industry in the early nineteenth century.Footnote 54 Beckert argues that ‘for most of capitalism's history the process of globalization and the needs of nation-states were not conflicting, as is often believed, but instead mutually reinforced one another’.Footnote 55 The state was important not only within nations but across borders, when empire encouraged ‘the ability and willingness to project capital and power across vast oceans’.Footnote 56
Together, these different threads – land, labour, violence, capital, intermediaries, and the state – construct a history that undermines ideas of European exceptionalism. Beckert seeks to explode arguments that Europe's economic growth in the nineteenth century ‘can be explained by Europeans’ more rational religious beliefs, their Enlightenment traditions, the climate in which they live, the continent's geography, or benign institutions such as the Bank of England or the rule of law’.Footnote 57 Instead, ‘Europeans united the power of capital and the power of the state to forge, often violently, a global production complex, and then used the capital, skills, networks, and institutions of cotton to embark upon the upswing in technology and wealth that defines the modern world.’Footnote 58 Beckert's Empire of cotton is deeply important in writing violence back into histories of capitalism. Looking to the links between different economic systems and the changing nature of such interconnections is crucial to revealing the systematic nature of violent incursions within trade. As Lisa Lowe has recently argued, violent histories are forgotten when the ‘imperatives of the state subsumes colonial violence within narratives of modern reason and progress’.Footnote 59 Empire of cotton re-inscribes the changing nature of violence and power within histories of capitalism, a crucial element that has been largely absent from earlier histories of global material culture and commodities.Footnote 60
While Empire of cotton provides a broader explanatory picture that underlines the violent creation of ‘a global production complex’, the roles people played in its creation and its specific impacts upon people's lives are often lost. Beckert is writing an economic rather than a social history, but given the importance of social relationships (and the asymmetrical power often at work in such relationships) upon the creation of wealth and capital, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the need to ‘people’ histories of global capitalism fully is pressing.Footnote 61 Social relationships remain frustratingly absent from global histories of capitalism, as do the standards of living people experienced and the inequalities they endured.Footnote 62 While people are not entirely absent from Beckert's analysis, they tend to feature as introductory motifs rather than as central elements within his analysis.Footnote 63 As Natalie Zemon Davis has argued, global history raises questions ‘about whether the sharp edges of social history and gender history are being ignored in the descriptions of large-scale interactions among civilizations, trading empires, and species’.Footnote 64 While social relationships and entanglements tend to be missing from global histories of capitalism, such absences, and the silence they produce, only underline the importance of highlighting the local when attempting to explain it.
III
T. H. Breen's The marketplace of revolution argued that colonists’ experience as consumers was crucial to American history in both economic and political terms. Engaging with the marketplace provided colonists with ‘the cultural resources needed to develop a bold new form of political protest’.Footnote 65 In contrast, Empire of cotton underscores production and more particularly slavery as central to American history, and American capitalism. As such, Empire of cotton mirrors broader changes in economic and social history across the US and Europe that emphasize renewed interest in production and producers. Energy, materials, capital, and labour are growing again as key areas of investigation, as are the processes and practices that shaped and produced them. In British history, the resurgent interest in production has perhaps most clearly emerged in new debates on the importance of energy in sustaining economic growth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 66 While it might appear that histories of production and trade are holding all before them again, the publication of Frank Trentmann's ambitious and important volume Empire of things: how we became a world of consumers, from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first demonstrates that histories of consumption continue to thrive.Footnote 67 The erudition and complexity of Empire of things shows that the historiography of consumption is now a well-developed area of research.Footnote 68 Drawing together so many different strands of research will prove invaluable in making sense of the field and introducing its complexity to students. At the same time, the volume also points to the ways in which research in consumption studies is changing.
The history of consumption emerged as a key sub-field in the 1980s, particularly among historians of the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world. The birth of consumer society: the commercialization of eighteenth-century England led to a hunt for the origins of consumer society with scholars exploring ever earlier periods and different geographies from Renaissance Italy to the seventeenth-century Netherlands.Footnote 69 More recently, Martha Howell's intervention in such debates has highlighted the importance of the changes in commerce between 1300 and 1600. However, Howell stresses that while such changes may have ‘set the terms for future socio-economic developments, they were not themselves embryonic forms of what we call capitalism’.Footnote 70 Instead, the economic culture of the medieval period must be approached ‘on its own terms’.Footnote 71 While the hunt for origins may have lost its exuberance, over the last thirty-five years early modern and modern scholars have actively interrogated questions of who engaged with consumption practices, how, and why.Footnote 72 Scholars have been keen to investigate the groups who were involved in broadening the consumer base, looking to question prices, wages, and living standards.Footnote 73 They have also examined changes in the places and processes by which consumption took place, exploring how emergent retail spaces and second-hand markets changed the nature of consumption.Footnote 74 Historians have looked to issues of social emulation and identity formation to ask why individuals were motivated to consume more.Footnote 75 More recently, they have asked where these new, exciting goods came from, underlining the importance of global trade and a variety of connections, and where they went when no longer in use, shaping practices of waste and reuse.Footnote 76 Many of these debates and more are outlined in Empire of things, which begins by exploring how people became consumers from the fifteenth century to the present, before examining contemporary preoccupations with consumption and their historic context, including credit and saving, speed and quality of life and leisure, impact on generations, consuming outside the marketplace, movement of goods and people, impact on religious life, and waste and disposing of goods.
Empire of things gives a strong sense of the established scholarship, but also highlights more recent debates and issues concerned with consumption, including a growing interest in what things do rather than what they mean, an interest also apparent, as we have seen, in new histories of capitalism and global history. The growing group of scholars asking ‘what do things do?’ suggests that the theoretical insights about objects, things, and materiality, emerging more coherently in the humanities as ‘new materialism’, are beginning to impact significantly the questions we ask about, and how we interpret human relationships to and interactions with the material world. The name Empire of things in itself suggests the importance of tackling the ‘doings’ of the material world.Footnote 77 ‘Objects’ (in contrast to ‘things’) are primarily important in their relationship to a subject. As W. J. T. Mitchell asserts, ‘Objects are the way things appear to a subject – that is, with a name, an identity, a gestalt or stereotypical template, a description, a use of function, a history, a science.’Footnote 78 In contrast, the term ‘thing’ attempts to understand non-human entities in their broader being, seeking out evidence of their existence beyond their relationship to humans. In including ‘things’ in his title, therefore, Trentmann gestures towards an important analytical shift that sees things not only in relation to humans, but also as broader entities that can effect change in order to understand fully the different aspects of what they ‘do’ and how and why they do it. As such, consumption is understood not only in terms of how humans consumed, but also how the consumption of certain things impacted on humans and the wider world.Footnote 79
Getting beyond an examination of a particular subject–object relationship to the thing in order to understand its broader existence has proved difficult, however, and has drawn the attention of philosophers, literature scholars, environmental humanities scholars, political scientists, and historians.Footnote 80 Discussions have emerged as to the extent to which such entities can, have the intention to, and do affect processes. In Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory (2005), Bruno Latour argued that ‘any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor – or, if it has no figuration yet, an actant’.Footnote 81 Things may not act with intention but they do effect.Footnote 82 The human and material are not separate but porous, continually informing and shaping each other.Footnote 83 Such insights have been broadened and enriched by the theoretical models of object-oriented ontologists, who suggest the need for analytical lenses which interrogate different things simultaneously.Footnote 84 As we see in Trentmann's Empire of things, these new forms of social analysis are being including within historical analysis, leading to the emergence of ‘new materialism’ as a particular (but still often partially used) approach.Footnote 85 ‘New materialism’ asserts the need to analyse the material world from and beyond a human-centric standpoint.Footnote 86 The binaries of nature/culture, life/matter are perceived as artificial and unproductive. The divisions that have emerged between the two have been asserted by humans and exist as markers of the continued human-centric project. Moving beyond human-centric analyses and to take account of other actors from albatrosses to grass and from slime to iron ore is important if we are to understand fully the complexity of the world, its interconnected nature, and humans’ roles within it.Footnote 87
While histories of consumption have long been shaped by economics, anthropology, and material culture studies, Empire of things demonstrates how the impact of environmental, urban, and political history is now being felt, as consumption (particularly nineteenth- and twentieth-century consumption) comes to be understood in terms of material flows and systems. William Cronon's Nature's metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991) has proved important. It explored how the growth of Chicago during the nineteenth century was intimately related to the changes taking place in the Great West. By seeing city and country as bound together, Cronon broke down the nature/culture divide and opened the way for work that seeks to challenge such binaries and instead look to flows and systems.Footnote 88 More recently, Timothy Mitchell's Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity (2002) has shown how scholars examining techno-political systems can draw on the material world (such as the Aswan dam) and non-human actors (such as mosquitos) to explain processes of change and the development of political situations, an approach mirrored more recently in the work of Patrick Joyce and Tony Bennett.Footnote 89 Trentmann points to these new avenues of research within histories of consumption by considering flows and systems at various points within Empire of things, but particularly when considering cities, homes, and waste.Footnote 90 For example, in chapter 4, Trentmann discusses how the consumption of gas and water in nineteenth-century cities was often unequal, even within small geographical areas.Footnote 91 Consumption levels were culturally contingent and significantly dependent on private provision, infrastructure, and governance.Footnote 92 Empire of things consistently stresses the involvement of the state in different forms of consumption, and its influence on expectations around consumption and standards of living. As such, Trentmann underlines the importance of politics and power in delineating access to resources and shaping the material world.Footnote 93
In his final chapter, when grappling with waste and the difficulties of examining the extent to which contemporary citizens dispose of materials, Trentmann discusses the importance of considering ‘material-flow analysis’ and how it asks us to consider all the materials that go into making any one item, ‘from the petrol used to ship it to the resources needed to get rid of it’.Footnote 94 It is important not only to consider objects from their moment of making to that of discarding, but rather to also consider how whether ‘recycled, buried or burnt, material particles flow back into eco-systems, be it as sludge or CO2 emissions’.Footnote 95 Here, Trentmann works to explore much longer itineraries of goods and thus the excessiveness of things. In light of these approaches and his earlier work, Trentmann might be understood as distinctly shaped by and shaping the ‘new materialism’ paradigm. Trentmann explicitly discusses his need to look at things not only as communicators of meaning but also as entities with material properties that have impacts even after their ‘social life’ as an object might have ended.Footnote 96 He asserts that ‘things are not only bearers of meanings or symbols in a universe of communication. They also have material forms and functions. They can be hard or soft, flexible or stubborn, loud or quiet, manual or fully automatic, and much else.’Footnote 97
As historians begin to look more fully at what things do, it is important that other cultural and social modes of analysis are not obscured. One of the major issues of ‘de-centring’ the human within certain aspects of historical analysis is that many humans have yet to be ‘centred’. Such problems are particularly pertinent to cultural and social historians (such as those interested in material culture and consumption studies) who have long been engaged in analysing forms of material expression to uncover voices and give agency to those who are or have been marginalized.Footnote 98 Political theorist Jane Bennett has considered the politics of the object-oriented ontology and new materialist project. As she notes, critics of these projects state that ‘the ontological divide between persons and things must remain lest one have no moral grounds for privileging man over germ or for condemning pernicious forms of human-on-human instrumentaliztion (as when powerful humans exploit illegal, poor, young, or otherwise weaker humans)’.Footnote 99 Bennett argues, however, that one way of understanding the analytical and social benefits of flatter ontologies is that elevating ‘the status of the materiality of which we are composed’ would ‘distribute value more generously’ as a whole.Footnote 100 While the elevation of all material might allow a broader range of humans to be understood and valued more fully, the politics and hierarchies of such studies continues to need addressing. As Mel Y. Chen has asserted, examining the ‘animacy’ of things has its own politics, which distinctly privileges and values particular forms of animacy.Footnote 101 Thus, those tools that have long been used by social and cultural historians, among others, to focus on historical actors who have been marginalized and reveal the systems and structures that have created and maintained such distance from the centres of power remain important. At the same time, critical engagement with the ways in which race, class, sexuality, and gender shape the theorization of things are critical in creating a fuller understanding of the material world and our ability to ever ‘glimpse’ at things.Footnote 102
Historians need to ensure that analyses of systems and flows also engage with other forms of material history. Material culture concerns with why and how humans historically have used the material world to express meaning, as well as to perform particular actions and practices, continue to be important and contribute to our understanding of how things have resisted and shaped such projects. Trentmann argues that historians must consider ‘connecting “hard” (but fragile) things and networks to the “soft” world of possessions and the domestic interior’ to create ‘a space for material politics, reconnecting private and public and providing a bridge between histories of politics and material culture’.Footnote 103 Finding such bridges and interconnections is crucial, but historians also need to question why such distinctions have emerged and how they play upon gendered connotations. How an account book or irrigation system accrues meaning is as important and analytically rich as how it works and what it does. Rather than finding bridges between different areas of analysis, assemblages of objects, things, humans, and non-humans need to be understood together in different ways to enrich analyses.
IV
Our understanding of the material world is changing in important ways, and new avenues for research are emerging. Global history approaches have underlined the need to analyse how connections and contacts shaped the manufacture, exchange, and consumption of commodities. Examining the nature of connections over time shows how certain commodities, such as tea, came to be naturalized within certain cultures and reveals the cultural work and political and economic processes undergone to construct new access to and understandings of particular goods. Analysis at a local level can provide the means to unpick the social, political, economic, and cultural practices and institutions at work when people embraced or rejected the goods exchanged through connections, and enriches global histories by underlining the heterogeneous nature of responses to global processes. Such work also asks questions of commodities by suggesting at their dependency on other related commodities in naturalization processes. It gestures towards the need to consider the creation of commodities and how commodification takes place over time and space.
Global frames also make visible systems that were instrumental in orchestrating processes such as production, trade, and consumption and underline the violence and power often embedded within them. Examining how power operated, who wielded it, and how, is crucial to developing histories of capitalism and understanding how capital moved and was utilized in global terms. Such research underlines the importance of exploring how technologies from account books to canals worked and what they did. It also suggests that human relationships were often key to their spread and use. Revealing the social histories of global processes remains an important task. Global histories of trade and manufacture have impacted other areas of study, particularly shaping consumption studies anew by revealing the panoply of goods on offer from different parts of the globe, especially from the early modern period onwards. More recently, new questions have emerged which seek to explore the range of materials and energies that were used in producing these goods, and more work revealing the global linkages provided by such material flows is important.
Rather than inert and passive forms beholden to human subjects, the material world is being re-analysed as active, animated, and animating. Things are being recognized as existing not only in relation to humans, but also in their own right. Grappling with this new understanding and the ways in which things effected historical processes requires engagement with different forms of social analysis. Nevertheless, it remains important that the critical approaches developed by cultural historians are utilized to understand what forms of animacy are and are not recognized, why and how. These new insights prompt new questions and ambitious projects; they illuminate the importance of developing critical material histories that integrate different approaches to engage fully with the complexity of the material world. Empire of cotton, Empire of tea, and Empire of things demonstrate the liveliness and richness of current historical scholarship grappling with objects and commodities to understand historical processes; they also underline the continued importance of interactions between political, economic, social, and cultural approaches, in order that the material world might be fully understood.
