Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures
The Material World Remade, c.1500–1820

Charts the rise of consumerism and the new cosmopolitan material cultures that took shape across the globe from 1500 to 1820.

Beverly Lemire (Author)

9780521141055, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 11 January 2018

370 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.6 kg

'… an important project dedicated to decentering our understanding of global commodity flows through both written and material cultural evidence.' Jane Hooper, Canadian Journal of History

The oceanic explorations of the 1490s led to countless material innovations worldwide and caused profound ruptures. Beverly Lemire explores the rise of key commodities across the globe, and charts how cosmopolitan consumption emerged as the most distinctive feature of material life after 1500 as people and things became ever more entangled. She shows how wider populations gained access to more new goods than ever before and, through industrious labour and smuggling, acquired goods that heightened comfort, redefined leisure and widened access to fashion. Consumption systems shaped by race and occupation also emerged. Lemire reveals how material cosmopolitanism flourished not simply in great port cities like Lima, Istanbul or Canton, but increasingly in rural settlements and coastal enclaves. The book uncovers the social, economic and cultural forces shaping consumer behaviour, as well as the ways in which consumer goods shaped and defined empires and communities.

1. Early globalisation, rising cosmopolitanism and a new world of goods
2. Fabric and furs: a new framework of global consumption
3. Dressing world peoples: regulation and cosmopolitan desire
4. Smuggling, wrecking and scavenging: or, the informal pathways to consumption
5. Tobacco and the politics of consumption
6. Stitching the global: contact, connection and translation in needlework arts in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries
7. Conclusion: realising cosmopolitan material culture.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural history [HBTB], General & world history [HBG]