2 - The Globalization of European Consumption

Summary

How was consumption able to rise so dramatically before the age of the Industrial Revolution? The consumer revolution was the result of incremental changes in urban growth, agricultural specialization, commercial development, and proto-industry. Global trade was also a major factor. While agriculture, industry, and intra-European trade expanded gradually in the eighteenth century, intercontinental trade between Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas soared, expanding the horizons of the European material world. Global trade introduced European consumers to an array of products from distant lands, from Chinese porcelain and tea to Indian cotton textiles to American tobacco, coffee, chocolate, and sugar. Slavery was integral to global trade. On the west coast of Africa, European merchants traded Indian cloth for human captives, whom they shipped to the Americas in the largest forced migration in human history. In the Americas, European-descended enslavers brutally forced the enslaved to produce large quantities of commodities (tobacco, sugar, and coffee) for European consumption. Global trade also gave rise to import substitution as Europeans producers made cheap imitations of Asian porcelain and textiles. Such import substitution was part of a broad shift from the consumption of high-quality, durable materials that stored value over long periods of time to cheaper, more fragile semidurables that were rapidly replaced. This shift marked the birth of modern materiality and accelerated the fashion cycle.