Global historians have been among the most prolific apostles of the material turn since both fields’ inception in the 1990s and early 2000s.Footnote 1 Global commodity histories, accounts of the ‘global lives of things’Footnote 2 and popular histories of the ‘world in objects’ – Benin brass portraits, Aztec double-headed serpents and Mughal miniatures that ‘tell of the world for which they were made’Footnote 3 – are only the most visible tip of an iceberg comprising global environmental histories,Footnote 4 world histories of consumptionFootnote 5 and global histories of human waste,Footnote 6 fashion or, indeed, epidemic disease and ‘contagion’.Footnote 7 Materiality evidently is en vogue among historians adopting a global perspective – as object of study, as a prism, directing the historian’s gaze, as source material or, indeed, as illustration, ‘material embodiment’ and evidence of world-making, the global scale and connectivity.Footnote 8 This is in some measure paradoxical, to be sure. For matter and material cultural have long been, and remain to a degree, associated with proximity, the concrete and the ‘lower order’Footnote 9 in the modern imagination: the ‘micro’ rather than the ‘macro’, the contingent rather than the universal and, indeed, the local rather than the global.
This chapter seeks to uncover a series of implicit, often unspoken assumptions that guide and inform global histories that canvass aspects of the material world. Its particular interest is in the grounds on which historians associate matter and material culture with a particular scale, context or level of observation – the global, most importantly, but also, and seemingly inconsistently, the concrete, the particular or a ‘lower order’. The very words ‘object’, ‘substance’ and ‘matter’ suggest intransience, obduracy and self-evidence. An object is that which, literally, throws itself before and puts itself against us, with ‘the self-evidence of a slap in the face’;Footnote 10 a substance is that which ‘stands under or grounds things’ – the ontologically basic, fundamental entities of reality and ‘facts of nature’.Footnote 11 And yet, matter and material culture tend to stand for something other than themselves – mud for dirt, antiquities for the past, pears for food – on account of humans making sense of them in particular ways.Footnote 12 The humanities’ now nearly three-decades-long interest in the ‘agency’ of things, posthumanism and the ‘ontological dignity’ of matter has let semiotics fade into the background, but, with all due humility,Footnote 13 it is still humans – and, in this particular case, historians – who endow matter and material culture with meaning. Matter, the chapter holds, may temporarily become inextricable from the global scale – because certain forms of matter affect the entire planet, for instance, or because a global material event would have been evident as such to men and women in the past – but materiality as such has no ‘natural’ scale, level or context, no self-evident, obvious place in any order.
In its attempt at understanding the criteria practitioners apply to connect matter and material culture with a particular scale, context or level of observation, the chapter is concerned with the entire range of matter surrounding humanity in the modern era, from plants, viruses and oxygen to chintz, plastic and pesticides. One of the most pervasive dichotomies in the Western intellectual tradition is the opposition between man-made, or artefactual, material objects on the one hand, and natural, seemingly inert material objects on the other – presumably a remnant of the Aristotelian hylomorphic model, according to which things are compounds of matter (hyle) and form (morphe).Footnote 14 Scholars have for some time now problematised that dichotomy: even the most natural-looking flower, human body or river course may be the result of human ingenuity, while even the most abstract expressions of human thought and culture – Japanese sericulture and economic growth, or Western mass democracy – could be argued to arise also from the ‘material world’.Footnote 15 This chapter shares the conviction that differences between artefactual and natural objects of the material world are gradual rather than dichotomous, and a belief in the historicity and contingency of the dichotomy. It remains, at the same time, acutely aware of the import of the differences between various kinds of material objects. Not only does matter have properties that artefacts do not – it is divisible ‘without requiring a change of name’, for instance, and it can endure within other sorts of matterFootnote 16 – artefactual material objects also bear many of the cultural associations the chapter sets out to uncover precisely on account of the longevity of the hylomorphic tradition. The chapter reflects on the material world surrounding and comprising human beings in its entirety, because it is only thus that one can comprehend the sum of the historian’s relation to it.
A chapter concerned with materiality, globally, could have dealt with a series of other topics, to be sure. Possibilities for emphases abound; there are various ways one might approach the relationship between global history and the material world. Some might suggest it would be better to consider the materiality of the field as such – global historians’ particular dependence on airplanes, digitisation or archives in places where humidity threatens the paper records.Footnote 17 Others might think it pertinent to discuss, instead, the field’s material – both organic and physical-mechanical – language: its jargon of ‘circulation’, ‘international pressure’ and ‘flow’.Footnote 18 Another obvious choice might have been to study the materiality of some of global history’s favourite subjects: the transport infrastructure at the basis of the global economyFootnote 19 or the submarine cables, breech-loaders and doses of quinine that made high imperialism – ‘a more territorial form of [imperial] domination’ – possible.Footnote 20 In centring, instead, on global historians’ association of matter with a particular scale, context or level of observation, the chapter opts for a theme in line with the volume’s general impetus of understanding the conceptual basis of our work as global historians; of exposing the tacit assumptions that guide our work and of holding them up for careful inspection.
Signs of the Global
Most commonly, forms of matter and material culture are seen to ‘reveal a world of movement and interaction’Footnote 21 when they themselves have moved – or, more accurately, have been moved about the world, for matter is rarely automotive – at some point during their ‘biographies’.Footnote 22 Commodities, in particular – by definition moveable and implicated in patterns of exchangeFootnote 23 – have come to signify world-making, the global economy and ‘connections among people … distant and unfamiliar to each other’, because, owing partly to the impact of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, their biographies are often told through world-spanning chains of production, processing, marketing and consumption.Footnote 24 So have diplomatic gifts,Footnote 25 contagious germsFootnote 26 or medicinal imports, many of which were exchanged across boundaries in the early or late modern era and are at present regarded as ‘tangible manifestations of … global connections’, a ‘global age’ and a ‘global shared culture’.Footnote 27
While these things’ movement and implication in worldwide connections is undeniable, one ought not to forget other features of their biographies: the circumstance that their ‘globality’ and movement would often have been unknown to, concealed from or – particularly from the late 1800s onwards – irrelevant for our historical subjects;Footnote 28 the fact that these materials’ movement across large distances would have been short in comparison to other, less mobile stages of their biographies: plant growth, or museum display, let alone gemstone formation; and the fact that contemporaries would sometimes have condemned the things’ global movement as inappropriate, erroneous or extrinsic to their nature, as in discourses about medicines, plants,Footnote 29 or, indeed, antiques. As the current, virulent debate about restitution exemplifies, to many in the present and the past, some artworks, though they may have lived decidedly ‘global lives’, remain firmly associated with the particular context of their origins or ‘ancient seat’, as Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, put it during the Napoleonic wars, when ideas about the proper place of art first (re-)gained currency.Footnote 30 Already during the 1790s, driven by their opposition to the French revolutionaries’ looting of the Italian peninsula, writers such as Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy had argued that the best art, though it could not be possessed, belonged in its original setting. They condemned the displacement of artworks from ‘where nature had placed them’, their ‘sequestration from their native country [l’enlévement à leur pays natal]’.Footnote 31 From that moment, at least in some strands of modern thought, many artworks were regarded as intrinsically inalienable and immovable. This is not to say that Jingdezhen porcelain, Saint-Domingue sugar or Potosí silver may not justifiably be regarded as ‘physical evidence for sustained cultural encounter on a worldwide scale’.Footnote 32 It is merely to lay bare that present-day global historians’ foregrounding of such objects’ globality has as much to do with the possibilities that their biographies offer as with the historians’ own research interests – in global integration, connections and cosmopolitanism.Footnote 33
The other, more important question is whether these forms of matter and material culture ‘reveal a world of movement and interaction’ or whether what they really reveal is ‘movement and interaction’ in a world of isolation, stillness or, at the very least, shorter-range (e.g. (cross-) regional) movement – whether they are ‘likely to offer a distorted view’ of the past, as de Vries put it in relation to the ‘unusually cosmopolitan individuals’ many global historians like to study.Footnote 34 Indeed, few economic historians, including those studying ‘commodities that transcended national borders’, would deny that ‘the vast majority of economic activity in the world before 1945 was still dedicated to home and local production’.Footnote 35 Even though the integration of global commodity markets certainly began in the eighteenth century, long into the nineteenth century world trade accounted only for a small share of economic activity and material possessions, even in Western Europe or East Asia.Footnote 36 By convincing metrics, even in the late twentieth century the bulk of the world’s economic activity remained national or regional.Footnote 37 Historians of migration have for some time now tempered our image of modernity as an age of unchecked mobility since only a small share of the world population migrated across oceans and continents, even in the nineteenth century – 0.36 per cent in the 1850s, 0.96 per cent in the 1880s, 1.67 per cent in the 1900s and 1.58 per cent in the 1920s.Footnote 38 The same applies to the material world: in most societies in human history the bulk of foodstuffs, tableware and medicines would have been made, or harvested, close to home. Ceramics, plants and fertilisers leading global lives were exceptions rather than the rule, unusual in their cosmopolitanism. They certainly reveal ‘movement and interaction’ on a global scale, but not, or at least not necessarily, a ‘global age’ of art, trade or consumption. Critics of the wider field of global history have in recent years again and again posed the question of whether the ‘global talk’ of the present-day is ‘a sui generis response to events “themselves”’ in the past or a discourse that, prejudiced by the historians’ global present, sculpts historic realities.Footnote 39 Practitioners in the field ought to exercise due care – weigh their evidence carefully, keep a sense of proportion and remind their readers of those proportions – in order not to fall into the latter.
This is not to say that global scholarship ought to cease to deal with the material world, only that there is no material foundation for a field based purely on what critics have come to call ‘connectionism’.Footnote 40 Indeed, matter often became temporarily – in certain periods of history – inextricable from the global scale not because it was traded or bartered across distance, but for other reasons, such as the fact that certain forms of matter came to affect the entire planet. The pollution of air, for instance, which for half a million years – since humans first harnessed fire – had been a local issue, grew ‘so comprehensive and large-scale’ with high modernity that it came to upset ‘the fundamentals of global atmospheric chemistry’.Footnote 41 Indeed, substances may become ‘global’ – as in, relate to or involve the whole world – not necessarily because humans move them about but because they happen to occur in various places at the same time. Substances such as oxygen, fresh water and clay are distinct from things precisely by virtue of their peculiarly mobile, or, rather, diffuse disposition: the propensity of stuff to exist within another, dissipate and occur at the same time in different places.Footnote 42 The same applies to less appealing sorts of matter, which have likewise come to affect and involve the entire world. While the issue of refuse is as old as humanity, the massive Cold War–era chemical manufacturing of synthetic materials entailed waste that, from the 1970s at least, was publicly recognised as hazardous, toxic and global in its implications.Footnote 43 The disposal of plastics, pesticides and synthetic fibre has become inextricable from the global scale because exports of hazardous waste to poorer, non-OECD countries became an international business in the 1970s,Footnote 44 but also because chemical waste matter, instead of fully deteriorating, dissipates and accumulates in a finite world – in landfills and open dumps and, as microplastics, heavy metal or trace chemicals, in wildlife, oceans, human foetuses and the lithosphere alike.Footnote 45 The study of plastics, pesticides and synthetics certainly lacks the romance that comes with the study of coffee, calicos or combs, but it is, in many ways, more forcibly tied to the global scale than the latter.
To be sure, the global scale of some material events emerges only in hindsight. Studies of historic climate records for the years 1788–94/5, for instance, retrospectively reveal a global, connected climate crisis: flooding on the Peruvian coast; droughts and famines in the Caribbean, Western Europe, South Asia and southern Africa; and heavy rainfall, high temperatures and epidemic disease in North America.Footnote 46 For most contemporaries, however, these would have been unconnected, local climatic stresses, confined to their own area. The same applies to contagious disease. Historians have argued, largely based on retrospective diagnoses, that the 1790s marked the beginning of ‘a great epidemiological upheaval’, a ‘Victorian Age of Pandemics’ in which diseases such as yellow fever, plague and cholera first affected all continents simultaneously. It was only after a series of cataclysmic disease outbreaks over the late 1800s and early 1900s, however – the Russian Flu of 1889–91, the plague wave of the 1890s and the 1918 Influenza Pandemic – and owing to developments in bacteriology, medical statistics and, not least, reporting, that the connectedness of local disease outbreaks as pandemics (that is, global catastrophes) became part of contemporaries’ common awareness.Footnote 47 This relates to a broader debate about the justifiability of the historian’s declaring an event or moment global in hindsight, without reference to contemporary experience.Footnote 48 In the particular case of material histories, however, it also involves a discussion about the justifiable role of present-day scientific knowledge in historical scholarship: the bringing to bear of evidence from epigenetics, climatology or biochemistry on historical inquiries. To many historians, even the most ‘carefully measured use of the sciences’Footnote 49 is associated with the danger of anachronism – of posing ahistorical questions, or wrenching past experiences into a present-day lexis and explanatory repertoire, in ways that would distort their understanding of the past.Footnote 50 Few would deny the potential of a closer dialogue with the sciences, however, wherever they conceive materiality, nature and the human body as changing, versatile and historicizeable.Footnote 51 The field is in urgent need of novel forms of ecologically sensitive history-writing that engage in ‘the plotting of human relations with matter, nature’ or animals over the long term, as Sujit Sivasundaram has argued, and that reflect on co-evolution, mutation, adaptation or, indeed, causation at the interspecies frontier, including the global history of cultured evasion and taxonomic ignorance behind zoonotic disease transfer.Footnote 52
Other material events, processes or experiences came to be regarded as universal or global, in that they hinged upon the finitude of the globe, in the eyes of men and women in the past. As early as the late 1700s and early 1800s, for instance, the advent of ‘specifics’ in medicine – medications that worked ‘universally’, that is – entailed ideas about the modern body as physiologically alike, interchangeable and universal, regardless of temperament, gender or origin.Footnote 53 Human beings in the past may not necessarily have been connected to one another on a material level through the exchange of foodstuffs, tableware or textiles, but many would knowingly have shared a ‘material existence’ – as beings that endure sickness, possess a sense of smell and have a limited lifespan.Footnote 54 Much of the material world became inextricable from the global scale to contemporaries during the Cold War era. Resources came to be seen on a global scale from the mid-twentieth century onwards, for instance, because, given the post-war global imaginary of the world as a closed planet ‘with finite material potential’,Footnote 55 their abundance or shortage became, by definition, global.Footnote 56 Whereas the nineteenth century was all about expansion into an ostensibly ‘endless’ material world – vast tropical woodlands,Footnote 57 infinite mineral ores, yet more oilfields – along ever-advancing commodity and settlement frontiers that moved on ‘once resources were depleted in any given area’,Footnote 58 the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries were marked by many contemporaries’ sense of the world’s inexorable material finitude. By the 1970s the exhaustion of fossil fuels, fresh water and ores ‘on the global scale’ had come to be seen as, if not imminent, then within sight.Footnote 59 While into the mid-1900s the history of petroleum, for instance, was that of a moving frontier – from Upper Burmese, Sumatran and Bornean to Venezuelan, Caspian and Persian oilfieldsFootnote 60 – apprehensions about the ‘geological limits on the world oil supply’ surfaced from the 1950s and had become commonplace by the early 2000s.Footnote 61 This is not to say that changes in the biophysical environment, and awareness of it, had not well preceded the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, naturalists expressed unease about the possibility of anthropogenic resource exhaustion and species rarity as early as the late 1700s.Footnote 62 It was only from the Cold War era, however, that the view that humanity inhabited an endangered planet ‘with finite material potential’ became a majority discourse.Footnote 63 From that moment, resource shortages and scarcity were by necessity canvassed on a global scale. The way the term biodiversity – that is, species diversity – was used from the mid-1980s, as reinforcing ‘the global nature of the conservation problem’, is another case in point. What was at stake was no longer ‘particular wild places or even individual endangered species; the threat was to the diversity of life on Earth itself.’Footnote 64 The very issue of extinction, indeed, is inextricable from its global dimension. The concept and possibility of species extinction, which was first discussed after Georges Cuvier completed his studies of living and extinct elephants between 1796 and 1806, invariably was contingent both on accurate botanical knowledge – of discrete, fixed and stable ontic unities that could appear or vanish forever – and either certainty about a species’ endemism or the ability to contextualise globally. As a matter of fact, the vast swathes of poorly explored territory, where supposedly extinct species might still be found undetected, furnished – other than ideas about the mutability of species – a key argument against Cuvier’s reasoning in the early nineteenth century.Footnote 65
Idolatry and Fetishism
In some global material histories, objects are seen not merely to illustrate or supply evidence of world-making, the global scale and connectivity, but as the ‘signal’, ‘material embodiment’ of and agent or ‘actant’ in processes of global integration. The tendency is palpable in the motif of the object as storyteller, telling ‘tales of other places and unknown lands’, which has become almost a topos in the field. In MacGregor-style ‘histories of the world in objects’, which have enjoyed uncommon popularity even among a wider, non-academic public, a slave drum will ‘speak for millions’, Spanish pieces of eight would ‘tell us about the beginning of a global currency’ and an early Victorian tea-set will speak to us about the impact of empire.Footnote 66 Artefacts are regarded as ‘signals from the past’ that communicate messages across time and ‘tell of the world for which they were made’.Footnote 67 Readings of past material culture as signals of past worlds are by no means limited to popular forms of history-writing. In the most learned, nuanced and academic of historical writings, global or not, ‘the objects that move and the objects that are left behind’ are imputed to have ‘stories to tell’, sometimes particularly about contemporaries’ experience of warfare, migration and displacement.Footnote 68 This line of argument is firmly in the tradition of the early 1980s material culture studies, which was marked by the idea of representation – that artefacts reflect and reveal the ‘patterns of mind’ of the cultures that created them.Footnote 69
Whereas in these studies material culture is a carrier, a projection of the more profound, immaterial beliefs lurking behind it, to the more recent scholarship in the wake of agency theory, ‘the matter is the mind’.Footnote 70 Indeed, often where historians have adopted theories about the agency of things and the ‘ontological dignity’ of matter – its properties and affordances and the ways in which they act on human practices and discoursesFootnote 71 – we find yet another common trope: that of the commodity, diplomatic gift or artwork connecting people, creating global spaces and bringing about worldwide integration.Footnote 72 Global material histories make reference to forms of matter and material culture contributing to the ‘creation of long-distance social and economic connections’, ‘t[ying] together continents and fuel[ing] commerce’ and as ‘key agents of social cohesion and transcultural systems of value in the emergence of a global political community’.Footnote 73 Indeed, the language about pots and plants occasionally bears a striking resemblance to that commonly applied to the ‘unusually cosmopolitan individuals’ critiqued by Jan de Vries, who are seen to reveal the global at a human scale, ‘as they overcome barriers, dissolve misunderstandings, … and create spaces of tolerance’.Footnote 74
Practitioners of global material history have commonly applauded the embrace of agency theory for the study of all societies as a way of correcting ‘forms of global cultural subordination that sustain themselves on the … derogatory function of the term “fetish”’ – a close associate of the ancient idea that the ‘barbarian’, the ‘primitive’ and the ‘savage’ are closer to nature, and to base matter, than those who claim Christianity, civilisation or modernity for themselves.Footnote 75 As a matter of fact, the term fetish (feitiço) surfaced during Iberian expansion and came into its own in the eighteenth century, in enlightened ethnology and critique of religion – be it West African or Catholic – as a term designating an inanimate object irrationally reverenced for powers merely projected onto it.Footnote 76 The concept made its way into the realm of the economic in 1867 with the publication of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, into psychoanalysis via Sigmund Freud’s 1927 writings on fetishism and thence into everyday language, invariably in close company with the charges of irrationality, inferiority and immorality.Footnote 77 Particularly given the concept’s pejorative associations, one would certainly not wish to crudely accuse modern material historians of fetishism, as well as its close associate, idolatry.Footnote 78 The sense that material histories exhibit a certain affinity with fetishism in their understanding of objects as ‘material embodiment’ and as possessing powers they may exert over us is hard to refute, however. Footnote 79 A hint of it at least is present both in the idea of ‘representation’ – the circumstance of the thing or matter standing in the place of a society, with the authority to speak on its behalf – and, more plainly, in that of ‘agency’, as its early proponents well knew – the ability of the thing or matter to act on its environment.Footnote 80
One might object that in referring to gifts as agents in the emergence of a global community, or to a tea-set as telling us about empire, historians are either employing a Latourian idiom that has become commonplace in the humanities or, indeed, speaking metaphorically, employing nothing more than a figure of speech to denote that objects convey stories. But metaphors are not concepts; rather, they are prior to them, as historians have argued. They conjure up a vague feeling, without specifying the exact meaning of a historical event or process.Footnote 81 One would hardly deny that some forms of matter invite desire in far-away places or become a necessity to distant societies more easily than others, both on account of their imbrication with cultural attributions and their peculiar material affordances – their functional, sensorial and technical capacities, or their particular aesthetic, olfactory or resilient properties. Footnote 82 Nor would anyone deny that material objects permit and encourage us to ask different questions, occasionally even to defy established chronologies or reframe established narratives, including that of ‘connectivity’.Footnote 83 Surely, action arises from a conglomeration of things and persons. The crux of the matter is how to determine the share of material things or affordances in the making or breaking of a global community or commercial link, in relation to the many other factors that would also have gone into it: political momentum, extant economic structures or, indeed, sheer human will.
This necessary distinction is complicated further by the fact that most references to things that talk or bring about global ties are about man-made, commodified or otherwise artefactual objects: tea-sets, cotton or suitcases. Such things are already imbricated with human subjectivity in ways that further obscure the boundaries between human and non-human factors in global historical processes. However, it is precisely their close vicinity with humanity as well as their humanisation – by means of a language about tea-sets that resembles that employed to describe humans – that allows the historian to conjure up the sense that these things were our accomplices in global processes, when in fact these, and they, are at least in part our creation. That language implies that there was a congregation of objects that all tended toward integration and cohesion or exhibited a willingness to speak of foreign places, shared in our curiosity about them, when in reality, curiosity, wanderlust and free will are some of the last preserves of humanity. As philosophers of action have long argued – incidentally, a field largely unresponsive to and aloof from actor–network theory and the new materialism, as Andreas Malm observed – human agency is qualitatively different from that of matter in its intentionality. Fossil fuels, the morning light or a steamboat undeniably have effects, but they do not form intentions or own actions as humans do, including the causal reverberations that outrun our capacity for foresight.Footnote 84 Matter and material culture, though they certainly set constraints and offer possibilities, do not actually talk, nor do they willingly help bring about global integration. Rather, global historians may sometimes be reading their biographies, under the influence of their own time’s fascination with agency, global community and cosmopolitanism,Footnote 85 to make them seem to be doing so. They really may sometimes be revering material objects for powers they themselves have projected onto them.
The Pull of the Particular
In many ways, the association between matter and the global scale is, of course, downright counterintuitive. Indeed, historically, materiality has long been, and remains to a degree, associated with immediacy, proximity and the ‘lower order’.Footnote 86
Histories of matter, and material culture, will often begin with a narrative of absence, and loss – how for more than a century after its inception as an institutionalised discipline, history was largely purblind to matter and material culture.Footnote 87 The observation is in some measure accurate, to be sure. Not only did a large part of the field, in the tradition of historicism, rely principally on written sources; its understanding of history, broadly speaking, was one in which there were no material – that is, environmental, physical, natural – constraints on human agency or thought.Footnote 88 Modern historians’ oversight was expressive of a broader astigmatism of industrialised societies at large that likely had a religious substratum:Footnote 89 the theological premise – present in many of the world’s principal religions, from Buddhism and Hinduism to Christianity and Judaism – that materiality, not least our ‘body as the core of our sensuous existence’, is that which ought to be transcended, the merely apparent ‘behind which lies that which is real’.Footnote 90 Indeed, ‘fear and contempt’ of matter was particularly prominent in Protestant ontology – formative to historicism – which defined the value of the human in part through ‘its distinctiveness from, and superiority to the material world’.Footnote 91 In the dominant Victorian use of the term, materialism – different from materiality in being prescriptive and abstract rather than descriptive – was the object of a Protestant critique of Epicureanism, lust and gluttony.Footnote 92
It is the very association of materiality with immediacy, sensuousness and the ‘lower order’ that may account for some of its appeal to historians, global or not, and to a general public. For one thing, to global material historians in particular, matter and material culture carry the promise of opening up a window onto the little, least-understood details of daily life – eating, dressing, lodging – a sympathetic history that will seemingly bring us closer to our historical subjects, especially the ‘indigenous’, the non-European and the ‘subaltern’ who have not left written traces.Footnote 93 A drum formerly owned by an enslaved person or the contents of a maidservant’s tie-on pocket not only ‘speak for’ men and women ‘who were unable to write their own story’,Footnote 94 moving in their very mundaneness, smallness and intimacy. To many historians, objects convey the human, individual dimensions of past lives; they ‘mediate distances of time and space’ in ways words and images cannot.Footnote 95 Though historians rarely work with the objects themselves – usually, they rely on inventories, accounts or testaments – material remains ‘carry a special credibility’ and authority for many scholars, partly because they could be verified through the senses.Footnote 96 Like curators and visitors of museums that offer a ‘more fully embodied experience’ – where people are made to smell food, feel the sun on their head or take their place in a cattle car – historical writings are a reflection of the contested, yet deep-rooted, phenomenological belief that the touching, smelling or feeling of things lends proximity, ‘a more immediate sense of connection’ and understanding than would a history told in words.Footnote 97
This is treacherous, to be sure. As any sensory historian will tell you, material remains cannot be verified through the senses because the cultural and historical context overwrites physiological factors and because physiological factors change over time, partly in response to cultural and historical context.Footnote 98 What is more, the notion that contact with historical materials entails some sort of proximity or superior understanding is culturally contingent, and in some measure irrational. As Ruth Klüger, a Holocaust survivor, once put it in relation to memorial sites on former concentration camp grounds, it is ‘superstition (Aberglaube)’ to think that the ghosts cling to things or to the places where they departed from this life. Immediacy does not result from being in the same place but only from being in the same place at the same time (Zeitschaft).Footnote 99 Still, the appeal of materiality on account of its association with sensuousness and the promise of immediacy is pervasive and all but inescapable; unwittingly, global historians may be affected by it.
Materiality is commonly associated not just with the tangible, the intimate and the mundane, but also, along those same lines, with particularity, ‘specificity’ and singularity.Footnote 100 Though by now heavily theorised, things intuitively promise stability, warmth and relief from theory, as Bill Brown put it in a 2001 article.Footnote 101 Indeed, materiality, or materialism, is widely seen as ‘an aspect of a relation between the abstract and the concrete’,Footnote 102 invariably falling on the side of the concrete – the ‘micro’ rather than the ‘macro’,Footnote 103 the contingent rather than the universal or, indeed, the ‘local’Footnote 104 rather than the global. Untranscended materiality has often been placed in opposition to theory, ‘order’ and structure and, conversely, attributed an affinity with, as Peter Pels put it, ideas about ‘transgression’, ‘fancy’ and the ‘fact’Footnote 105 – the ‘apparently noninterpretative (numerical) description … of particulars’ rather than the systematic claims derived from it.Footnote 106 Indeed, the value attributed to non-artefactual forms of matter, as a natural fact and source of certainty on which to build human knowledge, is a hallmark of Western modernity.Footnote 107 Even though, somewhat ironically, it was largely through sociohistorical processes of abstraction – the abstract space of the global market, statistical enumeration or naturalist taxonomy – that our modern ‘inclination to associate the material with the concrete’ came about,Footnote 108 the association is a formidable and a tenacious one. While the relationship with singularity for late-modern material culture may be more tenuous – with changes in manufacturing and the rise of industrial production affecting material culture post-1800 – that with particularity is not.Footnote 109 More recently, digitisation, especially digital surrogacy, in purporting to supersede matter and bringing it into focus, may well have further exacerbated the pull of materiality as well as its long-standing association with tactility, particularity and ‘originality as authenticity’, as various material historians have suggested.Footnote 110 Walter Benjamin’s argument, first made in his 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, that the aura of an object is tied to its ‘unique existence’, and consequently lost in reproductions, is at present widely, if controversially, applied to digital surrogates.Footnote 111
Global historians may cherish the material world as they do because materiality’s close relation to the particular, the authentic and the concrete somehow assists their cause. It certainly helps them avoid the accusation of a penchant for ‘macro-perspectives’, ‘totality’ and structuralism still sometimes levelled at them.Footnote 112 It also furthers, however, what has, for better or worse, been their most fundamental argument: the contention of a growing and more or less continuous global integration. For if even the most intimate, mundane and singular aspects of life speak to world-making and connectivity, who could deny global historians having won their case entirely? At any rate, an inquiry into the hidden premises underlying present-day global material histories – our enthusiasm for the particular, the singular and the ‘auratic’, and the awe of matter that permeates it – is, so the chapter holds, just as worth our while as that into Protestant historicism or enlightened ethnology. Scholars have studied for some time now how specific, local conditions affected and altered the writing of global history in various parts of the globe.Footnote 113 It may well be that modern historians’ association of matter with sensuousness and immediacy, their evident enthusiasm for the particular and the ‘authentic’, is in some measure owing to the socioreligious (especially Protestant) and cultural texture of Northwest European and North American societies. There is no reason why historians from these parts should not, just like West African or East Asian ones, be influenced by local, contingent circumstances; it is their continued ability to set trends on a global scale, however, that may well account for some of the pull of material histories globally.
Orders and Storeys
This chapter is not the place to engage in debates about the genealogy, the constructedness or, indeed, the aptness of the idea of scale, of ‘upper’ and ‘lower levels’ and of ‘a layered order’,Footnote 114 nor to question whether historical processes are indeed located at the level of certain storeys and whether distinct ‘levels of observation can reveal different aspects’,Footnote 115 or ought to be assigned fundamentally ‘different heuristic potentials’.Footnote 116 It is the place to argue, however, that the association between particularity and materiality contributes to the latter’s attraction: for the firmly entrenched notion that there is such a thing as ‘a layered order’, alongside deeply rooted dichotomies of original and copy, materiality and ideality,Footnote 117 practice and theory,Footnote 118 would have played a part in drawing historians, global or not, to the material world. The chapter is also the place to observe that materiality has no natural scale, level or context, no self-evident, obvious place in any order. It can be both intimate and intricate in atmospheric chemistry, cosmopolitan at one moment and parochial the next, both of a lower and of the highest order. Global historians have been at the forefront of critiques of scholarship that, in framing national objects of inquiry, has participated in naturalising them.Footnote 119 It is precisely in the knowledge of their own rich deconstructivist tradition and of the equally rich ‘biographic’ tradition in material history that global historians ought to approach the material world. Critically aware of their own times’ socioreligious texture, global imaginary and discursive habits, they will be able to see the world of matter and material culture in all its changeability, elusiveness and polysemy.
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