8 - Global Turns in European History and the History of Consumption

Summary

Perhaps the key area where global history has affected European history has been the study of the trade in commodities and its impact on European consumer behaviour. Yet there remains a divide between study of the production and distribution of goods from coffee and sugar to porcelain and muslins and study of how these goods became desirable, then embedded in European consumption and everyday life. Historians have investigated the profound impact of Asian manufactured goods on the material cultures of Europe, but they know less about their conditions of production and trade in China, India, and Japan. Global history, now combined as it is with the recent rise of the history of capitalism, also challenges European historians of consumer culture and industrialization to connect the European reception of wider world goods and raw materials to the Americas and to slavery. This is a key new direction in historical research. At a time now of historians uncovering Europe’s slavery past, and enquiring further into coerced and low-wage labour systems, we continue to write histories of slavery and slave plantations separately from those of Europe’s consumer cultures of sugar, coffee, and cotton.