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AMIDST THINGS: NEW HISTORIES OF COMMODITIES, CAPITAL, AND CONSUMPTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 May 2018

KATE SMITH
KATE SMITH*
Affiliation:
University of Birmingham
*
Department of History, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, b15 2ttk.smith@bham.ac.uk
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Abstract

The review engages with three recently published works, which represent a cross-section of different approaches to studying processes related to the material world. The works consider the emergence of global systems of cotton manufacturing and its relationship to capitalism, the growth of tea consumption in Britain and its social, cultural, and economic impacts, and histories of consumption over a broad chronological and geographical span, respectively. Together, they demonstrate that histories of production, trade, consumption, and use are being rethought in light of the new approaches and questions prompted by global history and new histories of capitalism. At the same time, the review argues, the publication of these works suggests that fundamental assumptions about the material world are changing. Under the influence of new materialism, historians are increasingly tackling questions of agency, materiality, and thingness. As a result, alongside studying what objects mean, historians are increasingly asking what things do. The review argues for the need to ensure that such approaches continue to interact with cultural and social concerns in order to form analyses that fully grapple with the complexity of the material world, as it existed in the past.

Type
Historiographical Reviews
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 61 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 841 - 861
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

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22 Ibid., p. 9.

23 Ibid., p. 120.

24 Ibid., pp. 163 and 177.

25 Ibid., p. 73.

26 Ibid., pp. 90 and 187–91.

27 Ibid., p. 181.

28 Ibid., p. 221.

29 Ibid., p. 223.

30 Ibid., p. 31.

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54 Beckert, Empire of cotton, p. 169. At the same time, Egypt also suffered the assaults of British merchants.

55 Ibid., p. xxi.

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85 It is important to note that the material turn connected with ‘new materialism’ is sharply distinct from material culture studies and the project that those interested in material culture are embarked on.

86 Chris Otter, ‘Locating matter: the place of materiality in urban history’, in Bennett and Joyce, eds., Material powers, p. 46.

87 Bonneuil, Christophe and Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste, The shock of the anthropocene: the earth, history and us (London and New York, NY, 2016), p. 3Google Scholar. The importance of developing more ecologically aware approaches to historical analysis have largely been prompted by the anthropocene. See Crutzen, Paul J., ‘Geology of mankind’, Nature, 415 (2002), p. 23CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

88 Cronon, William, Nature's metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, NY, 1991)Google Scholar. For more recent examples of works that include material systems, see Trentmann, Empire of things, pp. 174–221.

89 Mitchell, Timothy, Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity (Berkeley, CA, 2002)Google Scholar. See Joyce, Patrick, The state of freedom: a social history of the British state since 1800 (Cambridge, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bennett and Joyce, eds., Material powers.

90 Trentmann, Empire of things, pp. 174–221.

91 Ibid., p. 179.

92 Ibid., p. 183.

93 Ibid., p. 12.

94 Ibid., p. 665.

95 Ibid., p. 664.

96 Appadurai, ed., The social life of things.

97 Trentmann, Empire of things, p. 17.

98 For example, see Ko, Dorothy, Cinderella's sisters: a revisionist history of footbinding (Berkeley, CA, 2005)Google Scholar; White, Sophie, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians (Philadelphia, PA, 2012)Google Scholar.

99 Bennett, Vibrant matter, p. 12.

100 Ibid., pp. 12–13.

101 Chen, Mel Y., Animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering and queer affect (Durham, NC, and London, 2012), p. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

102 Brown, ‘Thing theory’, p. 4.

103 Trentmann, ‘Materiality in the future of history’, p. 286.