Frank Trentmann

What we consume has become the defining feature of our lives: our economies live or die by spending, we are treated more as consumers than workers, and even public services are presented to us as products in a supermarket. In this monumental study, acclaimed historian Frank Trentmann unfolds the extraordinary history that has shaped our material world, from late Ming China, Renaissance Italy and the British empire to the present. Astonishingly wide-ranging and richly detailed, Empire of Things explores how we have come to live with so much more, how this changed the course of history, and the global challenges we face as a result.

How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First

Empire of Things

this right here is ultimately why i picked up this book, even though it might as well be a murder weapon via blunt force trauma. i've read enough moral panic over the state of consumerism; it's about time i delve into its comprehensive history to form my own informed opinions instead of parroting everyone else.

kuuri

Consuming is too diverse and its history too rich to fit either extreme model: complacent mass consumption or individual freedom. The book’s main aim is a different one: it wants to step back and give readers a chance to look at the subject from a historical perspective, to explain how consumption evolved the way it did over the last five centuries. This means it is, above all, interested in questions of process.

in as much as many would like to do away with fashion as if it were mere frivolity, the fact remains that in a society where status is tenuous and often renegotiated, consumption allows you to carve your own place—your niche, as you will.

There was a powerful symmetry, then, between the rise in consumption, the culture of politeness and the philosophical notion of the self as fiction. Just like the self, the polite person is always adapting, making himself affable and facilitating sociability with the help of fashions and accessories.

by weaving fabric, we craft an extension of our identity—fashioning ourselves into someone we desire rather than limiting our selves to the skin we were swaddled with at birth.

As an article of consumption, clothing is uniquely sensitive. There is no other thing which has such a tactile and visual presence in our lives. We touch it, see it, feel it. The clothes we wear contribute to our sense of bodies. The line between 'us' and 'the thing' is therefore a fuzzy one.

something to be said here about the concept of ownership as a means to power, but thanks to consumption for providing an alternative to slavery, i guess?

Status came to reside in the ownership of objects, not people... Once owning people was no longer an option, wealth and power were channelled into things (or saved for future consumption).

Empire of Things quotes

Join the club