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Lecture 2: Global Histories of Production and Consumption (Consumption in…
Lecture 2: Global Histories of Production and Consumption
Pre 1500- 1800
800 CE: Indian Ocean- trading zone in sugar, spices, pepper, silk
15th c- America's opened up- trading zones became truly global
1500-1800s 1% huge growth trade every year- rise of commerce, East to West
Changing relationship between bodies and clothes
18th Century
Role of women in commodities for the domestic sphere was accentuated
Emergence of modern consumption and consumer society developing. Enlightenment- progress, rationality and productivity
Islamic faith quicker to uptake new ideas of consumerism than buddhism or christianity
19th/20th Century
Extensive spread of mass markets and mass consumption
Style became more important for all classes
Continued gendered nature of domestic consumption
Emergence of pseudo-public spaces or consumption, civic and privately owned public spaces
Consumption becoming a visible aspect of daily life
Spatial distribution of mass consumption and mass commodities
Caution with Chronology
Consumption contingent on place based and complex social, political and economic interactions between people, things and processes
Consumption as spatially and temporally uneven
Trentmann's Empire of Things
Africa and the Global Life of Things
African agency- consumption in cultural and historical context
Understanding African trends enabled us to see nuances of why global hierarchies emerged and the role that consumption has played in that
Consumption in East Africa before 19th C
People as goods
Symbolic potential of an Umbrella
Had long been a symbol of the state and male patrician identity. Umbrellas were invested with new meanings, abecame associated with broader cultural norms
Early 20th Century
Expanding consumption crops for export
Emergence of a colonial regime
Objects as a way to acquire and maintain power and control ovr people, labour remained difficult to control
Externalising the consumption of slave labour, converting people into useful goods than to extract their labour
Historical/archealogical evidence of trade for >1000 yrs
Region integrates nto global markets - ivory, rummer and global commodities
East Africa was the last major slave-exporting region
Shift from subsistence to market, aspire to fashion
What can an understanding of History do for SCP?
:
The emergence of positions within global hierarchies
The agency of countries to international interventions
local points of differentiation, distinction and resistance
Production and consumption emerged together
Reflections of various moments in time
Example: Cleanliness and Civilisation
Histories of cleanliness and modernity linked with colonisation
Cleanliness as a civilising tool
Commodity racism in advertising
Gendered practices, gendered infrastructures
Westerners perceived a complete absence of clealiness
Hygiene important for health and mortality rates- important in achieving the MDGs and SDGs