Session Abstract

Early modern Japanese, Iroquois and African people increasingly shared ties to a global network of manufactured consumer goods over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but their ties to global markets remained locally motivated. Papers focusing on these disparate areas examine the common and diverging reasons non-European people chose to engage with the expanding market for consumer goods marked by Europe's consumer revolution. Together these papers ask whether, in their contexts, consumerism was revolutionary, and how local concerns reshaped interactions with global markets. By examining consumers who purchased from European merchants, these papers explore the intersection of imperial and economic ambitions with indigenous agency, and complicate the universality of consumer desire.

Although in Europe the consumer revolution has been connected to industrialization, together these papers will examine indigenous circumstances which gave rise to consumerism, and how local contexts shaped patterns of consumption for foreign goods. Consumption transformed the world of goods, domesticating imported goods and integrating them into the lexicon of local material culture. The initial attractions of imported goods varied widely in early modern Japan, Iroquoia and South Africa, ranging from cheap substitutes for local products, exotic novelties, time savers and markers of distinction, but unique local uses produced the common outcome of domestication.

In examining consumerism in three global settings, this panel complicates consumption as an active force in shaping cross-cultural exchange rather than passive act of absorption. Kane's paper argues that Iroquois consumers integrated European manufactures only when their adoption decreased family labor burdens, allowing more time for the florescence of indigenous decorative work with new materials. The Iroquois consumer revolution was driven by Native desire to produce less rather than consume more, increasing trade while decreasing the amount of work performed by Iroquois women and families. Chaiklin's paper shows that unique patterns of trade, urbanization and proto-industrialism in Japan created a consumer revolution similar to that in Europe. Groenewald argues that the patterns of trade between indigenous South Africans and the Dutch reflected both changes in the larger Dutch India trade and locally motivated needs, changing as the local political situation changed. Using travel accounts, contemporary local sources, credit and labor records, visual sources and archaeological material, these papers draw on diverse primary sources to examine cross-cultural trade from all sides. Together these papers examine the creation of indigenaity and tradition, complicate our understanding of the growth of consumerism, and localize the emergence of global trade in the early modern world.