Domesticating Goods from Overseas: Global Material Culture in the Early Modern Netherlands

Abstract

This essay is based on the notion that the early modern world was shaped by connections that stretched across geographical, political and cultural boundaries. The mobility of early modern people, ideas and things, and the networks they created and relied on, facilitated flows of material and immaterial interactions. Within that early modern connected world, material culture played a key role. Goods ranging from treasured, unique objects to commodities traded in vast quantities always accumulate layers of meanings as they move through time and space. By looking at a number of things in circulation in the early modern Netherlands, we can identify them as both ‘global’, in the sense of having travelled across long distances, having accumulated associations with the exotic, and as ‘local’, part of the cultural practices we have come to think of as Dutch. Methodologically, this essay combines a close reading of the idealized representations of things in domestic spaces we encounter in paintings with an analysis of the materiality, design and historical trajectories of the things themselves. Tracing global and local aspects of design as it appears in idealized representations and in early modern Dutch historical objects, I argue that embodied experiences play key roles in the domestication of goods from overseas. I seek to show that through vision and touch, and the proximity of objects to bodies in domestic environments, goods from all over the world become part of the material culture of the seventeenth-century Netherlands. As exotic goods and materials become part of the domestic environment, global goods gain local meanings, and simultaneously bestow new layers of meaning on the material culture of the early modern Netherlands.