For the Home and the Body: Dutch and Indian Ways of Early Modern Consumption

Abstract

For a decade or two, early modern consumption has been back on the scholarly agenda. In the slipstream of Werner Sombart, earlier work was mostly theoretical and highly Eurocentric in nature. In the mid-1990s the massive American project on ‘Culture and Consumption in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’ was a game-changer.2 As in almost all projects on the early modern West, however, the industrial revolution looms on the horizon. Hence, as a mere pre-history of the Great Divergence, most of the attention has focused on the experience of early modern Britain. During the past few years, Maxine Berg in particular has contributed significantly to a better understanding of early modern British consumption by emphatically bringing Asian agency into the story. Berg seeks to understand the contribution of Asia in the making of Europe on the basis of European consumption of Asian products. The project, Europe’s Asian Centuries, aimed not only to map but also understand the changing patterns of consumption in the context of a cross-cultural dialogue between Europe and Asia that intensified during the early modern period.3