Las Islas Del Lujo: Productos Exóticos, Nuevos Consumos Y Cultura Económica Europea, 1650–1800

Abstract

The importation of Asian and American luxury goods had a profound impact on European society from the seventeenth century onward. Indian cottons and tea, Asian and American coffee, sugar and American tobacco all were introduced as elite luxury goods and slowly became mass consumption items. For this to occur, the major European overseas traders had to change basic mercantile and even medieval ideas about luxury consumption and had to modernize their commercial relations. This was especially the case for the three leading import nations, England, Holland, and France, all of whom had to learn the importance of reexporting their goods to other European nations and had to develop sophisticated credit mechanisms to deal with long-distance trade. It also meant that governments had to reorganize their tax systems to allow Asian and American goods to be reexported. This trade became more intense over time, and by the end of the eighteenth century it accounted for a significant share of international trade for these key states.This is the important story that the distinguished historian Marcello Carmagnani has to tell. In this broad-ranging survey, he covers everything from changing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought about the political economy related to consumption and growth, to the dynamics of the individual trades. This is world history at its best, weaving together intellectual, cultural, and economic history in a fast-paced review of these developments. It was these so-called luxury trades that he argues had the most impact on changing social and even class dynamics in the Old World. All these goods first were consumed by the elite, and only as these European economies evolved into more complex and coherent markets did these goods begin to reach the middle and lower classes and move from luxury items to general consumer goods.Carmagnani first provides a detailed review, in three dense chapters, of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century economic thought and the rise of the so-called “commercial or political economy school” of modern economic theorists and philosophers who stressed that all consumption promoted growth and that there was no real distinction between goods consumed or produced as being better or worse for economic growth. In this they rejected the ideas of the Physiocrats and other early modern theorists who placed primacy on agricultural production or held that imported luxury goods should be restricted by the state through sumptuary laws because their production and consumption were detrimental to growth. This was one part of a complex debate about liberty, property, and prosperity that formed an important element of Enlightenment thought. This revolution in economic thought was also a response, he suggests, to the increasing consumption of Asian and American products, from Indian cotton textiles to coffee, tea, sugar, chocolate, and tobacco, and the need to fit this new commerce into a coherent economic model of positive development.While Asian and American products were known in Europe from the sixteenth century, it was only in the seventeenth century that Chinese tea, American and Asian coffee and sugar, and American tobacco and chocolate began to appear in large quantities on the European market. How to define these so-called “new drugs” produced a new European literature on whether they were harmful or had real health benefits. Carmagnani provides a fascinating review of this seventeenth-century “scientific” literature in all the major European languages. It is clear from the volume of the positive literature that cultural and intellectual ideas about these products quickly followed popular consumption and moved toward accepting these products as basic necessities of life rather than as luxuries. In turn, as the major imperial states of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries realized the profits to be made from their importation and reexportation to other nations, the intellectual opposition disappeared as well. These new products also generated a whole new set of European industries to process and use or replicate these exotic products. Carmagnani also shows how crucial these new non-European products were for Europe's relations with other regions. Thus Indian finished cottons and American tobacco (primarily Bahian) also became fundamental goods in the European trade with Africa.Although Carmagnani properly concentrates on England, France, and the Netherlands, it would have been useful to have more detail on the role of Iberian empires. It would also have been interesting to compare the relative impacts of these luxury items with the European adoption of basic American food crops (e.g., the potato). But these are minor complaints for an otherwise extraordinary survey that will rank as required reading along with the classic studies of Alfred Crosby. Readers will find much to contemplate about how the commercial expansion of Europe into Asia and America generated so profound a change in Europe itself, let alone its impact on the non-European world.