Material Culture

Bibliographic Data

ID23449249
AuthorsS A M Adshead (University of Canterbury, corresponding author)
Year1997
Pages1-30
Publication date1997-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueMaterial Culture in Europe and China, 1400-1800 (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan UK (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1007/978-1-349-25762-1_1
OpenAlexW4245279461
ISBN9781349257621
LanguageEN
References cited11

Between 1400 and 1800, the four primary civilizations of Western Eurasia, China, Black Africa and Meso-America lost their former isolation and were transformed. As a result of the Mongolian explosion, the Great Discoveries, and concomitant or subsequent renaissances, reformations and enlightenments, the cultural monads ceased to be windowless and began to reflect a wider reality. Among these developments, which may be said to have founded the modern world, was a change in material culture, not yet adequately studied, which will be called the rise of consumerism. This change went furthest in Europe, because it was rooted in Christian materialism, that sacramental sense of this world which Michael Novak has emphasized in his recent writings. However, because it was propagated through a new globalization of commodities, consumerism may also be found to some extent in China, Islam, Black Africa and Meso-America, in roughly that order. Consumerism, like science and democracy, has become part of the modern world order, and shares with them an intellectual dimension. The rise of consumerism involved not merely an increasing number and variety of available commodities and, as emphasized by Braudel, the emergence for the first time of genuine choice for consumers, but also, concomitant with that wider choice, a deeper penetration of the physical by the psychological and the intellectual: Popper’s World 1 by his World 2 and World 3.1

Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Globalization, Historical Perspectives, and International Relations · Materials Science

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