Project Details
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Consumer revolution and changes in household consumption in probate inventories in Northwestern Germany (16.-19. c.)

Subject Area Modern and Contemporary History
Early Modern History
Term from 2019 to 2023
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 436508425
 
The thesis of an early modern consumer revolution describes a change in material culture in which the demand of pre-modern households was increasingly met by the purchase of market goods at the expense of subsistence production based on households. Households possessed ever larger quantities of differentiated manufactured goods, and also globally traded colonial goods such as coffee, tea, sugar, porcelain, cotton, etc. This development affected not only urban elites, who saw themselves committed to a lifestyle oriented towards aristocratic splendour, but increasingly also - so the thesis - the small-town bourgeoisie and rural households. Populuxe goods spread to all social classes - smaller, relatively cheap things such as colorful ribbons or printed handkerchiefs that many people could afford and which thus set significant markers for the further development of material culture. The beginnings of this change are located in the 17th and 18th centuries; geographically, they have so far mainly been discussed for the North Atlantic riparian areas, especially England and the Netherlands (DE VRIES 2008). The investigation of changes in the material culture of pre-modern households under the perspective of the thesis of a consumer revolution touches on two historiographical discourses: on the one hand, the debate about the preconditions of the Industrial Revolution and the ‘Great Divergence’; on the other hand, the analysis of the economic and consumption strategies of pre-modern households in the context of market formation.The proposed project examines the changes in the material culture of rural households over the period from about 1550 to 1808 to determine the extent to which the thesis of a pre-modern consumer revolution can claim to be valid for the Northwest German inland. This goes far beyond previous studies on Germany, which have mainly concentrated on urban areas and only focused on a small minority of the population. The thesis of the consumer revolution can be examined from perspectives of economic history, social history and cultural history. The project aims primarily at a quantitative social history, which looks at significant elements of a changing material culture and examines them for consistent references to a possible consumer revolution. In addition, the project will contribute to the transformation of consumer culture, in which practices of meeting demand and consumption will be differentiated according to social contexts and life courses using selected case studies. The social practices are thus juxtaposed with contemporary normative statements, such limitations in luxury, and can be understood as a practical sense of material culture.
DFG Programme Research Grants
 
 

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