12 research outputs found
Intoxicants and the invention of 'consumption'
In 1600 the word ‘consumption’ was a term of medical pathology describing the ‘wasting, petrification of things’. By 1700 it was also a term of economic discourse: ‘In commodities, the value rises as its quantity is less and vent greater, which depends upon it being preferred in its consumption’. The article traces the emergence of this key category of economic analysis to debates over the economy in the 1620s and subsequent disputes over the excise tax, showing how ‘consumption’ was an early term in the developing lexicon of political economy. In so doing the article demonstrates the important role of ‘intoxicants’ – i.e. addictive and intoxicating commodities like alcohols and tobaccos – in shaping these early meanings and uses of ‘consumption’. It outlines the discursive importance of intoxicants, both as the foci for discussions of ‘superfluous’ and ‘necessary’ consumption and the target of legislation on consumption. And it argues that while these discussions had an ideological dimension, or dimensions, they were also responses to material increases in the volume and diversity of intoxicants in early seventeenth-century England. By way of conclusion the article suggests the significance of the Low Countries as a point of reference for English writers, as well as a more capacious and semantically sensitive approach to changes in early-modern consumption practices
A closed elite? Bristol’s Society of Merchant Venturers and the abolition of slave trading
Why, despite clear economic incentives, did eighteenth-century slave traders fail to defend their business interests against the abolition campaign? We focus on the outport of Bristol as a case in point. Our main argument is that slave traders lacked an organizational basis to translate their economic interests into political influence. Supporting evidence from merchant networks over the 1698–1807 period shows that the Society of Merchant Venturers offered such an organizational site for collective political action. Members of this chartered company controlled much of Bristol’s seaborne commerce and held chief elective offices in the municipal government. However, the Society evolved into an organization that represented the interests of a closed elite. High barriers to entry prevented the slave traders from using the Society as a vehicle for political mobilization. Social cohesion among slave traders outside the chartered company hinged on centrally positioned brokers. Yet the broker positions were held by the few merchants who became members of the Society, and who eventually ceased their engagement in slave trading. The result was a fragmented network that undermined the slave traders’ concerted efforts to mobilize against the political pressure of the abolitionist movement
Entangled Modernity and the Study of Variegated Capitalism: Some Suggestions for a Postcolonial Research Agenda
The First European Colonization of the North Atlantic
Many facets of what are commonly considered to be novel and unique characteristics
of modern Capitalism have their roots, often in a mature form, in the Medieval
Period (Abu-Lughod 1991; Crosby 2004; Hoffmann 2001; Marks 2007). Archaeological
work focusing on the Norse North Atlantic from the Early Medieval Period
through to the Early Modern Period has been especially effective at revealing certain
of these phenomena, specifically those dealing with the commoditization of
natural resources and the influence of global markets on colonization. The early
medieval colonial expansion of the Norse and the subsequent centuries of interaction
with the medieval world system anticipate the central place that international
global markets had on the formation of the post-Columbian world. This essay will
discuss the North Atlantic Norse colonies, specifically the Faroe Islands, Iceland,
Greenland, and Newfoundland. For the purposes of this volume, this discussion is
offered as a counter-point to the discussions of the post-Columbian colonial efforts
of the Europeans in the Americas. The intention is to use the medieval Scandinavian
colonial migration to problematize the larger discussion on the nature of colonies,
colonialism, and the emergence of capitalism