A review by nghia
Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann
2.0
This book simply tries to do too much. A history of every non-essential thing in every country across five hundred years. In the introduction Trentmann writes "My intention has been to follow major themes across time and space, not to try to be encyclopaedic." But the resulting book very much comes across as "encyclopaedic". How can it not when it has frequent passages such as this one from 1609 listing the Chinese goods for sale to the Spanish in Manila.
And that's hardly an isolated occurrence. I just felt...weary...reading this. I struggled to see the forest for the trees, constantly buried in an avalanche of factoids, such as
I struggled to discern what the "major themes across time and space" were...other than the obvious "once people started having more than subsistence incomes they were able to start affording other things, what those things were was a complicated contingency of history and geography".
This isn't to say the book is terrible or has nothing interesting to say. Simply that the chaff outweighed the wheat for me. For every section on how "cotton [...] was the first truly global mass consumer good" there we be sections that retread the Great Divergence (between Europe and Asia/rest of the world) debate without adding much.
To some extent that is unavoidable -- how could such an all-encompassing topic like "the things we spend money on" not end-up touching on colonialism, post-colonialism, industrialization, religion, feminism, child labor, and so much more. So even as I disliked Trentmann's totalizing approach, I also struggled to see how he could have meaningfully reduced it without gutting the story and turning into another overly-simplistic "how coffee changed the world" type book.
At the end I felt like Trentmann's main message was, "Wow, everything is just vastly more complicated and interrelated than you can imagine and even 800+ pages I can only scrape the surface". But...at that point I begin to think the book has set itself an impossible task: this kind of book is doomed to failure, I think. The topic is just too broad.
white cotton cloth of different kinds and qualities, for all uses . . . many bed ornaments, hangings, coverlets, and tapestries of embroidered velvet; . . . tablecloths, cushions, and carpets . . . copper kettles . . . little boxes and writing-cases; beds, tables, chairs, and gilded benches, painted in many figures and patterns; . . . numberless other gewgaws and ornaments of little value and worth, which are esteemed among the Spaniards; besides a quantity of fine crockery of all kinds; . . . beads of all kinds . . . and rarities – which, did I refer to them all, I would never finish, nor have sufficient paper for it
And that's hardly an isolated occurrence. I just felt...weary...reading this. I struggled to see the forest for the trees, constantly buried in an avalanche of factoids, such as
In the early seventeenth century, for example, men and women in Bondorf and Gebersheim, two villages in Württemberg, Germany, owned 3 and 12 articles of clothing respectively. A century later, the number had shot up to 16 and 27 pieces. By 1800, it had doubled again.
I struggled to discern what the "major themes across time and space" were...other than the obvious "once people started having more than subsistence incomes they were able to start affording other things, what those things were was a complicated contingency of history and geography".
This isn't to say the book is terrible or has nothing interesting to say. Simply that the chaff outweighed the wheat for me. For every section on how "cotton [...] was the first truly global mass consumer good" there we be sections that retread the Great Divergence (between Europe and Asia/rest of the world) debate without adding much.
To some extent that is unavoidable -- how could such an all-encompassing topic like "the things we spend money on" not end-up touching on colonialism, post-colonialism, industrialization, religion, feminism, child labor, and so much more. So even as I disliked Trentmann's totalizing approach, I also struggled to see how he could have meaningfully reduced it without gutting the story and turning into another overly-simplistic "how coffee changed the world" type book.
At the end I felt like Trentmann's main message was, "Wow, everything is just vastly more complicated and interrelated than you can imagine and even 800+ pages I can only scrape the surface". But...at that point I begin to think the book has set itself an impossible task: this kind of book is doomed to failure, I think. The topic is just too broad.