Trentmann looks for the origins of modern consumption in ‘three cultures of consumption’: Italy during the Renaissance, China during the Ming dynasty, and Britain and the Netherlands during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Renaissance coincided with a flourishing of material culture in the northern Italian cities, but the acquisition of goods was often a way of stockpiling wealth. Those goods were made to be stored and reused, not exhausted and replaced; this attitude also imposed a constraint on the cycle of fashion insofar as chasing novelty could reduce citizens’ net worth. Moreover, in a pattern that recurs throughout consumption history, increasing material wealth gave rise to moral panics, perhaps most spectacularly exemplified by Girolamo Savonarola’s ‘bonfire of the vanities’ in 1497.

In Ming China (1368–1644), the growth of internal trade produced a similar culture of conspicuous consumption among the merchant class. In Renaissance Italy, those who would associate consumption with moral decay had both Christianity and the Stoic tradition (transmitted through Cicero) to draw upon; in China, Confucianism functioned in much the same way. But in China the Confucian tradition was personified in the class of scholar–officials, who were able to counter the merchants by mobilising their cultural capital to elevate antiquity over novelty, and connoisseurship over consumption. The result was to impede the development of a broad and acquisitive consumer culture in China for centuries. The breadth of the sources Trentmann marshals behind his arguments frankly astonishes; it is easy to pay lip service to the need for transcultural approaches in the humanities, but extremely demanding to carry them out.

Of these three societies, it is north-west Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that finally ushered in ‘a new regime of consumption ... characterized by volume, variety and innovation’. The question of why modern consumption should have arisen there and not elsewhere has traditionally been answered in three competing ways: the populace’s higher real wages, emulation of their social superiors, and willingness to work more to acquire more. Having deftly identified the shortcomings of each thesis, Trentmann argues that a complete explanation for why certain societies were more amenable to the world of goods than others must include a deeper analysis of cultural factors than has been hitherto put forward. As such, he goes on to examine the role of the Enlightenment, of empire, of urbanisation, and of home life in forming a culture of consumption from the eighteenth century into the twenty-first.

Emperor Chengzu of the early Ming Dynasty, who commissioned a series of treasure ship voyages from 1405–33 to expand Chinese influence throughout the known world (National Palace Museum, Taibei/Wikimedia Commons)By giving a central role to ideas and ideologies in his account, Trentmann makes an important break from the staid materialism of (nonetheless foundational) historiographical traditions like the early Annales School. Empire of Things pays careful attention throughout to consumption’s role in producing modern identities, the ‘material culture of the self’. At the same time, the book resists the temptation to retreat into abstract theorisation, while having some fun with those who do, notably Marx, whose tortured grappling with commodity fetishism is juxtaposed with the sordid material circumstances of his life in Kentish Town. Indeed, Marx is the modern thinker perhaps most responsible for historiography’s neglect of consumption; the irony that nominally communist China is home now to some of the world’s most avid consumers is lost on nobody. Indeed, China’s ongoing transition from a production- to a consumption-driven economy and the immense stakes thereof seem ample justification for a concomitant shift in intellectual emphasis for economic historians. Moreover, the rise of Asian consumers and their differences from their Western counterparts underscore one of the central insights of consumption history: that consumers are not the passive, hypnotised, undifferentiated mass of puritanical imaginings. Rather, consumers are actively engaged in constructing their identities and their worlds by appropriating things creatively, and often using them in unexpected ways.

Part Two of Empire of Things turns away from historical narrative to consider consumption’s role in a series of contemporary debates: over consumer credit, work/life balance, social security, the welfare state, the corporate world, global trade, inequality, and the environment. That this topic figures prominently in so many familiar political and social issues is testimony in itself to the importance of Empire of Things, particularly insofar as it succeeds in moving the debate on from the easy moralism that still attaches to consumption, particularly from the political left. Moreover, in an age characterised as much by a profusion of information as of things, a monumental work of synthetic scholarship like this, presented in terms accessible to the common reader, points the way forward for interdisciplinary work in the humanities.