1st Edition

A History of Global Consumption 1500 - 1800

By Ina Baghdiantz McCabe Copyright 2015
312 Pages 7 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

312 Pages 7 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

312 Pages 7 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

In A History of Global Consumption: 1500 – 1800, Ina Baghdiantz McCabe examines the history of consumption throughout the early modern period using a combination of chronological and thematic discussion, taking a comprehensive and wide-reaching view of a subject that has long been on the historical agenda. The title explores the topic from the rise of the collector in Renaissance Europe to the... Read more
Introduction. 1. Collecting the World.  2. American Gold: Sugar, Tobacco and Chocolate.  3. Consuming the New World: Settlements and Transformation.  4. Domesticating the Exotic.  5. Treasures from the East: Tulips and the Fashion for Asia's Luxury Goods.  6. Consumption as a Global Phenomenon: Colonial Dreams and Financial Bubbles in Europe, China's Consumer Culture.  7. Resisting Exotic Luxuries: Simplicity and Boycotts in the Age of Revolutions.

Biography

Professor of History and the Darakjian and Jafarian Chair of Armenian History at Tufts University, USA. Her publications include The Shah’s Silk for Europe’s Silver: The Eurasian Silk trade of the Julfan Armenians in Safavid Iran and India, 1590–1750 (1999), Diaspora and Entrepreneurial Networks 1600–2000, co-editor (2005) and Orientalism in Early Modern France: Eurasian Trade, Exoticism and the Ancien Régime (2008).

‘Baghdiantz McCabe’s work advances a nuanced and incredibly important argument about how consumption structured a new cultural power dynamic, by bringing it into dialogue with the booming field of world history. This is a book, and an argument, with real importance for the intersections of culture, power, and global commerce in our own time, and should be of great use to introductory, intermediate, and advanced undergraduates.’

Dr Eli Rubin, Western Michigan University, USA

'Approaching her subject through a clear chronological framework, Baghdiantz McCabe shows that consumption was not merely a dependent variable in...broad[er] evolution but in some significant instances an independent variable capable of powering its own significant social and economic consequences...this book will be of use to those interested in the social and economic history of the early modern period. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above.'

J. Murdock, University of Missouri--Columbia, USA in CHOICE