EMPIRE OF THINGS
BY FRANK TRENTMANN (ALLEN LANE)
We live in a world of things. The average German owns 10,000 of them, while in 2013, the UK was home to six billion items of clothing. That’s roughly 100 per adult, a quarter of which never leave the wardrobe.
Recently, the boss of Ikea said that we may well have hit saturation point or ‘peak stuff’ - a state of affairs that could be called ‘peak curtains’. But where did this craze for things come from? How has it changed the world? And, perhaps most important of all, what does it say about us?
Once, long ago now, owning stuff was generally reckoned to be bad for you. In the Sermon On The Mount, Jesus warned against accumulating too many material things on Earth - ‘where moth and rot soon corrupt’. St Augustine went even further, claiming that the lust for things and lust for flesh sprung from the same - deplorable - source.
Possibly because of this, people were surprisingly slow to cotton on to the lure of possessions. Up until the start of the 18th century, people wore the same sorts of clothes as their grandparents, bar one or two customising touches. As for home comforts, nothing much had changed in 500 years.
A t the same time, displays of conspicuous consumption tended to be frowned upon. In London in 1574, a man was sent to prison for ‘wearing a pair of hose lined with taffety’. Some 150 years later in Germany, a woman was given a hefty fine for sporting a neckerchief that was deemed too large for someone of her class.
But then something happened. All at once people became far more vain than they had been before - and far more houseproud. The reasons for this are not hard to fathom. In 1664, the English East India Company shipped 250,000 pieces of cloth to England. Twenty years later that figure had quadrupled.
Suddenly, cotton was everywhere. Not only was it cheaper than linen, it was easier to wash and dye. Clothes, tablecloths, napkins... everyone, it seemed, wanted a piece. Writing in 1725, the novelist Daniel Defoe complained that: ‘It is a hard matter to know the mistress from the maid by their dress; nay, very often the maid shall be the finer of the two.’
In 1700, the average French servant spent 10 percent of their income on clothes. By 1750, that figure had risen to a third.
Where clothes led, other things soon followed. Tastes - literally - were changing at an unprecedented rate. Coffee houses began opening in England in the 1650s - the first one of all, The Angel, was in Oxford. Then came chocolate.
Once a tasty delicacy much enjoyed by Jesuit priests in the New World - but hardly anywhere else - it soon caught on in a big way. In the late 1600s, the diarist Samuel Pepys sipped chocolate in the hope it might settle his stomach after a hard night’s drinking.
Others believed it was an aphrodisiac. But, oddly enough, it wasn’t until soldiers got a taste for chocolate that it really conquered the world.
In the 1870s, the chocolatier Philippe Suchard started sending ‘military chocolate’ to army barracks in Switzerland. At first, the soldiers spat it out, complaining it tasted disgusting. But within a few years the demand was so great that Suchard started manufacturing chocolate bullets for soldiers to carry in their ration packs.
And then, of course, there was tea. By the 1850s, tea had become an integral part of British life, so much so that Widow Twankey in Aladdin was named after a cheap brand of Chinese tea - ‘Twankay’ - in the surefire knowledge that the audience would get the joke.
With so many people consuming hot drinks, there was a revolution in the manufacture of domestic goods.
J osiah Wedgwood, the potter, found a way to coat earthenware with a shiny glaze that looked good and was strong enough to take sudden changes in temperature.
Rapidly, the world was becoming a smaller, more consumer-driven, place. At the start of the 20th century, Harrods boasted that its postal service could deliver anywhere from Argentina to Zanzibar.
And all the time there were more and more things for people to spend their money on. By now they had begun taking holidays, something that would never have occurred to them 100 years earlier. Even the most unlikely people succumbed to the lure of a deck-chair. Sigmund Freud wrote ecstatically about the joys of paddling in the Irish Sea.
With so much on offer, choice played an increasingly large part in people’s lives. They wanted the newest, smartest domestic appliance not only because it saved on labour, but also because it made them feel better about themselves. Because in some way it defined who they were.
Nonetheless, the rampant pursuit of ownership came with some unforeseen hazards. In the Fifties, women were warned not to get too close to their new washing machines for fear they might be electrocuted or scalped. Ever since reading this I’ve been trying to work out how anyone could be scalped by a washing machine.
With choice came something else that hadn’t been much in evidence before: pickiness. In 1952, a woman called Heidi Simon came first in an amateur photography competition - the prize was a new Vespa scooter. When Simon learned this, she wrote to the organisers thanking them for their generosity, and then asked for a Lambretta instead.
Of all the objects people lust after, none can match the car. Here again, the most unlikely people have succumbed to the lure of a well-tuned motor.
In the Seventies, a number of bombs exploded in German department stores. They were planted by the Baader-Meinhof gang, who declared they were waging a war against consumerism. ‘Consumerism terrorises you, we terrorise the goods’, ran their slogan.
But when the leader of the gang, Andreas Baader, was arrested, he was sitting behind the wheel of a brand new, rare, 300-horsepower Iso Rivolta sports car. He had also been the proud owner of a white Mercedes 220SE and a Ford Fairlane complete with tail fins.
The message could hardly have been clearer: money may make the world go round, but it’s a desire for newer, smarter, shinier things that keeps it spinning at an ever-faster rate.
In order for me to try to convince you of how good this book is, I need to point out just how unqualified I am to review it. I’m not an economist - indeed, I barely know the difference between a stock and a share. Nor am I a social historian. Yet I read Empire Of Things - all 862 pages of it - with unflagging fascination.
Frank Trentmann, professor of history at Birkbeck College, is not only an elegant, adventurous and colourful writer, he also manages the tricky balancing act of being eminently sensible and gleefully provocative. All too aptly, he has produced a thing to covet.
Daily Mail