Unexpected Subversions: Modern Colonialism, Globalization, and Commodity Culture

Abstract

Scholars studying the history of modern colonialism have been more reluctant to make strongly contrarian claims about consumerism and commodification similar to those made by early modern Europeanists because they are more unsettled by some of the implications of their own studies. Modern consumer culture is strongly mapped to ‘Westernization’ and globalization. There is a very large class of scholarly studies that in some respect or another discuss the association between colonialism and consumption in nineteenth- and twentieth-century global culture. Even constrained to the Western European states that created or extended formal empires in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific after 1860, studies such as Anne McClintock's intricate reading of British commodity culture indicate the extent to which colonial meanings and images were circulating within metropolitan societies. This article discusses modern colonialism, globalization, and commodity culture. It first examines the middle classes, nations, and modernity, and then considers consumer agency in the context of globalization.

From craft to industry and back: transnational efforts in reconstructing tin’s social meaning to the retail consumer (1950s–1960s)

“…In historical studies, this framework is demonstrated through Mintz’s (1986) seminal scholarship on sugar, which shows how the commodity’s biography changed as it passed from producer to consumer across geographies and societies. By studying how the “commodities themselves also shape consumption practices through their concrete materiality and in terms of the embedded histories of meanings associate with them” (Burke, 2012, p. 478), it engages historians to rethink commodities produced in colonies as more complex than mere tools of imperialistic projects.…”

Roman Diet and Meat Consumption: Reassessing Elite Access to Meat in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10

“… 2. Unlike Mayer, I am not comfortable with applying the term ‘middle class’ to pre-modern societies, and, furthermore, I am wary of implying such a modern social and economic concept by speaking of ‘middling’ classes, as this modern model of class structure is a distinct product of modernity and industrialization, expanding into a global middle class (see López and Weinstein 2012; Burke 2012). It would be anachronistic to impose such a class structure onto the Roman world.…”