Recent research has often drawn on probate inventories. Merchants’ probate inventories, for example, provide information on the financial or economic status, on credit and business relations ...mentioning debts, business partners, suppliers and customers, which provides valuable insights into the spatial dimension of the business. Usually stocks of goods were recorded meticulously, documenting the origin, quality, quantity and price of the stored products. In so doing, these inventories allow us a glimpse into the ‘world of goods’. This contribution is mainly based on the inventories of spice merchants in the city of Salzburg during the second half of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and discusses the potential of inventories for historical consumer research.
Labour migrants were a widespread phenomenon in the Alps during the early modern period and impacted the materiality of everyday life in the mountains. This article investigates traces of these ...movements in linguistic usage by exploring the way in which goods were described by actors from the Three Leagues, in present-day Switzerland and Italy. Provenances of goods were given by using toponyms that indicated the place of origin the more precise, the closer the location was to the Alps. These geographical terms informed about specific visual and tactile qualities and were introduced together with other technical vocabulary via specialized merchants and spread via shops to customers of the upper echelons. Small-scale retailers and occasional dealers made use of less detailed descriptions that can also be found in the accounts of their clients which resembled the language used in informal correspondences. These channels could be activated to gain more detailed information and thanks to the wide-spread networks of migrant labourers, knowledge was exchanged with and via the Alps. This exchange of information appears, however, to have become less intense when migration patterns changed in the aftermath of the French Revolutionary Wars.
The inventory of Tallinn merchant Michael Meyer’s (1704–1758) property is one of the largest inventories of an 18th century citizen of Tallinn. Almost the entire world of his possessions is reflected ...in this unique source. The inventory provides a comprehensive picture of his success, lifestyle, and hobbies, and the diverse list of household items provides a good idea of a prosperous merchant’s home in northeast Europe in the 18th century. The unique body of sources (Michael Meyer’s will, property inventory, and auction reports) provides comprehensive insight into the development of Tallinn’s material culture, i.e., the material culture history of Northern Europe, during the century of Enlightenment.
Eighteenth-century consumption is often characterised in terms of an expanding world of goods, one that reflected an increasingly complex web of global trading links and cultural associations. Some ...have seen a growing role for empire in shaping the provision of goods and the consciousness of consumers, especially in terms of groceries and textiles; others have argued that Europe, especially Italy and France, was predominant in the minds of retailers and their customers. In this article, I build on these studies by exploring the placenames with which a wide range of groceries and textiles were labelled in stock lists, newspaper advertisements and receipted bills. My concern is to examine the varied meanings that these placenames carried for retailers and consumers: sometimes indicating provenance, but often overlaying this with messages about the material qualities of the products. Rather than mapping actual patterns of supply, therefore, the analysis opens up the mental geographies that helped shopkeepers and consumers to comprehend the world of goods available to them. In doing so, it provides important insights into England's changing position in the eighteenth-century world.
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Whether the ‘democratization’ of consumption during the early modern period was specifically a characteristic of the European economic shift or observable in other parts of the world remains a ...central question in understanding the early roots of consumerism, as well as explaining pre‐industrial growth and divergence. However, the scarcity of quantitative evidence from the non‐Western world limits our ability to make comparisons and grasp the nature of changes that occurred in the material environment. Based on a sample of 380 probate inventories from the Ottoman town of Üsküdar, this paper examines the change in possession of domestic goods from 1700 to 1850. It reveals that, from the 1760s onwards, ordinary Ottomans in the town, who were neither wealthier nor better positioned in the social hierarchy compared with their ancestors in 1700, owned a greater quantity and variety of domestic goods. As a result, they enjoyed richer and more elaborate domestic interiors. The findings strongly suggest that democratization of consumer goods, a hallmark of the early modern consumer revolutions in Europe, was experienced in the Ottoman town of Üsküdar during the second half of the eighteenth century.
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FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
The incompleteness of early modern period probate inventories is notorious. The attempt of explaining these gaps often leads to the assumption of a conflict-ridden relationship between the ...authorities and their subjects with the latter trying to trick the former. Examining a corpus of 2000 inventories stemming from eighteenth-century Tyrol and the Prince Bishopric of Brixen makes it obvious that the administrative bodies were most likely fully aware of the inconsistencies. This raises questions of how they dealt with the incompleteness of inventories. The thesis this paper proposes is that the incompleteness of inventories cannot simply be considered the result of deviant behaviour of surviving dependants or unknown third parties. Instead, the fact that the authorities accepted obvious blanks within the records is indicative of a subject-authority-relationship with far more cooperative elements than widely expected.
This article uses a novel database of Ottoman probates and examines some of the methodological difficulties that arise in very long-term analysis. Wealth statistics, spanning from 1460 to 1920 in the ...longest subsample, indicate approximately an inverted U-shaped pattern that may signal the limits of extensive growth. While plausible, severity of the drop on the right side of the wealth curve does not entirely match recent scholarship on the Ottoman Empire. Examining the effect of biases and changes in probate demography on wealth, we explore how real the observed wealth pattern is. We employ descriptive statistics, linear regression and Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, and find that demographic composition matters but does not alter the shape of the wealth curve. Explanation for the gap between probate findings and current historiography, therefore, must lie elsewhere.
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9.
Managing “Property” Petley, Christer
Journal of global slavery,
01/2021, Volume:
6, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Abstract
Probate inventories helped to support the established social and economic order in colonial Jamaica. These documents were part of the legal process of winding up an estate after a death and ...presented an account of personal possessions that had belonged to a decedent. They facilitated the transfer of property to heirs and identified those parts of an estate that were available for the repayment of debts. The inventories contain lists of enslaved people, representing them as a type of “property,” and so these documents form a major part of the archive of Jamaican slavery. This article explores the practices, aims, and assumptions of the people who produced the inventories, developing our understanding of slaveholder culture in the British Caribbean and of the bureaucratic and accounting techniques that facilitated slave management.
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W artykule scharakteryzowano przedmioty wymienione w 238 spisach ruchomości z lat 1677–1795, znajdujących się w księgach kancelarii sądu grodzkiego zakroczymskiego. Wyroby te stanowiły wystrój i ...wyposażenie domów szlachty w ziemi zakroczymskiej na Mazowszu. Zestaw przedmiotów, z których wewnątrz siedziby codziennie korzystał właściciel i jego najbliższa rodzina, był podobny do znanego z innych środowisk społecznych i innych regionów Rzeczypospolitej. Elementem różnicującym, podkreślającym status społeczny, były: surowce, kolorystyka, wykończenie i zdobienie oraz liczba rzeczy. Wskazano pewne tendencje czytelne w badanym okresie, m.in. stopniowy zanik tradycyjnych elementów wnętrz (takich jak tkaniny orientalne), w drugiej połowie XVIII w. częstsze stosowanie parawanów, pawilonów przy łóżkach, zwiększenie średniej liczby kufrów, bielizny stołowej i zastawy stołowej, a także pojawienie się, chociaż jeszcze w ograniczonym zakresie, meblarskich nowinek (np. stołów okrągłych lub składanych, garniturów złożonych z kanapy i krzeseł, komody), używanie naczyń z fajansu i porcelany.
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