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.
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.
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.
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.
Managing “Property” Petley, Christer
Journal of global slavery,
01/2021, Letnik:
6, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
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.
In this article we examine the accuracy of valuations of movable property for a sample of 22 probate inventories from Swedish. The sample comprises a total of 785 probated items which we have been ...able to match with contemporary auction protocols, giving us an official sales price for each item. This enables us to determine the consistency between the appraisal values in the probates and prevailing market prices, despite the fact that the probated items were invariably second-hand and of uncertain quality, as the comparison can be made for one and the same items. Our results show that probate appraisal values were marked underestimates of contemporary market prices, but also, that they lacked internal consistency. We find a mean undervaluation for probated items of −36 ± 3 percent, but the degree of undervaluation varied both depending on (i) the category of item, (ii) the year of the probate, as well as depending on (iii) the social class of the deceased. Our results apply, first and foremost, for the Swedish counties of Uppland and Södermanland, but as there is no reason to assume that Swedish probate proceedings exhibited significant regional variation, our results are most likely valid for the whole country.
Los orígenes de las vajillas cerámicas valencianas, uno de los productos más codiciados de la Baja Edad Media, se han explicado tradicionalmente desde el punto de vista de la oferta. El interés por ...los aspectos tecnológicos y estilísticos —productivos— ha tendido a eclipsar las cuestiones que van más allá de los objetos, que afectan al punto de vista del consumidor: ¿hasta qué punto fue clave la demanda de obra de terra de la propia sociedad valenciana en el inicio de su producción? Este artículo valora esta cuestión a través de una muestra de 232 inventarios de bienes de entre 1283 y 1349, sobre los que se aplican los análisis cuantitativos propios de la historiografía del consumo. Se argumentará que, antes de la Peste Negra, el consumo de vajillas cerámicas presentaba enormes desigualdades en el seno de la sociedad medieval, y que el peso de su demanda recaía sobre un sector social particular de la ciudad de Valencia. Se propondrá además que era el factor de la moda, y no el del coste, el que no sólo explique este consumo restringido, sino la posterior popularización de estos productos.
PDF
