Research team
Expertise
In my PhD I have developed a research focus on the history of family, households, social networks, and social inequality in rural society. Over the last few years, I have also developed this research further with studies on landless households, rural credit, labour markets and so-cial inequality and established international collaborations in this field. Currently, I am working on the history of consumption and globalisation from 18th to 20th centuries. At the moment, I pursue two projects in this research area. In my current publication project I focus on the connections between early modern Germany, European expansion and encounters with the non-European world. I examine the trade in remedies and exotic substances that reached the German hinterland of the world's trading centres via the European Atlantic ports and Hamburg. In addition to the specific trade, I also follow the development of knowledge about the non-European world, to which there was often only contact via the Netherlands, England, France or the Iberian Peninsula. The history of remedies is of central importance for the German region, as the pharmaceutical-chemical industry became the most important leading sector of industrialisation here in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The pro-ject is part of a larger research project that focuses on Central Europe as the hinterland of Eu-ropean expansion and world trade centres. Relations with the Dutch trading centres have hard-ly been studied to date, although their importance for both sides can hardly be underestimated. The relationship between the global world and the development of a modern consumer society is at the centre of my second project in this field. In May 2024, my PhD student submitted his dissertation that emerged from my project funded by the German Research Council and examines the origins of an early consumer society in the 18th century in north-west Germany as a region neighbouring the Netherlands. First results have also been explored in a recent article published in The Economic History Review, written in collaboration with my PhD student. I am currently developing this focus further by focussing on the 19th century as the central period of the transition from a pre-modern to a modern consumer society. The emergence of the European consumer society is driven by early globalisation, which established massive inequalities between European and non-European societies and continues to reproduce them to this day. Tracing these long lines is the focus of this long-term project.
Exotic Substances in Early Modern Consumer Culture: Global Trade, Knowledge Production and Consumption in Germany (ExTraConKnow).
Abstract
European expansion provided Europe with the goods that drove the emergence of an early consumer society. Although the German lands did not play a significant role in the colonial project, German merchants were prominent in major Atlanic ports and successfully paricipated in colonial ventures. They also traded colonial goods and exotic substances to the German-speaking regions. The project invesigates the import, dissemination, and production of knowledge about exotic substances, which were consumed primarily as therapeutic products, and contributes to the study of early modern consumer culture in Germany in the epistemic transition from the early modern period to modernity. So far, we know very litle about the distribution and consumption of these goods, although the arrival of exotic remedies in Europe contributed significantly to the scientification of medicine. This replaced the humoral-pathological understanding of disease with a more scientific view of the body, which was increasingly able to identify diseases and find new ways to treat them. It examines trade statistics to draw conclusions about the extent and speed of the increase in imports of exotic remedies. The project analyses the production of knowledge about remedies in a lively commercial print culture that developed between late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, became increasingly differentiated and appealed to different reader groups. These books contain, among much other information, advice on how the exotic remedies can be used in medical practice and consumed by the buyers. Finally, consumption is also examined based on medical prescriptions and recipe books, which makes it possible to understand, at least for selected towns in the German hinterland, how exotic remedies were integrated into medical practice during this period. All sources are made available digitally by means of AI-powered OCR and HTR transcription and examined with innovative methods of the Digital Humanities.Researcher(s)
- Promoter: Van Damme Ilja
- Fellow: Fertig Christine
Research team(s)
Project type(s)
- Research Project