When the neologism luxury (lusso) was first coined in the Italian vernacular in the mid-fifteenth century, it drew upon the twin concepts of excess and lust embedded in the etymology of the ancient Roman word luxus. Luxury, with these twin debased moral states born of unregulated desire, was an attribute applied by old elites to the aspirational middling classes. It lies at the heart of Emma Bovary's morality tale: a woman whose obsessive attempts to mimic the fashionable classes in Paris, coupled with her libidinous desires, lead to utter ruin. But what ultimately enables Emma's downfall is a reliance on the personal credit offered by her draper Lhereux. Emma is one of the many in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe who used a network of unsecured short-term loans with credit based on trust and personal relationships rather than collateral.
The chronological focus (1730–1850) of this timely and original volume edited by Klas Nyberg and Håkan Jakobsson lies precisely in this period of precarity before the commercial banks and institutional lenders of the mid-nineteenth century became increasingly dominant, and, similarly, in a geographical area, that of Sweden, peripheral to the luxury style setters in Paris. It looks at the pressures luxurious desires placed on individuals to stretch themselves beyond their means and rely on unsecured credit, and the domino effect of individual insolvency on an intricate network of luxury suppliers who also relied on these relationships of trust. The collective story of the numerous insolvents throughout Europe ultimately impelled governments to become more interventionist in their management of debt and lending.
It is excellent to see Jakobsson, an early career researcher, being given a central editorial and authorial role, but it is the experienced hand of Nyberg that features most strongly. Responsible for the introductory and concluding framing, and for three sole- and two coauthored chapters, this close editorial involvement perhaps explains why the book and its progressive argument is so well structured. Eleven chapters are clustered into four parts. The first focuses on Paris as the capital of luxury in the period and the ways in which those in an outlying location such as Stockholm looked to this center for consumptive direction (Nyberg). The second examines the Swedish financial system and its bankruptcy laws (Nyberg, Gratzer, and Hayen), with pejorative views of the bankrupt heavily influenced by Italian moralizers (Box, Gratzer, and Xiang Lin). It uncovers the increasing tensions between a personal system of credit and a developing state legislative framework of bankruptcy. Part 3 takes these structural and systemic features into a series of chapters on the Swedish fashion and luxury arenas grounded in detailed case studies. In the concluding section (Nyberg), Stockholm is placed again within a broader European context, bringing a satisfying symmetry to the volume's overall argument.
By following the money trail not just through its strengths but above all to its teetering edges, the second part of this collection brings additional depth and range to an area of consumption studies first opened up for an earlier period in Italy by Kuehn, Hohti, Cohn, Welch, and others. Here is a sustained study of the financial networks developed to sustain the aspirations of the Swedish Emma Bovarys of the early modern world, and the financial vulnerability of the producers servicing these consumers’ awakening desires. The third part demonstrates how the short-term credit economy's system of values were founded, but also often floundered, on the dependence on trust, thereby affirming Trentmann's contention that all economic activity is culturally embedded. It was this system which enabled, but also often unraveled, Sweden's nascent luxury industries of silk manufacture (Jakobsson), books and newspapers (Hayen), cabinetmakers and chair makers (Ulväng), coiffeurs and wig makers (Turunen and Vilkuna), painting and wallpaper professionals (Nyberg and Hagberg).
I have only two critiques of the otherwise excellent framing of the volume's arguments. The claim that “an increasing demand for various new consumption goods can be established in the Western World from the seventeenth century, with a starting point in Northwestern Europe” is a contention that needs at least some minimal reference to, or defending from, scholars (including myself) working in the field of luxury and consumption studies inspired by Goldthwaite's arguments for Italian primacy in this area from the fourteenth century.
My second concern relates to the ahistorical and ultimately nonsensical use of the phrase old luxury. For Nyberg (referencing Berg and others), old luxury was “the more traditional luxury consumed by the aristocracy and the higher ranks of society.” “New luxury,” instead, “depended on novel commodities closely connected to the rise of fashion.” However, old luxury was never associated with elites, not in the ancient world, nor in its earliest reuses in Renaissance Europe. Elites shunned the word and its associations with unregulated excess. They coined and reutilized the word as a pejorative insult for those imitating their own consumptive practices with mere money.
But these criticisms apart, this tightly conceived collection is a welcome and carefully produced contribution to the ever-expanding consumption studies corpus.
