This chapter studies global histories that consider aspects of the material world. It exposes the – often tacit – assumptions that guide these global material histories and holds them up for careful inspection. Its particular interest is in the grounds on which global material historians associate matter and material culture with a specific scale, context or level of observation: with world-making, the global scale and ‘connectivity’, but also with the concrete, the ‘micro’ and the intimate. In that context, the chapter discusses a wide range of themes, from the risk of fetishising material things – as in, reverencing them for properties, including ‘global’ ones, merely projected onto them – to the inevitability of canvassing some forms of materiality on a global scale: the pollution of air, for instance, or, for the post–Cold War era, the issue of resource shortages. The chapter argues that, like any form of historical writing, global material histories are under the influence of their practitioners’ own times’ socioreligious texture, global imaginary and discursive habits; mindful of the telos and conceptions that pervade their work, they will be better prepared to see the world of matter and material culture in all its changeability, elusiveness and polysemy.

This chapter visits sketches the contours of an “Ottoman lighting system,” that is, a centrally regulated network that procured lighting materials from the provinces and channeled them to Istanbul and other crucial points in the imperial power grid and set lighting priorities in line with its political needs. The main argument is that lighting was considered a basic commodity and its regular supply therefore concerned the state. Yet, access to light was extremely unequal, which, as shown in the next chapter, made light a shiny index of power.