How was consumption able to rise so dramatically before the age of the Industrial Revolution? The consumer revolution was the result of incremental changes in urban growth, agricultural specialization, commercial development, and proto-industry. Global trade was also a major factor. While agriculture, industry, and intra-European trade expanded gradually in the eighteenth century, intercontinental trade between Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas soared, expanding the horizons of the European material world. Global trade introduced European consumers to an array of products from distant lands, from Chinese porcelain and tea to Indian cotton textiles to American tobacco, coffee, chocolate, and sugar. Slavery was integral to global trade. On the west coast of Africa, European merchants traded Indian cloth for human captives, whom they shipped to the Americas in the largest forced migration in human history. In the Americas, European-descended enslavers brutally forced the enslaved to produce large quantities of commodities (tobacco, sugar, and coffee) for European consumption. Global trade also gave rise to import substitution as Europeans producers made cheap imitations of Asian porcelain and textiles. Such import substitution was part of a broad shift from the consumption of high-quality, durable materials that stored value over long periods of time to cheaper, more fragile semidurables that were rapidly replaced. This shift marked the birth of modern materiality and accelerated the fashion cycle.

Colonial practices of jurisdictional accumulation consist, in the Iberian case, of the requerimiento, encomiendas, audiencias, and the various jurisdictional opportunities they provided leading to jurisdictional competition and subjectivities in colonial New Spain. Castile’s mercantilism is also discussed in relation to its governance and administrative structures and commercial–legal institutions. Relying on the jurisdictional incorporation of both settlers and Native American subjectivities, Castilian practices of imperial expansion transplanted Castilian authority and are primarily concerned with authority over people providing jurisdictional opportunities of contestation and subjugation. Different practices of jurisdictional accumulation are identified in the French, Dutch, and English/British empires. These mostly relate to trading and chartered companies and settlements primarily concerned with authority over land and resources, where inhabitants of the colonised land need to be excluded rather than jurisdictionally incorporated. The more commercial, indirect, and outsourced practices of these empires are discussed through the debates on mercantilism and the practices of corsairing, which produced conditions for jurisdictional accumulation as transports of authority (i.e. focused on the use of intermediaries and a jurisdictional distancing between the imperial centres and their colonies).

Chapter 5 concerns the practices of Dutch, French, and English consuls in the Mediterranean and illustrates jurisdictional collaboration and conflict between sovereigns, merchants, trading companies, and regional institutions. It discusses the range of consuls' jurisdictional functions, the policies and strategies developed, such as the restrictive regulations increasingly put in place for the French service and its unique model of salaried and commissioned consuls, as well as the different practices found in Christian and non-Christian parts of the Mediterranean. Through a selection of archive material regarding events in the French embassy in Constantinople from the 1660s to 1680s, the analysis reveals a more interdependent relation between ambassadors and consuls in shaping extraterritorial and jurisdictional spaces. Focusing on class differences and social origins emphasises the role of consular diplomacy, its connection to the aristocratisation of ambassadorial diplomacy, and the development of different forms of early modern mercantilism. French consular practices are better categorised as transplants of authority, in contrast to the less jurisdictionally autonomous role of English and Dutch consular attempts to transport their sovereign’s authority.