Project description
How New Christians shaped global trade and consumption
From the 15th to the 18th centuries, the New Christian trading elite (descendants of Jewish communities forced to convert in Iberia) played a major role in Europe’s intercontinental trade. Experts in sourcing and marketing goods across continents, they shaped patterns of consumption. Funded by the ERC, the Materia project explores how this expertise influenced material culture and consumer behaviour. It examines commodities, markets, environments and gendered consumption, while considering social networks, diaspora resilience and the pressures of Inquisition-era suspicion. Materia combines economic, social and art history with geography, gender studies and environmental analysis to centre individual and collective agency, revealing how New Christian material knowledge transformed trade, consumption and social status across continents.
Objective
New Christian Materiality, 1450-1750. The New Christian trading elite, descending from Jewish communities forced to convert between 1391 and 1498 in Iberia, was at the forefront of intercontinental trade from the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. They became experts on material culture, sourced commodities from different continents, and developed markets. This project will answer the question: how did New Christian expertise in material culture influence patterns of consumption where they lived and traded? This question addresses a historiographical gap between material culture, consumption, and social agents involved in intercontinental trade. The hypothesis that undergirds this project is that the liminal condition in which the New Christians were placed – forced to convert but never fully integrated under constant suspicion and prosecution from the Inquisition – favoured their diaspora, resilient networks, and innovative behaviour across continents. The four pathways framed by the key orientations of this project will be: a) commodities and expertise; b) agents and markets; c) environment; and d) gender. It is a global project, based on extensive archival research, that will identify how expertise was built, links between production and trade were established, gendered consumption developed, and houses were built and decorated for enhanced status and marketing. It will place social and individual agency at the core of research. It will bring together economic, social, and art history, geography, gender studies, environmental studies, and the sociology of inequality. The focus will be on New Christian materiality and its influence on consumption, keeping a critical view on environmental impact and the inequality the New Christians reacted to but also produced. It is ultimately a transformative project: for the first time, an ethnic group will be the object of a global project of research concerning material culture and patterns of consumption.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2024-ADG
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WC2R 2LS London
United Kingdom
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