Project description
A closer look at luxury and global power
Luxury has long been a symbol of power, status, and global influence. From private jets to haute couture, its role in shaping world order is undeniable. Yet, how has luxury historically influenced global hierarchies? Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the LUX project seeks to answer this question through a historical-sociological study of luxury in the 19th century. Examining the maritime fur trade, gold rushes, and World’s Fairs, LUX explores how luxury was contested as a marker of global order. By shifting focus from philosophers to market practitioners, the project unveils how luxury-driven hierarchies shaped international relations, colonial expansion, and sustainability debates, offering new insights into the politics of wealth and status.
Objective
"Whether private-jet carbon emissions, haute couture, or the diamond trade: how we judge luxury is surprisingly closely tied to how we view global order. So what role exactly does luxury play in modern global order? Based on a historical-sociological investigation of the maritime fur trade, the gold rushes, and the World's Fairs, LUX is the first comprehensive study of the nineteenth-century contestation of luxury at the level of global order. It has three objectives: a conceptual history of luxury with a focus on global order; an investigation of practitioners' conceptions of luxury in three case studies; and developing an empirically grounded new theory of ""sumptuary ordering,"" or the policing of luxury as a marker of status in global order. Extant work identifies a break in the late eighteenth century, from suspicions of luxury as a vice to a modern embrace of luxury as a virtue. Yet what this embrace entailed in practice, and what kind of global order the pursuit of luxury was understood to require, is unclear. This gap is surprising, since the link between luxury and the power, status, and imperial expansion of states had long been considered obvious by thinkers from Plato to Thomas More to Mary Birkett. Further, how practitioners involved in the creation of luxury markets–many of them preludes to colonisation–understood global order is unexplored. My innovation is twofold: I study conceptions of luxury among practitioners rather than philosophers; and I move from histories of consumption to luxury-framed hierarchies between nations. This invigorates debates on historical global orders and hierarchy. Connecting IR and history with current debates on colonial legacies and sustainability, LUX comprises archival research and theory-building, but also intervenes in wider debates on the future of luxury."
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)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01
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2000 Antwerpen
Belgium
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