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.The East8 Asian contexts for consumerism resulted from several key components.91011China: resistance and later impacts12 Prior to the eighteenth century, European consumer items had scant impact311 on Asia.A great deal of trade followed traditional patterns, independent of4 European intermediaries, and the range of goods Europe had to offer was5 limited.Silver, brought from the New World, and a certain amount of6 weaponry counted for more than new consumer products.By the late eight-7 eenth century, however, the extension of European power drew some interest8 toward wider fashions.Portraits of certain upper-class Indian ladies, for9 example, show them in European style dress, stiffly posed as if constrained20111 by the unfamiliarity.This degree of consumer interest and opportunity1 remained unusual, but it signaled some new influences.2 Well into the nineteenth century, however, the impact of European3 consumer interests on China specifically continued to be a one-way street.4 European traders sought a wide range of Chinese goods, from porcelain to5 tea, for the growing markets back home, but they had little they could6 induce the Chinese to buy in exchange.In addition to continued imports7 of Mexican silver, some of which was fashioned into jewelry for elite buyers,8 the key European import into the later nineteenth century turned out to9 be opium.The spread of opium use had, to be sure, some consumer-like30111 features.Many initial buyers came from the wealthy upper classes, particu-1 larly among young men, and they were seeking novelty and diversion.2 In the long run, however, quite apart from bitter if not always effective3 official opposition to opium use, opium did not encourage wider consumer4 patterns.Its mind-numbing qualities discouraged consumer desire rather5 than fanning it further.An eighteenth-century edict against opium use6 explicitly noted how purchasers continually become sunk into the most7 stupid and besotted state, and this was hardly the context for wider8 consumer behavior.Opium imports flourished, with Chinese merchants9 collaborating with European and American smugglers.This became, by the40111 1830s, the world s largest trade in any single commodity.With Western1 governments insisting on their right to promote the trade, China s increas-2 ingly ineffective government was powerless to resist strongly.Only at the3 end of the nineteenth century did increasing domestic production cut44111 imports, though not necessarily usage. 94 Consumerism goes globalChina did resist or ignore more general inducements toward new formsof consumerism - precisely the reason that Westerners decided that theyhad to focus so fiercely on drugs.The kinds of goods that attracted Russiansor various Native American groups simply had little appeal.There werethree reasons for the marked and durable gap between European consumerhabits and Chinese reactions.The first involved massive poverty in a largelyrural society in which population was growing rapidly: China simply lackedthe economic basis for the kind of consumerism developing in Europe,particularly in the countryside.But the other two factors counted as well,given the large size of Chinese cities and the importance of a wealthy upperclass.The first factor was economic, the second cultural; and they operatedin some mutual tension.China already had, not a consumer society in the Western sense, but welldeveloped consumer products.An English merchant noted that China alreadyseemed to have everything: the best food in the world, rice; the best drink,tea; and the best clothing, cotton, silk, fur. Many European products, suchas china, were just pale imitations of what China already produced.Evencotton goods (which ultimately provided some inroad) were better made inChina than in the growing European factories, into the 1830s.China neededa few consumer raw materials from other places, such as lead for tea chests;pepper; and cane for beds and chairs, but these could be obtained throughestablished trading patterns in South East Asia and hardly encouraged eitheran interest in Western items or some new surge of consumerism.It was true that the eighteenth century saw the spread of upper-classlife styles to a growing number of wealthy families in the cities.Gardenvillas became more popular extensive gardens with pavilions, bridges,ponds, and winding walkways.This was consumerism of a sort, in termsof suggesting interests in more opulent lifestyles, but the fashions involvedwere highly traditional.The same trends applied to food and clothing,where materialism might spread but not the zest for novelty and franticacquisition typical of consumerism in the contemporary West.Clothingfashions did change periodically, based on the tastes of trend-setting elitesin the big cities; and there were other innovations, such as growing use ofrestaurants.But court dress remained stable, defined by customary stand-ards, and many furnishing styles, like architecture itself, demonstrated along and conservative tradition.And of course the groups involved werefar smaller as a percentage of total population than the expanding consumeraudience in Western Europe.These constraints related to the second, cultural factor
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