About the Project
New Christian Materiality, 1450–1750 creates an innovative link between material culture, social agents, and patterns of consumption. Drawing on a wide range of archival and visual sources, the project develops a new way of writing global history, focused on specific locations (New Christian hubs) and their connections across continents.
Placing material culture at the centre of analysis, the project examines how knowledge of objects—how they were produced, valued, exchanged, and displayed—influenced wider patterns of consumption. It connects commodities with the social actors who moved them, and explores how trade shaped markets and everyday life.
By bringing together economic, social, and art history with geography, gender studies, and environmental perspectives, the project offers a new way of understanding early modern global trade. It places social and individual agency at its core, focusing on how New Christians navigated conditions of exclusion, mobility, and opportunity.
New Christian expertise in spices, precious metals, precious stones, coral, pearls, porcelain, lacquer, sandalwood, textiles, dye products, chocolate, tobacco, hides, exotica, art, and decorative arts will be systematically related to local information, investment in production and trade, and marketing across continents.
Shifting focus from commodities to the agents that sourced and traded them allows a deeper understanding of the logic of markets, local alliances, and the accumulation of knowledge. The project examines New Christians, material culture, and patterns of consumption in relation, attentive both to the expertise of the agents and to the qualities and agency of the objects and commodities they traded.
There is no precedent for a research project on the intersection between New Christians, material culture, and patterns of consumption. The project explores these themes through the specific role played by New Christians as brokers of intercontinental trade.
The project addresses several key research questions:
What was the role of New Christians as brokers and mediators of taste between Asia, Africa, and the Western World from the late fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries?
In what ways did New Christian expertise in material culture influence patterns of consumption where they lived and traded?
How did New Christians use material culture to enhance their social status?
How did material culture reflect gender issues within this ethnic elite?
How did New Christians impact the environment?
This project is based at King’s College London and is funded by the European Research Council (ERC).