Luxury and Modern Global Order

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 marketsmany of them preludes to colonisationunderstood 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.