From Europe to Jujuy: The Circulation of Enlightenment Ideas and Domestic Material Culture in the Mid-18th Century

Abstract

The eighteenth century propelled profound changes that influenced every aspect of social and individual life, giving rise to a body of literature that permeated all spheres, including the private one. A turbulent century, it sparked debates and controversies on countless topics, from which neither objects nor the household were exempt. Out of this consumer revolution—fueled by the technological advances of the time and the ensuing consumerism derived from the capitalist economy—there emerged in Europe a literature aimed at distinguishing among types of luxury: new and old, ancient and modern, as well as those linked to pleasure and vanity, while incorporating the notion of comfort into the equation. This paper seeks to examine how that literature—both the writings that debated luxury and those that discussed household comfort, in terms of objects and decoration—shaped domestic life in Jujuy in the mid-eighteenth century. To do so, it draws on contemporary European works and documentary sources—estate papers, wills, legal proceedings, and inventories—to describe how such ideas materialized in the quantity and quality of household goods and furnishings, as well as in the arrangement and decoration of domestic spaces. This socio-cultural approach, grounded in clues and traces, allows us to reconstruct the consumption patterns and prevailing ideas of the period, situating the analysis at the intersection of microhistory and global history, and tracing regional and global interconnections.