Consumption and the World of Goods

John Brewer, Roy Porter, John Brewer, Roy Porter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136157677
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The study of past society in terms of what it consumes rather than what it produces is - relatively speaking - a new development. The focus on consumption changes the whole emphasis and structure of historical enquiry. While human beings usually work within a single trade or industry as producers, as, say, farmers or industrial workers, as consumers they are active in many different markets or networks. And while history written from a production viewpoint has, by chance or design, largely been centred on the work of men, consumption history helps to restore women o the mainstream.
The history of consumption demands a wide range of skills. It calls upon the methods and techniques of many other disciplines, including archaeology, sociology, social and economic history, anthropology and art criticism. But it is not simply a melting-pot of techniques and skills, brought to bear on a past epoch. Its objectives amount to a new description of a past culture in its totality, as perceived through its patterns of consumption in goods and services.
Consumption and the World of Goods is the first of three volumes to examine history from this perspective, and is a unique collaboration between twenty-six leading subject specialists from Europe and North America. The outcome is a new interpretation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one that shapes a new historical landscape based on the consumption of goods and services.

1

Introduction

John Brewer and Roy Porter

Our lives today are dominated by the material objects that proliferate all around us, and by the prospects and problems they afford. It is peculiar that the history of this ‘world of goods’ has, at least till very recently, been so little addressed by historians. Economic history has long been entrenched; social and cultural history have vastly expanded their domains in recent years. Yet none of these disciplines has set the history of consumer societies high on its agenda; and, though the opportunities are present, the three have rarely joined forces to tackle what ought to be a fruitful and unifying mutual concern.

As events over the last few years in eastern and central Europe have been suggesting, in the modern world the ultimate test of the viability of regimes rests in their capacity, in the literal sense, to ‘deliver the goods’. Today’s verdict is that state communism has failed to meet this demand; erstwhile Marxists are now looking to the west for their models of abundance. If, over the long haul, what J. H. Plumb has, in a different context, called the growth of political stability hinges on the ability of politico-economic systems to satisfy expectations of the good life, surely it is high time for ‘big history’ to address one of the special features of modern western societies: not just industrialization, or economic growth, but the capacity to create and sustain a consumer economy, and the consumers to go with it. Modern western economies have transformed the material world, and thereby, it seems, stabilized the social and the political.

The early history of consumer societies has not been totally neglected. Notable studies have appeared, assessing the transformation of the medieval void into a culture full of objects, not least Chandra Mukerji’s wide-ranging From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism and Joan Thirsk’s more specialized Economic Policy and Projects.¹ A lively scholarship surveys the distinctive forms of consumer-capitalism emerging in the second half of the nineteenth century and flourishing in the twentieth: department stores, international exhibitions, advertising, consumer psychology, industrial design and so forth.² And, in some ways, most ambitiously of all, The Birth of a Consumer Society (1982), jointly written by Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, addressed head-on the key questions of the roots and rise of consumer-capitalism.³ Probing the time and place of the ‘take-off into consumerism, that work suggested that it was, in fact, eighteenth-century England that had witnessed the first ‘consumer revolution’. Above all, the authorial trio seriously addressed the implications of material plenty from different disciplinary positions. As an economic historian, Neil McKendrick explored the strategies through which entrepreneurs could create, and then cash in upon, a new hunger for belongings and services.⁴ From the social-historical angle, J. H. Plumb showed the impact of new gratifications upon cultural horizons and expectations of life in the age of the Enlightenment.⁵ And, assessing the political implications, John Brewer showed how the pressures and problems of commercial society helped call into being a new middle-class politics.⁶ The volume aimed to demonstrate that analysis of consumer societies must go far beyond mere enumerations of the accelerating rates at which pots and pans, geegaws and jigsaws were acquired. For the concept of consumer society has far wider significations, characterizing social orders whose expectations, whose hopes and fears, whose prospects of integration, harmony or dissolution, increasingly depended upon the smooth operation and continued expansion of the system of goods.

The Birth of a Consumer Society was a swallow, preceding a summer which has yet to follow. The hope of the authors that the economic, socio-cultural and political dimensions of consumption would be conjointly researched has hardly yet come to fruition in major cross-disciplinary works. It is noteworthy, for instance, that consumerism and the impact of material abundance figure hardly at all in the new three-volume Cambridge Social History of Britain.⁷ A certain degree of scepticism continues to be bruited about the heuristic value of the concept to historians. Some of this centres on specific questions. Was eighteenth-century England really the site of this happy event? Didn’t consumerism emerge earlier, in Renaissance Italy and the Low Countries, and then reveal all its major features in the ‘embarrassment of riches’ enjoyed by the burghers of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic?⁸ Or, to pose the question differently, wasn’t the eighteenth century far too early to expect to find manifestations of mass society, mass culture and mass production? Should we not be looking for those developments in the age not of Josiah Wedgwood but of Henry Ford?⁹ Several of the contributors to the present volume – above all, Jean-Christophe Agnew in his survey of methods, approaches and historiographies, and John Styles in his closing essay – think out loud upon these genuinely complex issues of language and categorization.¹⁰

But there is a more general scepticism which needs to be identified and addressed, a discomfort with the very concept of the history of consumerism. Not (as might have been suggested a decade or two ago) on the grounds that the study of material culture is a trivial pursuit. We are all semiologists now, convinced by the arguments of such cultural anthropologists as Clifford Geerz and by literary structuralists like Roland Barthes and his successors – to say nothing of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life – that every object bears a meaning and tells a story: belongings are good to think with.¹¹ Rather there is an underlying objection, a fear that to interpret the last few centuries in terms of the rise of consumerism is some kind of ideological ploy, an old progress theory being smuggled back in new clothes. The suspicion has been most directly articulated from the political right: J. C. D. Clark has condemned attempts to identify early consumer societies as Whiggery Redivivus, yet another example of teleologically reading back the present into the past, or of endowing earlier centuries with a spurious modernity.¹² But one senses a no less impassioned, if not so clearly stated, antipathy from leftish historians, evidently fearful that concentration upon the history of the creation and fulfilment of customer demand will, willy-nilly, endorse a panglossian, hidden-hand history, which ratifies the claims of market capitalism to give the people what they want, and thereby obscures the history of poverty, oppression, uprooting, deskilling – in short, of class struggle in industrial capitalism.¹³

There has long been, of course, ideological antipathy from the left to the seductions of capitalist materialism, perhaps summed up most seminally in work by R. H. Tawney such as The Acquisitive Society (1923). This distaste for the fruits of capitalism may be regarded as an honourable tradition of idealist dissenting radicalism; alternatively one may see it as displaced Puritanism, latter-day Luddism, elitist snobbery or pseudo-aristocratic prejudice. From Carlyle, Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts movement, through to the Leavisites, the march of material progress has commonly been disparaged by British critics and historians as a source of alienation, selling the birthrights of craft and community for a can of pottage.¹⁴ Such views owe much both to Christian Socialism and to the young Marx’s ‘anthropological’ critique of capitalist reification and the fetishism of goods (the more you have the less you are).¹⁵ Amongst modern Marxist philosophers, Herbert Marcuse has been notable for his exposés of the politically reactionary functions of acquisitiveness (‘repressive desublimation’).¹⁶ Today, commodity capitalism has become one of the targets of the ‘Green’ political movement.

Critics red, green, and of many other hues, however, would insinuate that to highlight consumerism as a key tool of historical interpretation is necessarily to underwrite market economics and the politics accompanying it. It means, of course, no such thing – as is surely proved by the uniting of some two dozen distinguished scholars of radically different backgrounds, commitments and beliefs, as contributors to this book. It is, rather, the view of all who have written for this book that our understanding of the development of western societies will remain dramatically impoverished unless we confront the fact that such polities, uniquely in world history, have come to revolve around the mass consumption of goods and services. We need to understand how this system originated and how it has functioned. And to do this, it is imperative that we investigate in the most comprehensive way the links connecting this material culture (one often highly and increasingly inegalitarian) to the political and social systems with which it has become symbiotic.

Various questions suggest themselves. Has the emergent world of goods by some economic–technological necessity precluded the possibility of certain sorts of regimes (the ancien régime or brute tyranny), and has it pre-empted certain kinds of political future (for example, proletarian revolution as outlined in the Communist Manifesto)? How far should we see consumerism as a mentalité, informing attitudes not only towards goods and belongings, but also personal relations and political philosophies?¹⁷ In what ways does history reveal the manipulation of attitudes such as emulativeness by political leaders and dealers, by the psy-professions, by public relations agencies, no less than by manufacturers, marketeers and their publicity machines?¹⁸ Alongside homo faber, and homo economicus and all the other ‘men’ inscribed in modern society, we need to assess how far the new world of goods was simultaneously created by, and creating, a new sort of man (and woman): homo edens, the consumer, or, even less flatteringly, homo gulosus.¹⁹

In short, the problem with the concept of the history of consumerism is not that it is irredeemably ideologically loaded, but that it has been, till now, historiographically immature. It has not yet been the subject of searching criticism nor have its programmes been fully put into effect. It needs to be broken in and put through its paces. Yet it carries great promise. The point of this volume, and the two planned to follow it, is to explore the notion’s value in interpreting the central transformations in the histories of Europe and North America over the last several centuries, not just in economic history or the history of material culture, but across a far wider spectrum of human affairs.

This volume is divided into six sections, each addressing a particular problem area. The first, ‘Problems, methods and concepts’, is mainly methodological and historiographical. As a historian, Jean-Christophe Agnew examines recent writings that have argued for the utility of ‘consumerism’ as an analytic category. He points to some of the difficulties encountered by attempts to translate terms derived from twentieth-century circumstances to earlier eras, and the dangers of circularity; he is also concerned with the reality of the beast: the consumer. Is he who consumes automatically a ‘consumer’? Do ‘consumers’ necessarily possess a consumerist mentality? How can one legitimately infer attitudes and dispositions from behaviour?

These difficulties are further addressed by the sociologist Colin Campbell, who indicts customary explanations of consumer behaviour in terms of ‘emulation’, ‘fashion’ and ‘demand’ for being little better than question-begging, and suggests an alternative reconstruction of the mentality and structure of feeling of consumer man.²⁰ Avoiding tautology, Campbell aims to reconstruct the precise structures of feeling which gave consumerism a boost in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

It is hardly possible to explore the idea of consumption without running up against a disturbing paradox: the deep ambiguities associated with the very word, ‘consume’; it suggests both an enlargement through incorporation and a withering away. Consuming is thus both enrichment and impoverishment. The significance of semantics is central to Porter’s paper. For, alongside its politico-economic meanings, ‘consumption’ had a precise medical connotation: the wasting disease we nowadays call tuberculosis. Porter seeks to uncover the metaphorical and symbolic undertones of consumption through playing on the contemporary doubling of meanings in a society in which extremes of consumption (underand over-eating and drinking) and a growing abundance of goods were commonly regarded as deleterious to health.²¹

The next section, ‘Goods and consumption’, situates rising consumption within its wider economic, political and ideological contexts. As Peter Burke emphasizes in his cross-cultural study of Europe and the Orient, it was not only in western societies that massive personal wealth accumulated²² or the ostentation of possessions became a conspicuous feature of social life and worldly values.²³ Yet, as Jan de Vries’s survey of western economic developments makes abundantly clear, it was unique aspects of the development of capitalism, first around the Mediterranean and then on the ‘Atlantic rim’, and in particular the role played by urbanization²⁴ and the social and political structures associated with it, which ensured in the Euro-American world an unprecedented proliferation of manufactured articles from the seventeenth century onwards.²⁵ There is some irony in the fact, noted by John Wills in his account of the overseas, imperial dimension of western economic expansion, that Asiatic producers of tea, sugar, spices and other primary goods found markets in Europe of a magnitude they could never have hoped to achieve in Asia itself.²⁶

Along similar lines to Peter Burke, Joyce Appleby reminds us that economic expansion does not occur in an ideological vacuum. The multiplication of goods upset entrenched Christian religio-moral teachings, with their denunciations of Mammon and the love of lucre, and threatened conservative theories of social order, which stipulated (partly through sumptuary laws) that each rank must have, and must remain within, its proper material trappings. One of the historical tasks of what we may loosely call the Enlightenment was to forge new sets of moral values, new models of man, to match and m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• LIST OF FIGURES
• LIST OF TABLES
• LIST OF PLATES
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• Preface
• 1 Introduction—John Brewer and Roy Porter
• Part I Problems, Methods and Concepts
• Part II Goods and Consumption
• Part III Production and the Meaning of Possessions
• Part IV Literacy and Numeracy
• Part V The Consumption of Culture: Books and Newspapers
• Part VI Consumption, Objects and Images
• Index