Consumer Revolution

10 Key excerpts on "Consumer Revolution"

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  The Complete Tradesman

  A Study of Retailing, 1550–1820

  • Nancy Cox(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  9 most attention has been devoted to economic and social change; until recently much less has been directed towards investigating the relationship between retailing and cultural change. The introduction of such concepts as 'Consumer Revolution' and 'consumerism' initiated a shift towards the cultural implications of retailing and it is to the development of ideas of Consumer Revolution that we now turn.

  Consumer Revolution

  'Consumer Revolution' is a phrase that has suffered much from over use since its relatively recent introduction. It has spawned a number of definitions and applications and, with its underlying ideas, has provided a framework upon which scholars have built conflicting theories about economic, social and cultural change. The wider the chronological span to which the phrase has become attached, the more it becomes apparent that there is no agreement on precisely what the term means. Most scholars of modern economic and social history would assert that the only true Consumer Revolution occurred in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, when the urbanization and industrialization of the country produced a working class with opportunities not available to their forebears.10 To these historians, the Consumer Revolution is synonymous with mass production, mass marketing and mass consumption, and the Market is the key to that revolution. Attractive streets and gleaming shop windows encouraged avarice and day dreaming far beyond the immediate reach of many purses, while stores like Woolworths and Marks and Spencer allowed all but the destitute some share in the new world of luxury and its imitators. Defined like this it is impossible not to agree with this interpretation of the nature of Consumer Revolution.11

  However, another school of thought has argued that the seeds of change were sown in the eighteenth century if not even earlier.12 They see an increased variety of goods, some once imported as luxuries but now produced more cheaply at home, and a developing sophistication in marketing from a very primitive base. The evidence for the change is most easily observed, they would argue, in the home where raised standards of comfort, particularly for the middling sort of people, were matched by specialized room use, rising expenditure on the presentation of a public face to visitors and increased facilities for leisure. Just as the later period is typified by the threepenny and sixpenny stores, so this earlier age has its symbol of consumption - the new commodity of tea. Tea drinking was a new pleasure and not a replacement for other similar practices. By the beginning of the eighteenth century it was firmly associated with sugar, another commodity also new to most of the population. By the end of that century tea drinking had become not only an adjunct of polite conversation but also a popular drink providing comfort to the poor.13

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  Global History and New Polycentric Approaches

  • (Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Springer Open

    (Publisher)

  Yet further research has even pushed the site of the Consumer Revolution earlier into the seventeenth cen-tury, especially for precocious locations such as parts of Flanders and the Dutch Republic. In every case the early work of documentation was centred squarely in either Europe or America (in terms of both the loca-tion of the historians themselves and also the objects of their study). Yet it was impossible to go very far in this pursuit without having to engage with the food of exotic commodities coming into Europe and America from other parts of the world, which were moreover them-selves such a strong catalyst for the new kinds of consumer desire being described by historians. 1 T HE E ARLY M ODERN C ONSUMER R EVOLUTION It is this specifc connection between the rise of world history as a sub-discipline and the discovery of a ‘Consumer Revolution’ by early modern-ists that I want to pursue here. Indeed, this chapter began with a hunch: that the burgeoning historiography of consumption, the discovery of one or possibly several ‘Consumer Revolution(s)’ and a new interest in the history of commodities themselves were all in some way critically linked to what seemed like the almost simultaneous take-off of world his-tory as a recognized feld worthy of its own associations, journals and graduate training programmes. To probe this hunch empirically, I frst checked the English-language corpus of books available for review using the Google Ngram Viewer. Running a search across the twentieth cen-tury and into the current one (1900–2008) on the phrases ‘world his-tory’, ‘global trade’, ‘global history’ and ‘Consumer Revolution’ yields the graph reproduced in Fig. 1 . ‘World history’ is by far the most common of these phrases, rising steadily from even before the Great Depression GLOBAL HISTORY AND THE HISTORY OF CONSUMPTION: CONGRUENCE … 245 and peaking twice, frst in the context of the Second World War and then again in the mid-1960s.

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  France, 1800-1914

  A Social History

  • Roger Magraw(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 8The birth of a consumer society?

  Introduction

  Studies of the ‘industrial revolution’ once emphasised technological change and production. It is no accident that historians’ focus has now shifted towards consumption, for consumerism is central to the culture of our age. With the decline of clear ‘class’ identities built around work has come an emphasis on those constructed around consumer taste and lifestyles. Choice in the market-place, it is assumed, defines one’s true essence. I shop, therefore I am – and I am what I buy! ‘Trickle-down’ economics revitalised once fashionable, but briefly discredited, assumptions that élite consumption produced benefits for the poor. Insisting that expensive silk gowns should be worn at Court in the 1857 industrial recession, Empress Eugènie explained that ‘when those above are spending, there is no unemployment down below’. During the 1847 depression etiquette magazine Le Counseiller des Dames observed that ‘government, in the interests of the labouring population, wants celebration parties, gatherings of the fashionable set – for they are precious sources of work for all industries’ (Vanier 1960). Because our own ‘underclass’ allegedly dreams of Armani fashions and Porsches, the Industrial Revolution has been re-conceptualised as a consumer-driven process during which elite tastes in furniture, porcelain, fashion and colonial goods were aped by rising ‘middling classes’, then by the populace as servants coveted their employers’ cast-off fashions and workers emulated the servants (Fine and Leopold 1990). Certainly British workers developed a taste for cheap colonial goods such as tea and tobacco, and wore bright-coloured cotton clothing, though some remain unconvinced that a ‘bleak-age’ of worker immiseration can be reinvented as an era of popular consumerism on the strength of the poor acquiring the second-hand clothing of their social superiors. Emerging ‘consumerism’ has been discerned in Holland and in the American colonies, where the 1770s revolt was symbolised by a boycott of imported British consumer goods and the Boston Tea Party was an elaborate ‘ritual of non-consumption’! There is evidence that flourishing colonial trade and proto-industrial production were expanding the world of material goods in pre-1789 France. Parisian artisans were being drawn into a culture des apparences

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  Acknowledging Consumption

  • Daniel Miller(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 CONSUMPTION WITHIN HISTORICAL STUDIES

  Paul Glennie

  IThe significance of consumption for history

  INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

  Earlier this century, industrial and agricultural revolutions were being discovered almost everywhere that historians looked. Recently it has been Consumer Revolutions, at least among European and American historians (little literature has hitherto addressed other histories of consumption, though see Clunas 1991). Phrases like the birth of consumer society, emergent modern consumption, the rise of mass consumption, and the rise of mass market culture have been applied to the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (Thirsk 1978); Restoration England (Earle 1989: Shammas 1990; Weatherill 1988); the early eighteenth century (Eversley 1967); the Georgian period (Campbell 1987; McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb 1982; Williams 1987); the late nineteenth century (Fox and Lears 1983; Fraser 1981; Lee 1981); and between the two World Wars (Miller 1991). And, of course, each account raises questions about defining ‘consumer society’, and about consumption’s connections to wider economic and cultural changes.

  This proliferation reflects both continuous growth in Western consumption, and historians’ various definitions of ‘consumer society’. In addition, work on consumption is characterised by fragmentation, with very many local case-studies. Most general treatments of consumption either cover short periods and a single country, or take a long-run comparative view only for certain goods. The sheer variety of available sources (artefactual, documentary, visual, literary), and the divergent agendas of specialised research fields in different countries, exacerbate diversity and fragmentation. Different histories inform, and are informed by, highly divergent general analyses on consumption, and many historians distrust explicit theorising as a comparative and synthesising device.

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  Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600-1800

  • Woodruff Smith(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Even a superficial consideration of these questions reveals that they cannot be answered without following trails of evidence that lead in multiple directions, into many, perhaps most, of the corners of early modern European life, crossing and crisscrossing each other in the process. Trying to understand changes in consumption requires that they be examined in connection with a host of other major phenomena with which they were interwoven, such as European overseas expansion and the elaboration of a global economy, the development of public opinion, changes in social organization and in definitions of gender, the processes of commercialization and industrialization, and so forth. This would be an impossible undertaking without an appropriate conceptual approach and analytical structure, which the present chapter is intended to provide.

  CHANGES IN CONSUMPTION PATTERNS IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

  Some historians have written of a “Consumer Revolution” in the eighteenth century, with its origins in the seventeenth. Although others have questioned whether the term can be applied accurately to the period (not enough consumption, not rapid enough change for a revolution), there can be no doubt that major alterations occurred in the quantity and types of consumer goods demanded in western Europe, and that some of these alterations helped to lay the foundations for European industrialization, the consumer society, and much more.1 What happened, and why?

  Between the beginning of the seventeenth century and the conventional onset of British industrialization in the late eighteenth century, a period of rising consumption in general in western Europe, an increasingly large proportion of the commodities that satisfied European consumer demand were produced overseas. Although many consumer goods of entirely European origin also experienced growth in demand, many of the most important changes that occurred in consumption centered on the use of non-European products. Several of the staple commodities of the Industrial Revolution, most notably cottons, were imported massively from abroad before they were produced in quantity in Europe.2 Hence the importance of paying close attention to the roles of overseas imports and, by implication, of European expansion and the construction of global economies in any attempt to understand European consumption patterns.

  The significance of non-European consumer goods did not, as might be supposed, arise immediately from the European discovery of America. For a century after Columbus, the main object of European attention in America was precious metals. When silver was found in the 1540s in territories claimed by Spain, the whole enterprise of America (Spanish and non-Spanish alike) oriented itself around its extraction and transportation. A transatlantic consumer-oriented trade did develop in the fifteenth century, but it was small potatoes compared to the silver business, and of course the potatoes themselves, once brought across the ocean, required little further importation. Most of the consumer trade moved from Europe to America, to supply settlers in New Spain and Peru.3

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  Exploring Social Change

  Process and Context

  • Bridgette Wessels(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The fashion process created a class of consumers whose members wanted to own goods that were different in kind – not merely in value – to those desired by the subordinate classes. Distinctions in social status therefore began to be signified and expressed through the types of goods consumed. The rise of ‘taste’ – whether good or bad taste – was part of the way that distinctions became socially and culturally created, managed and controlled (Gronow, 1997). Ultimately, the rise of fashion across a wider population of consumers formed a ready market for the expansion of in the availability of consumer goods in the modern and late modern era. Consumption and economics Looking at another historical period, Corrigan (1997) writes that England’s economic prosperity in the 18th century supported a consumer culture because people from a broader range of backgrounds and classes had more disposable income. This meant that fashionable goods were more accessible for many people. McKendrick et al. (1982) claim that 18th-century England was a period and place that fostered and generated an early consumer society based on the masses, instead of elite consumption. They assert that this devel-opment of wider consumerism across society related to changing economic conditions rather than to political factors – as had been the case in the earlier Elizabethan court. McKendrick et al. write that: ‘the Consumer Revolution was the necessary analogue to the industrial revolution, the necessary convulsion on the demand side of the equation to match the convulsion on the supply side’ (1982, p.9). The industrial organization of production created some of the conditions required to develop this mass consumption across society. At the end of the Social Change and Consumerism 113 18th century, consumption was recognized as being a central feature of the English economy.

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  The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism

  New Extended Edition

  • Colin Campbell(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  42 What remains unclear, however, is how the revolution in demand was related to these wider developments, or even which of the many innovations that occurred at this time should be considered as either part of the Consumer Revolution or closely related to it.

  What is clear, as Professor Plumb has demonstrated,43 is that a leisure revolution was an integral part of this overall pattern of change. A very wide range of activities which we now accept as a normal part of recreation, such as the theatre and horse-racing, took their modern form during this period. In this respect, it is even more obvious that the expenditure involved can hardly be classed as anything other than luxurious, leisure being, almost by definition, a non-essential activity, the modern view of ‘healthy recreation’ as an important human need having not as yet become widely accepted. Here too the middle classes constituted the dominant new market, as Professor Plumb makes clear, commenting at the end of his survey that ‘All the activities that I have so far described point to the growth of a middle-class audience.’ These he specifies as the theatre, music, dancing, sport and ‘cultural pastimes’ generally, for which ‘the prosperous gentry and the new middle class hungered’.44

  Another facet of the eighteenth-century Consumer Revolution only referred to in passing by McKendrick et al. was the development of the modern novel and the emergence of a fiction-reading public. There occurred a tremendous expansion in the market for books, especially fiction, during the century, with the annual publication of new works quadrupling; at the same time, new marketing and distributing techniques were introduced, most noticeably the circulating library, whilst the profession of ‘author’ also became more or less established.45 Here too commercialization was very apparent with the development of a ‘fiction-manufacturing industry’46 being linked to aggressive advertising, with special subscription plans and part-publication designed to overcome the high cost of books. Also there is widespread agreement that the major part of the demand came from the middle classes and more particularly still, from women. As Taylor observes, the fact ‘That women constituted by far the greater part of the readership for these novels was never disputed.’47

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  A Brief History of Pollution

  • Adam C. Markham(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Four

  THE FIRST Consumer Revolution

  And how much for the brain of a pocket mouse, and how much for the hump of a humpback whale? Miroslav Holub

  Climbing the Ladder of Consumption

  The vastly inequitable consumption of resources by people in the industrialized nations is the basis upon which our environmental crisis is built today. The burning desire to possess and consume was only truly unleashed during the last 50 years, but centuries of attempting to slake human thirst for material and non-material goods have driven the planet into a downward spiral of resource depletion and pollution. The wealth of the western world has allowed its inhabitants to buy hundreds of millions of durables such as televisions, videos, cars and books in the last few decades, but what was the role of the consumer in earlier times?

  It is a mistake to believe, as many do, that the roots of the resource consumption and pollution problem are only planted in the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth century. From the myriad historical points when agricultural produce began to be traded and craftsmen began to produce goods for barter or sale, came the problem. Its seeds lie deeper still, in human nature itself, because as Aristotle said, ‘the avarice of mankind is insatiable’. And Adam Smith believed ‘every man is rich or poor according to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life’.91

  Although certainly not the first example of a period of increased consumption among a human population, the colonial expansion of Europe from the late fifteenth century is a good launching point for this account. Columbus’s 1492 landfall in the Caribbean marked the beginning of the destruction of the native peoples of the Americas. The subsequent bloody expeditions of generations of European invaders were inextricably linked with the desire for wealth and possession of exotic wares. Columbus himself had set off to the West across the ‘Sea of Gloom’ in the hope of reaching the Indies and reopening the flow of consumer goods such as silks and jewels and particularly spices, which had been plugged by the Turkish victory in Constantinople in 1453.92

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  Consumer Culture

  History, Theory and Politics

  • Roberta Sassatelli(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  To account for these, we do not need to build a stage theory of development (see Stearns 2001). Instead we can resort to an imagery of increasing but uneven stratification, whereby a variety of ongoing processes, among different sections of the population in different places and times, are piled one on another, partly displacing previous trends, partly resuming them. To outline the phenomenon of modern consumption, historiography has traditionally focused not only on the commercial cities of the Renaissance and the consumption of colonial produce of the 17th-18th centuries, but also, and especially, on a much more recent period which runs, approximately, from the second half of the 19th century to after the Second World War. Studies on the end of the 19th century overwhelmingly focus on the spread of department stores and the modern system of advertising; those on the post-war period are mostly concerned with the spread of mass-produced durable goods for domestic use, from fridges to televisions. To these we can add various sociological studies on contemporary society which underline the shift to a post-Fordist model of production and the subsequent diffusion, thanks also to new technologies, of ever more individualized flexible models of consumption. These different studies of the changes in the practices of consumption may be read via a focus on how consumption has been framed and which features have been ascribed to consumers as social actors. In the next few pages I shall briefly run through a selection of the crucial shifts which have characterized the consolidation of modern patterns of consumption in the last two centuries, suggesting an initial picture of the most important factors behind the historical formation of the consumer society (see Figure 2.2)

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  The Evolution of Luxury

  • Ian Malcolm Taplin(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Greater material progress is coincidental with increased consumerism. But an expanded culture of consumption continues to embody social traits associated with status differentiation as well as a reconfigured notion establishing one’s self identity in a more fluid social structure. Industrialism would be the catalyst that presaged such changes. Industrialism North Western Europe was the area where a dynamic and innovative culture of consumption developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 20 However, it was England that emerged in the forefront of such trends by the latter part of that period. The English had become more “worldly” (the proverbial “nation of shopkeepers”) in the sense that they realized there were opportunities for creating a better life in this world rather than the world to come. Effectively this refocused attitudes towards work and material enjoyment with an emphasis upon the earthly present rather than an anticipated and hoped for heavenly future. It did not necessarily diminish sacred fervor and the pervasive desire to anticipate an afterlife; it merely removed some of the heavenly uncertainty for those whose work efforts were yielding considerable material rewards

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