Are We Rich Yet? The Rise of Mass Investment Culture in Contemporary Britain. By Amy Edwards

Abstract

What makes Amy Edward’s study of the ways that finance soaked into everyday life and cultural norms in the 1980s so charming is its attention to social history. Alongside financial history, the reader is treated to a history of artifacts like the Filofax, the suits of the Yuppy, board games (The Stock Exchange Game, Ratrace), newspaper financial advice columns and their radio and TV equivalents (such as BBC’s The Money Programme). Edwards likewise draws attention to how a mass investment culture was imbued in other forms—TV dramas, sitcoms and various shows (such as The Antiques Roadshow, although curiously, not ITV’s Minder) as well as plays like Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money. But such sources are more than just charm, for Edwards is also detailing how the monetization that captured Britain and Britons was not simply a process that trickled down from the initiatives of financial elites and political ideologues. This was ground-level, popular capitalism, a culture of neoliberalism, as much as some abstract idea(s) of political economy. Edwards is thus part of the current historiographical re-thinking—see, for example, Davies, Jackson and Sutcliffe-Braithwaite’s The Neoliberal Age? (UCL Press, 2021)—of the neat and tidy narrative that nestles neoliberalism, Thatcherism and the 1980s together. And it folds developments in investing into a broader, longer narrative of consumerism—what Edwards dubs “financial consumerism.” Are We Rich yet? reads like a British version of the new histories of capitalism (Bethany Moreton, Louis Hyman and more) that emerged in the U.S. in the last decade or two. If Edwards is practicing something of a material (re)turn in cultural history, her preferred name for the field is “economic humanities.”