Consumption and Wealth

Abstract

In recent decades the phenomenon of consumerism has generated an impressive amount of historical discussion and research, much of it stimulated initially by academic interest in the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century. As this work has continued, however, the origins of the so-called ‘consumer revolution’ which, some historians claim, played a vital part in stimulating industrial change have been pushed ever further back into the early modern period. There is thus a plausible connection between the rise of consumerism and the beginnings of the decisive upward movement in economic activity which occurred in Restoration England. Research appears to have vindicated the views of contemporary writers such as Defoe, who looked back on the 1670s and 1680s in particular as a period of both economic and social transformation, certainly as a period during which England’s merchants and manufacturers first seized the commercial leadership of the world. However, the question of whether and to what extent this economic upsurge was reflected in rising purchasing power and rising consumer expectations among the English people as a whole has remained controversial. A ‘consumer revolution’ in the later seventeenth century would require not only a vast expansion in the range and quality of goods available even to those in modest circumstances but also a profound change in traditional attitudes and values.