Consumption in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain

Abstract

CONSUMPTION, CONSUMER REVOLUTIONS AND DEMAND There is a paradox at the heart of recent research on the industrial revolution. This is the juxtaposition of theories and evidence of slow economic and industrial growth with alternative theories and evidence of rapidly rising consumer expenditure. Earlier histories linked consumption to elite expenditure on the one hand and rising standards of living on the other. These are no longer considered to be valid. Few now believe that elite expenditure was in itself sufficient to fuel a major increase in consumption, and elite consumer behaviour did not ‘trickle down’ to sufficiently broad parts of the population. It is also now believed that the living standards of the labouring classes either were static or improved only slowly over the whole of the eighteenth century and much of the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet despite these conventions, theories of a consumer revolution, or at least recognition of evidence of a relatively widespread increase over the period in the possession of consumer goods, have been difficult to dislodge. Indeed they have gathered force since the 1990s, shaping the grand narrative of the period, and replacing the former grand narrative of the industrial revolution. Consumption, is now the major preoccupation of social and cultural historians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as it is of the social sciences more generally. Analysis of the broader aspects of consumer practices, and an understanding of the growing diversity of consumption, were left to social and cultural historians. Shifts in consumer behaviour depended on changing tastes, on deploying underemployed resources, especially within the household, and on that vocabulary which economic historians had carefully removed to the cultural sphere, that is, desire, attitude, fashion and emulation (de Vries 1993).