Introduction. Selling Textiles in the Eighteenth Century: Perspectives on Consumer and Retail Change

Abstract

The notion of an eighteenth-century transformation in European material culture, affecting both personal dress and the furnishing of the home, has become an established part of the historiography. Depending on the interests of different historians, it has been variously linked with the manifestation of growing wealth and material comfort amongst ordinary people; the supposed emergence of a ‘consumer society’ driven by fashion and emulation; the growth of colonial trade and the pursuit of the novel or the exotic, and the attempt to construct and communicate individual and collective identities through consumption.1 Textiles, especially imported and European cottons, are often accorded a central role in these processes, being seen as key engines driving change in consumption practices and thus broader shifts in the European and global economy. In the past, emphasis was invariably placed on improvements to the efficiency of production, particularly in terms of powered mechanisation. The key symbol of cotton’s role in modern society was, therefore, the mill. More recently, greater weight has been given to the transformative power of consumer choice, cotton’s agency now being symbolised in chintz curtains or a muslin dress.2