Societies of consumers and consumer societies: co-operation, consumption and politics in Britain and continental Europec. 1850–1920

Abstract

The paper examines aspects of the development of consumers' co-operation in Europe from the mid-nineteenth century to the years immediately after the First World War. This was an important period in the extension of a ‘consumer society’, increasingly based on mass-consumption, but it also saw co-operative attempts collectively to empower consumers with ideological and material resources to contest the meanings of consumption and promote a vision of socio-economic transformation. This challenge to consumer society, most strongly expressed in Europe's industrial regions, is inadequately represented in most historical studies which concentrate on what are seen as consumption's dominant capitalistic and individualistic traits. Although some of the most visible early initiatives were found in Britain, co-operatives assumed their own particular characters within the different national and regional arenas of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. The paper examines the political context of co-operative development and establishment attempts to defuse its transformatory potential, especially where consumers' co-operation became overtly associated with socialism. Co-operation was weakened, however, by the fracturing of the supposed universalism of a shared identity as consumers by the particularism of political and geographical loyalties. Co-operation's ultimate failure to curb the extension of capitalist commerce should not prevent a recognition of the development of modern consumer society in Europe as a contested process.