The Consumer Revolution: Now, Only Yesterday, Or a Long Time Ago?

Abstract

The Consumer Revolution: Now, Only Yesterday, or a Long Time Ago? Paul G. E. Clemens (bio) Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds. Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia and United States Capital Historical Society, 1994. xii 721 pp. Bibliographical references and index. $79.50 (cloth); $24.00 (paper). This volume of essays represents a vigorous attempt to relocate the origins of “consumer society” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and to demonstrate that the ability of capitalism to shape taste, fashion, and material culture defined a world economy as much then as now. Building on a thriving scholarship on consumerism in early modern England, these essays place the “consumer revolution” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in an Atlantic context, and in doing so, challenge works that see the transition from production to consumption, from genteel culture to mass markets, as the defining characteristics of the modern age.1 More generally, these essays break down the artificial divide between cultural and social history: grounded in careful research on who consumed what and when, these studies raise questions about the meaning of consumption to both the genteel and ordinary folk, the purposes that consumption served, and the systems of value which consumption shaped and in which it was embedded. The volume is organized topically. We thus have essays on various aspects of leisure (travel, sport, reading, theater) and forms of consumption (architecture, clothing, household possessions, paintings), as well as more general essays about the causes and consequences of the “consumer revolution” (a term, in fairness, which no more than half the authors employ). Collectively, the essays contribute to an understanding of several general themes that form the outlines for a yet-to-be-written study of consumerism in early America: (1) How do we define and date the consumer revolution in early America? How “revolutionary” were the changes in consumer behavior? How was the consumer revolution modified by local, vernacular traditions in material culture and architectural design? (2) What factors best explain new patterns of acquisitive behavior? How crucial was European influence? (3) What were the consequences of the consumer revolution? Was the “consumption revolution” [End Page 574] good, practically and morally, for the people of British North America? Did it mean greater opportunity for ordinary Americans to live comfortably? Did it create or reinforce class tensions between those who could and those who could not afford to consume? Did it destroy traditional ways of life that had given people comfort, security, and meaning? In “Changing Lifestyles and Consumer Behavior in the Colonial Chesapeake,” Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh argue that a fundamental change in household consumption occurred in the early Chesapeake between the 1680s and the 1760s. For most of the seventeenth century, Chesapeake settlers lived a life of crude sufficiency — the rich had more but not markedly different goods than other folk. There was, they state, “no agreed upon assemblage of goods” (p. 63) that correspond to wealth, status, or reputation. Through an intensive study of some 7,500 probate inventories drawn from four Maryland and Virginia counties, Carr and Walsh chart how this pattern changed, first among the elite, as early as the 1680s, and then trickling down, so that by the 1760s most middling households as well were furnished according to new standards of comfort, taste, and fashion. To establish this point, they devised an “amenities index” to measure the frequency with which twelve representative household items — such things as books, earthenwares, knives and forks, watches, clocks, silver plate, bed and table linens, implements for storing or processing spices — were found in probate records. The index rose from around two in the seventeenth century (crude sufficiency) to around five (the triumph of gentility) before the Revolution. Thus, for example, an item such as fine earthenware — noted in the inventories as Queensware, delftware, Liverpool ware, and the like — that could be found only here and there among seventeenth-century decedents, was by the 1760s in the homes of virtually all the rich, half or more of the middling sort, and perhaps a quarter of the homes of those who died poor. Building on...