for consumption. The manner in which consumption decisions are made by a wage earner is vastly different in terms of the income earned and the worker’s amount of discretion about where that income goes. It is consumption by the worker, rather than the slave, on which this book will focus. It is the “sphere of exchange,” or the market, for both labour and consumer goods that translates work into consumption in a capitalist, market economy (Sassatelli, 2007).
The second element that distinguishes the capitalist political economy is for-profit, private ownership. This is relevant in terms of consumption because it means that the goods and services that people consume are produced in order to make a profit for firms and the individuals that own them. Goods and services produced in this manner are often referred to as commodities. This makes for a different context of provision than occurs in the home or by the government, neither of which are quite as concerned with profits. Most people acquire most of their goods and services through the market, although this is not exclusively so. Many goods and services, although a declining percentage of total consumption, are acquired through production in the household. This is where many child-rearing services are performed, from changing diapers to cooking meals, often according to socially constructed, traditionally defined gender roles. People also consume goods and services produced by the government. This is how most people get their education, their drinking water, fire protection and roads. Compared to market provision, these are produced under a different logic and with very different consequences for who gets to consume and the types of goods and services with which those people will be provided. In this book, we are concerned primarily with commodity consumption, although we will frequently contrast its crucial differences with the home or government. To sum up all of our definitional discussion, this book is on consumption, with a particular focus on capitalist, commodity consumption, or, as sociologist Max Weber put it, the satisfaction of daily wants and needs achieved through the “capitalist mode” (Weber, 1961).
Competing Themes in the History of Consumption
As we shall see in the remainder of the book, two fractures show up time and again in analyzing the political economy of consumption. The first tension is whether the evolution of consumption is one of continuity or transformation. Those, like Trentmann, who advocate for continuity argue that consumption is a dynamic evolution, not a phenomenon that should be associated with more recent times or any particular place. Rather, they argue that consumption and consumer culture extend back into time and across geographical locations, with no sharp break between a consumer society and a pre-consumerist past (Trentmann, 2009). As Trentmann stated, “things are an inextirpable part of what makes us human” (2016: 678).
Continuity advocates point to the importance of consumption beyond the usual Western European and American locations and back into the distant past. In tribal societies people not only ate, clothed and sheltered themselves but also consumed beyond bare necessities, often using consumption as a mark of status (Sassatelli, 2007). The Roman Empire was famous for its system of transportation that facilitated trade (Trentmann, 2009: 191). Marco Polo’s voyage in the thirteenth century marked the beginning of long-distance trade in high-value items between Asia and Europe. His accounts of the riches of the Great Han, including exotic horses, elephants and leather shoes, inspired further voyages and an expansion of Asian possessions in Europe by the aristocracy and (perhaps ironically) the religious hierarchy – an inventory in 1295 at the Vatican listed quite a collection of Mongolian silk (McCabe, 2015: 18–19). Moving in the other direction, Western imported goods were integrated into Middle Eastern markets by the sixteenth century (Stearns, 2001). An important part of this scholarship highlights the number of things that were in people’s houses as evidence of their propensity to consume (Margairaz, 2012: 193). In China, during the late Ming dynasty (up to the first half of the 1600s), books were an important household item, as were Japanese-made fans, lacquered tables, gold-painted screens and cosmetic boxes (Trentmann, 2016: 47).
Even McKendrick et al.’s definition of consumption for novelty and fashion can be found in more locations and further back in time than is often assumed. In Ming China, people exhibited a taste for changing sleeve lengths, demonstrating the importance of fashion, and one scholar at the time lamented that for “young dandies in the villages … even silk gauze isn’t good enough and [they] lust for Suzhou embroideries.” Merchants would create gigantic banners, some as much as 10 meters high and lit by lanterns at night, to attract customers (Trentmann, 2016: 47). In Zanzibar, off the East African coast, status items such as jewelry and umbrellas were important markers of social standing. Although consumption has evolved, expanded and intensified, it has a much longer history in much more diverse geographic space than is often acknowledged (ibid.: 677).
Similarly, innovations that facilitate consumption, such as credit, also have a long history. Credit is useful because it allows the purchase of more expensive items without prior saving and facilitates continued consumption during temporary periods of reduced income. The Code of Hammurabi in Mesopotamia in 1752 bc laid out the terms of debt bondage in which men could pledge themselves or other family members into the service of a creditor to pay off their debts (a practice that still continues in some countries, such as India). Over time there has been an incredibly wide range of arrangements between debtor and creditor – from those granted based on personal relationships of trust, such as when bartenders would chalk up their drinkers’ debts on a slate above the bar until it was wiped clean by payment, to those backed by collateral, such as a pawnshop, to those backed by law, such as the debtor’s prison, where creditors could have delinquent borrowers confined until they paid up (Wiedenhoft-Murphy, 2016).
For those that view consumption through the continuity lens, there is rarely such a thing as a new problem. For every perceived disaster seen by analysts focused on current trends, the continuity researcher can point to a historical precedent. For example, the concern that globalization creates problems for local producers and sacrifices local tastes and culture is hardly new. Long-distance trade has been practiced throughout much of the sweep of recorded history. As early as the tenth and eleventh century, a long-distance trade in commodities was well established, with cotton, textiles, spices, silks and curtains being shipped across the Indian Ocean (Trentmann, 2009: 191). The worry that new, low-cost retailers such as Walmart, or, even worse, online sellers such as Amazon, will destroy their competitors also has a historical precedent. The same debates, with the same alarmist tones, occurred in the 1800s, when early department stores used low prices, one-stop shopping and innovative advertising techniques to pioneer purchasing as a recreational activity (Haupt, 2012: 272). Yet small-scale retail survived. Department stores took only 3 percent of total retail by 1914 in Western Europe (Trentmann, 2016: 205). The concern that consumption represents a social failure, in which people vainly attempt to show off and emulate, has been repeated in many different times in many different contexts (ibid.: 677). Centuries ago, in Italy, critics lamented the vanity of the market for beauty products, including fake hair, which was demanded not only by the predictably preening nobility but also by more humble artisans and innkeepers (ibid.: 30).
In contrast, transformationists see sharper breaks in consumption. This does not mean that there are no historical precedents for trends or that there are no antecedents for revolutions in consumption, but that certain periods can be identified as notably different from the past. In one particularly bold example of this, McKendrick et al. (1982) claim that the “birth” of the consumer society could be pinpointed to the third quarter of the 1700s in England, which was the richest country at the time – alternative birthplaces include the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, Renaissance Italy and seventeenth-century France (McCabe, 2015: 2–3). These authors justified their sharp period break with some impressive statistics. Sales of non-necessities such as soap, candles and beer increased at more than twice the rate of population growth over the last fifteen years of the eighteenth century (McKendrick et al., 1982: 29).
For McKendrick et al., it was not that people’s desires for consumption changed, but incomes and prices certainly did. Starting in the 1600s, the expansion of trade and the establishment of agricultural plantations reduced the price of many little pleasures, such as tobacco, tea, coffee and sugar (Pennell, 2012: 75). Coffee gained
