rather than hindering it (Sassatelli, 2007). The use of tobacco also spread widely, famed for its positive medical properties and ability to calm the nerves (McCabe, 2015: 73). The price of sugar dropped so much during the seventeenth century that the consumption of candies was possible for more than just the nobility, and the dessert course was introduced (ibid.: 57–8). According to McKendrick et al., this represented the “democratization” of consumption, in which spending habits that were once the exclusive purview of the very rich spread to the wider masses of the population, creating a consumer society, as opposed to a society that had some consumers (1982: 14). “All other classes imitated as best they could – which was much better than in the past” (ibid.: 11).
Transformationists argue that consumption should not be analyzed through “presentism,” which is looking at the past through the lens of, and in preparation for, the present by ascribing motives and values where they might not belong (McCracken, 1987: 142). For McKendrick et al., the revolution of the late 1700s provided people with the income to pursue the consumption that they had always wanted, but for other transformationists the break between the pre- and post-consumer society is also about culture and values in very different political, economic and social contexts. For example, many value systems before the 1700s, often based on religious doctrines from Christianity, to Islam, to Confucianism, were highly critical of worldly affluence and the excessive consumption that it spawned (although this did not prevent the upper levels of the religious and aristocratic hierarchy from living in ostentatious luxury). The earlier evidence on the continuity of consumption from Ming China, for example, needs to be tempered with the fact that most people did not think of themselves as consumers or even greatly value certain types of consumption that were associated with luxury or excess (Clunas, 2012; McCabe, 2015: 1). Different authors point to different periods in which these attitudes started to change. McCracken (1988), for example, points to Queen Elizabeth’s ostentatious consumption as a crucial feature of courtly behaviour in sixteenth-century England as one turning point. Generally, for these transformationists, the consumer society was created by a change in society’s cultural attitudes around consumption (Stillerman, 2015).
Consumerism was also often at odds with the strong influence of tradition, often reinforced by legal constraints on consumption (Stearns, 2001: 4–9). Sumptuary laws that restricted what people were allowed to own were placed on a shockingly wide range of goods: in fourteenth-century Venice, tapestries could not measure more than 1.5 meters and gilded fireplace furnishings were outlawed; in the late 1500s in England, “gentlemen entering London had their swords measured and broken if they were too long for their status” (McCabe, 2015: 24). Depending on your interpretation, these laws were in place either to protect people from overspending on fads or to ensure that consumption was a visible marker of the existing social hierarchy (Shammas, 2012: 212). The justification for sumptuary laws often used the anti-consumption language of the “sin of luxury” and the economic dangers of “extravagance” (Hunt, 2003: 64). By the seventeenth century these laws gradually began to disappear. Although some types of consumption (for example, drugs and prostitution in many countries) are still outlawed, these restrictions are rarely designed to reinforce social hierarchies. A consumer society was not present before the 1700s for three reasons: consumers were a small minority, new items were not consistently generated, and consumerism was criticized as a moral failing because it ran counter to tradition (Stearns, 2001: 8–9).
Transformationists can make similar claims about the changes surrounding consumer credit. While credit has a very long history, the social attitudes about both lending and borrowing have changed drastically. Charging interest on loans – called usury – was frowned on by most religions. It was punishable by excommunication in the Catholic Church and is still forbidden in Islam. Judaism permitted charging interest to those from other religions, and so some Jews (who were often banned from other occupations) earned their income by lending money, a practice that was often viewed by Christians with considerable distaste. Christianity gradually relaxed its strict prohibitions so that usury came to mean charging unreasonably or immorally high interest rates (Wiedenhoft-Murphy, 2016). On the borrower side, although aristocrats would frequently go into debt using the collateral of their good name and the poor were often forced into debt to purchase staples, in the nineteenth century being a debtor was seen as a bit shameful (Stillerman, 2015). As we will discuss in chapter 3, the negative stigma of borrowing began to wane in the twentieth century, so that one might argue that, currently, it is completely acceptable never to be free of debt.
Others argue that the eighteenth-century transformation to the consumer society was driven not just by growing incomes and changed attitudes but also by a massive social and economic project. E. P. Thompson’s classic “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (1967) argues that, during the transition to industrialized, capitalist wage labour, employers and governments constantly complained of the lack of discipline, material ambition, punctuality and attendance by workers, who were accustomed to a more relaxed, less acquisitive lifestyle. The moral authority and socializing influence of organizations such as churches and schools had to be brought to bear to shame people out of “sloth,” as they insisted on sleeping in when they were tired, taking customary holidays (such as “Saint Monday”), or knocking off early to go to the pub or to spend time with their children rather than keeping their noses to the grindstone to improve their material standing (Princen, 2005).
The second source of dispute revolves around whether consumption is driven by those who buy or those who make. Perhaps the most transparent title given to these two camps might be productivist and consumerist, although the more alliterative titles of “sucker” (productivist) and “savvy” (consumerist) might be more memorable (Paterson, 2017: 142–3). We will return to many versions of this argument in the rest of the book, but the general idea of the productivist camp is that both the income and the desire to consume are heavily influenced by the political economies that govern production. In the period between the seventeenth and the twentieth century, many European countries saw a transformation in the economic system from feudalism, in which the aristocracy ruled over its serfs in a largely agricultural system with joint rights for the use of land, to capitalism, in which land – along with all other inputs in production, except labour – is largely privately held.
Many productivists argue that this transformation revolutionized how people consume and the manner in which products are provided in several important ways. First, as much of the population shifted from having access to goods and services produced on their land, or in the broader non-market context of the feudal manor to which they belonged, to working for wage income, they relied much more on purchasing items from the market. The move between feudal agriculture and capitalist wage labour was not always voluntary or peaceful. In England, people were forced out of agriculture and into the wage labour market through the enclosure movements, which privatized common lands on which the feudal peasants relied as additional land for things such as raising livestock, making an agricultural livelihood almost impossible for many.
For productivists, the income that permits consumption is dependent on the amount and distribution of the spoils of the production process. While McKendrick et al. were correct in claiming that, in the eighteenth century, England was more affluent than other nations, it was also true that the limited national income and the uneven manner in which it was distributed meant that even in the nineteenth century many in that nation, especially those in the urban working class and in rural areas, earned so little that consumption activities, as we now know them, would have been a remote dream.
In the town of Preston in 1851, 52 percent of all working-class families with children below working age could not earn enough to rise above the poverty line even if they were employed full time for the year, which would have been a rarity (Hobsbawm, 1975: 221). Here is a description of the consumption of workers in England in 1844: “The potatoes which the workers buy are usually poor, the vegetables wilted, the cheese old and of poor quality, the bacon rancid, the meat lean, tough, taken from old, often diseased, cattle, or such as have died a natural death, and not fresh even then, often half decayed” (Engels, 1850: 68).
Competition for a customer
