Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600-1800.

Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600-1800. By Woodruff Smith (New York; London: Routledge, 2002. x plus 339 pp. $85 cloth, $24.95 paper).

In the twenty-five years since consumption emerged as a salient topic for historians, scholars have produced an extensive body of literature on the subject. Yet, according to Woodruff Smith in his new book, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, much of this scholarship fails to answer convincingly one of the most basic questions about the nature of demand: where do changes in consumer demand come from? Why, for example, did Europeans hunger for sugar--more than, say, pepper or spices--in the eighteenth century? Early work on the topic tended to treat the desire to consume as a historical constant, assuming that people bought goods when increased supply and income allowed them to do so, or focused on market manipulation of the consumer. Smith departs from these approaches in this study of northwestern Europe in the early modern period, seeking to historicize and complicate our conception of demand by connecting it to fundamental cultural transformations.

In itself the thesis that consumption practices are embedded in cultural contexts and that these contexts--and therefore the meanings and uses of commodities--change over time is nothing new, and Smith himself both acknowledges and draws upon the spate of recent work on consumption and culture. But too much of this work, he complains, offers a single cultural explanation (often social emulation) for consumer behavior. Smith proposes to redress the situation by undertaking a multi-causal cultural investigation, without losing sight of economic developments. More precisely, he wants to track the interplay of the diverse cultural factors that imbued particular commodities with new significance, and to show how, in each case, heightened demand for these goods converged with economic factors on the supply side to increase their consumption.

The main narrative that drives Smith's argument is the emergence of modern elites and their claims to social worth, although he is at pains to avoid the term "bourgeoisie" and, indeed, to eschew the economic determinism of a class analysis altogether. It is the story, in other words, of the erosion of the society of orders, in which status was assigned by birth, and its replacement by a more fluid social structure, in which individuals could assert social distinction through the display of "respectability." Smith defines "respectability" as a cultural amalgam, incorporating elements of the discrete "cultural contexts" of gentility, luxury, virtue, domestic femininity, and rational masculinity. By the eighteenth century, he contends, hereditary distinction gave way to distinction based on moral character and behavior, and these different "cultural contexts" mutated and merged to form the dominant elite context of respectability. Although defined by elites, moreover, respectability could in principle be claimed by anyone of good moral character with the means to display it; thus it had a democratic relevance well beyond the upper reaches of society.

Smith argues that these broad social and cultural transformations had dramatic consequences for patterns of consumption. As modern elites built up a new set of self-defining social practices, overseas imports such as tea, coffee, sugar, tobacco, and cotton came to play central roles in the performance of respectable identity. Elite men consumed tobacco, sugar, tea, and coffee in quantity in the coffeehouse, the locus of the emergent public sphere and one of the central theaters of male respectability. Respectable women, meanwhile, imbibed sugar and tea as they presided over the domestic ritual of tea-time, a resonant symbol of the moral authority of home and family. The advent of breakfast as a full-fledged meal and social ritual for the respectable family further boosted demand for sugar, used in breads, rolls, and cakes, and still more tea and coffee. In similar fashion, the consumption of cotton (first imported from India, but then manufactured in bulk in the industrial factories of England) took off as white cotton underwear became a fundamental feature of respectable attire. As with all of these commodities, material factors such as cheap and flexible production methods, technological breakthroughs, and cotton's adaptability to different consumer uses also played their role in this development.

Traditioanl elites had desired these same goods, Smith emphasizes, but had invested them with different meanings and uses. Sugar, for example, had a long history in Europe as both a status symbol and an exotic luxury, but these connotations faded as modern elites integrated sugar into their own cultural framework. Smith shows how new cultural contexts effectively domesticated sugar and weakened its long-standing associations with sensuality and bodily pleasure, transforming it into a source of comfort and, especially when taken with coffee and tea, a stimulus to rational and disinterested sociability. In the coffeehouse and in the domestic interior, sugar thus became an integral part of the cultural repertory of the respectable.

Consumption and the Making of Respectability follows the current fashion in cultural history in its focus on the incentives and intentions of consumers themselves, rather than on the goals of marketers or politicians who sought to influence them. It does so profitably, and Smith's readings of transformations in the meanings and uses attributed to goods are often sharp and engaging. In its most successful passages, the book offers us a richly historicized conception of demand as forged out of particular yet dynamic cultural milieux. It is to be praised for this and--what is more unusual--for its resolute effort to join cultural interpretation with economic arguments in order to develop complex, multi-causal explanations for new trends in consumption.

Laudable as Smith's efforts to link the democratization of social distinction to changes in consumption patterns may be, however, his overburdened mode of analysis frequently impedes him in realizing his aims. Despite his explicit focus on the consumer, for example, Smith's mapping of the convergence of separate "cultural contexts" or "clusters" is so abstract and schematic that human actors and their motives are often lost in it. Still more problematic is that his analytical framework fails to elucidate the mechanisms of cultural change: the process whereby his separate contexts morph into the context of respectability remains blurry and his sub-plots simply do not add up into a coherent narrative.

Another difficulty is that, despite his interest in the nuances of cultural meaning, Smith has a tendency to over-generalize from his evidence. Thus he exaggerates the importance of his sources, at times relying on a handful of putatively typical or influential works (Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, for example) to assert the emergence of a new cultural paradigm. He also sometimes treats his cultural contexts as monoliths, leading him to generalize across class and national boundaries. Respectability surely meant different things to members of the working classes and even to different segments of the bourgeoisie, but Smith is so committed to avoiding the pitfalls of a class-based approach that he glosses over these distinctions. Similarly, although Smith's account is principally a British one, he insists on the applicability of his model to France and the Netherlands without ever providing much evidence that this is the case. Certainly, his arguments do not work as well in the French setting, where a strong republican tradition militated against the marriage of individual self-interest and virtue he describes; indeed, "respectability" was not a particularly meaningful term for the French bourgeoisie (nor were terms like honnetete or civilite simple analogues).

In the end, if some of Smith's ambitions elude him, it is perhaps because they are so grand. Its more sweeping claims aside, Consumption and the Making of Respectability provides us with compelling answers to some important questions about early modern consumption and inspires us to think deeply about the complex sources of consumer behavior.

Lisa Tiersten

Barnard College