Consumption and the World of Goods.

More than ten years have elapsed since the publication of The Birth of a Consumer Society.(1) It is a much-remarked paradox that although McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb wrote about the eighteenth century only recently have other historians turned with any enthusiasm to exploring the subject of consumption and consumer societies before the nineteenth century. But now the race is on and in the last few years several important works, for instance, Carole Shammas's The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America (1990), Lorna Weatherill's Consumer Behavior and Material Culture in Britain, 1660-1760 (1988), and Jean-Christophe Agnew's Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (1986) have appeared. More are about to come flooding off the presses. We shall soon see studies linking the American and consumer revolutions of the eighteenth century by T. H. Breen and on consumers and consumer goods in ancien regime France by Cissie Fairchilds, among others. Why has the culture of things attracted so much attention recently? What is the fuss all about?

The answers to these questions can be found in Consumption and the World of Goods. It is time, the editors point out in their well-written introduction, "for 'big history' to address one of the special features of modern western societies: not just industrialization, or economic growth, but the capacity to create and sustain a consumer economy, and the consumers to go with it . . . |and~ thereby, it seems, |to stabilize~ the social and the political." All contributors to this volume share the perspective that the understanding of western societies hinges on comprehending how the world spawned by the consumer revolution came into being and functioned. This agenda fostered a three-year research project jointly undertaken by the Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies and the Clark Library at UCLA, and the twenty-four essays presented here (and others to appear in two future volumes(2)) come out of that forum.

The history of consumerism is thus becoming part and parcel of modern historical research, although it remains, in the words of the editors, "historiographically immature." The stated goal of this collection "is to explore the notion's value in interpreting the central transformations in the histories of Europe and North America, not just in economic history or the history of material culture, but across a far wider spectrum of human affairs." The volume is divided into six parts that reflect this program: concepts; goods and consumption; production and the meaning of possessions; literacy and numeracy; the consumption of culture; and that of objects and images. Here one sees how easily the concept of consumption widens to include not only the basic consumption of food, the production and purchase of necessities, but also of fashionable accessories such as fans, umbrellas, and watches, as well as politics, print, pictures, gardens, and public shows.

The first section most directly takes up concerns that inform almost every following essay: What is a consumer? Does consuming alone a consumer make? Can we transfer the Fordism of mass production backwards in time to an age when varied forms of manufacturing co-existed? Many of the authors argue that the "mass production" distinctive to early modern times cannot easily be compared to the more rigorously defined twentieth-century process that may have, in itself, been only a fleeting phenomenon. Moreover, consumption in the eighteenth century was a contested reality. It stood for wealth and surfeit, and for wasting and decay. One thinks immediately here of all those eighteenth-century Jeremiahs who railed against "luxus" and abhorred the resultant decline of morals, but also of the equally obvious presence of Mandevillians who acknowledged the benefits of a vice which "stoked the engine of commerce."

Other essays delve deeply into the goods revolution from the point of view of consumers. What did people buy? What did particular goods, or services, mean to them? How do we know? The quantitative evidence usually available proves insufficient or deeply flawed, as Weatherill demonstrates for the inventories which have been heavily mined for information on supply and demand. Aggregate trade statistics on amounts of tea and coffee shipped and taxed are even more suspect because they ignore the quite substantial role of smuggled wares. Thus statistics on consumption tell an incomplete story. We must also look at how people used their goods and what meanings they assigned them. The devilishly difficult task of unraveling how significance was ascribed to things, for example, as status markers, was as much part of the consumer revolution as the purchase of calico cloth and teapots.

Not only things were consumed. Numeracy and literacy fit easily into the definition of consumption as well. The consumption of print, in particular of serials and newspapers, expanded markedly, especially in the late eighteenth century, although the meaning of that increase is neither transparent nor constant. For example, if politics sold papers in revolutionary France, that was not true of England, nor of eastern Europe where the political and religious authorities kept firm control over print production. Words and numbers were not in and of themselves able to force major shifts in mentalites. The delightful articles of Patricia Cline Cohn and John Money, which follow the ways individuals used their numeracy and literacy, show how doing arithmetic and keeping journals were not inevitably revolutionary, or even "modern." Such activities could instead reveal, as Money shows in the case of an erstwhile excise-man, John Cannon, the "two-faced traditionalism of English society itself." Likewise, Simon Schama demonstrates in the example of Dutch pronck still-life painting that such "elaborately wrought and highly finished" Objects did not flaunt the bravado of consumption or glorify the "world of uses and appetites declared by half-eaten turkey-pies and pasties, half-drank goblets of wine." The message was darker: all was vanity and the "terrestrial world . . . but a shadow of the celestial."

Here, too, the contributors remind the reader that print is only our own privileged form of communication. Chandra Mukerji's study of French formal gardens neatly links the growth of a horticultural business and a service, gardening, to the claims of taste, property, and ownership, all symbolized in green lawns, fantastic topiary, and lavish flower-beds. She is also, I believe, the only author to grapple with the important if inherently tricky topic of taste, or rather good taste. The eighteenth century also, according to Barbara Maria Stafford, embarked upon the path that led toward the visual culture that unrelentingly presses upon us today. Such "visualization," Stafford maintains, offers no evidence for a lamentable table intellectual deterioration, but rather "provides a splendid opportunity for exiting, at last, from Plato's cave." Perhaps, however, a visualization of knowledge is all the more vital because language itself has become so opaque.

This brief review by no means does justice to the fullness of the volume. I cannot think of anyone seriously interested in early modern (or modern) history who would not profit from a careful reading of many articles. The contributions themselves are, of course, not all alike, either in approach or quality. Penetrating and thoughtful scrutinies of the heuristic and methodological uses of the concept of consumption, such as Jan de Vries' analysis of the household economy in early modern Europe, or Colin Campbell's treatment of traditional and modern patterns of consumerism in eighteenth-century England, alternate with some elegantly written, but ultimately facile, pieces that do little more than toss out slick ideas. Meticulously-researched articles, such as Fairchild's on "populuxe" goods in eighteenth-century Paris, C. Y. Ferdinand's on provincial news and newspapers in England, or Simon Schaffer's on electrical showman and public shows, best probe the everyday world of the consumer. The "meaning of things" is most convincingly illustrated by those who focus on how specific individuals "thought with things." Amanda Vickery does this beautifully for a late eighteenth-century provincial consumer, Elizabeth Shackleton. Equally attractive is the range of the articles. The authors consider items bought and cherished for years or even generations, as well as those more ephemeral things which momentarily delighted the eye, pleased the palate, or stimulated the mind. One might wish, of course, for a bit more on services (for example, medicine or legal advice in addition to education), and one can also still regret the predominance of scholarship on the Anglo-Saxon world (although, to be fair, the collection gives more than a nod to other cultures and places). One might also question the wisdom of so large and so inclusive a volume. Clearly the editors and the press intended to allow the reader to sample the richness of contemporary research. Too plentiful a degustation, however, often produces a bloated numbness, rather than a pleasant sense of satisfaction. It might have been better, especially as two more, abundant courses are soon to follow, to have been more austere in the selection of articles; some are leftovers, having been published before (in one form or another) and others, while they slide sweetly down, do little to sate more robust appetites. Yet the whole is so palatable table that one happily risks a slight bout of dyspepsia.

ENDNOTES

1. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1982).

2. Forthcoming are John Brewer and Susan Staves, eds., Changing Conceptions of Property in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries and John Brewer and Anne Bermingham, eds., Word, Image and Object: Culture and Consumption in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.

Mary Lindemann Carnegie Mellon University