Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe, 1650-1850 (review)

Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe 1650-1850. Edited by Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (New York, Manchester University Press, 1999) 260 pp. $79.95 cloth $29.95 paper

This collection of essays about consumption and luxury in Europe during the "long" eighteenth century incorporates several disciplinary perspectives and explores a variety of topics. Contributors include economists, art historians, historians of science and technology, and social and cultural historians. The essays reflect these diverse methodological perspectives, and cover wide-ranging topics that touch upon art, science, tourism, economics, and the sociology of consumption and display. Only its geographical focus lacks in diversity. Most of the eleven essays deal with Britain; three are on France; and one chapter, about the tulip craze, focuses on Holland.

In addition to providing such interdisciplinary approaches, the book also reflects the growing field of research on consumption. Historians are increasingly drawing attention to consumers, and in the process have demonstrated not only that consumption can drive production, but that it can also have broad effects on science and technology, social relations, family life, and even politics. Many of the essays in this volume build on this earlier work; others strike off in new directions.

The opening essay, by Neil de Marchi, lays the groundwork for much of the rest of the book by analyzing Adam Smith's views on the meaning of luxury. Marchi presents an argument that most of the other chapters demonstrate as well--that the boundary between luxury and necessity was fluid and changing. Over the course of the eighteenth century, many goods stopped seeming like luxuries. That is the argument Colin Jones and Rebecca Spang make in their essay about consumption in Paris. Coffee, for example, had become an everyday necessity for an increasingly large portion of Parisians by the second half of the century. Such "trickling down" of "luxuries" is another of the general themes of the collection.

Several essays focus on the drive for novelty and its influence on consumption, and others explore the ways in which conceptions of value evolved as goods and production methods changed. In an essay on precious metalwork, Clifford demonstrates that as time passed, people spent more money on the workmanship involved in producing particular pieces relative to the intrinsic value of the metal used. As she explains, "the second half of the eighteenth century . . . heralded the triumph of novelty and variety over quality of materials" (148). This statement summarizes well much of the thrust of this collection. Consumption became more about display--not only of wealth, but also of good taste and of familiarity with the latest trends--and more people were interested in participating in this game. The chapters about restaurants, high fashion, romantic tourism, and museums analyze these new forms of consumption and their significance. All the essays reveal links between consumers, new technologies, and economic, social, and cultural trends, thus bringing interdisciplinary approaches to the issue of luxuries and their place in eighteenth-century life.

Denise Z. Davidson
Georgia State University

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