Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600-1800 (review)

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...