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  • Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe 1650–1850
  • Katherine B. Aaslestad
Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe 1650–1850. Edited by Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999. xi plus 260pp. Cl. $79.95, Pb. $29.95).

Drawing attention to the “meaning of possessions” raised in Brewer’s and Porter’s renowned collection, Consumption and the World of Goods, this volume explores the consumption of luxuries and the attraction of novelty in consumer culture from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, many contributors describe how the value and definition of luxuries altered during the eighteenth century. The collection represents an interdisciplinary collaboration among historians of art, economics, science, and culture begun in 1996 at a workshop hosted by the Eighteenth Century Research Centre at the University of Warwick. As in the workshop, this study seeks to expand the boundaries of scholarship on consumption beyond appraisals of inventory collections to investigate contemporary perceptions of the market, luxury, and novelty.

In their introduction, editors Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford contend that recent scholarship on consumption often neglects insights raised by contemporary observers of consumer culture. They argue that contemporary accounts provide rich description and, more importantly, incisive analysis of the psychological assumptions, aesthetic choices, and social rituals of their consuming peers. Their attention to the historical context of consumption serves as a useful reminder to scholars who measure consumer behavior based on income distribution, industrial growth rate, and foreign exports. The first essay by economist Neil de Marchi explores the reticence with which Adam Smith treated consumer culture despite his dictum, “consumption is the sole end of all production.” He contrasts Smith’s moral and personal skepticism about unnecessary acquisitions to his appreciation of durable goods and product “ingenuity.” He concludes that Smith regarded consumption within an ethical, aesthetic, and economic frame-work.

The following essays by Colin Jones, Rebecca Sprang, and Maxine Berg challenge traditional historiographical interpretations and underscore the fluid relationship between luxuries and necessities in eighteenth-century France and [End Page 987] Britain. Jones and Sprang reject historical caricatures of a stagnant French economy characterized by recent scholarship as “miserabilism.” Instead, they focus on the significant growth of middling urban consumers in their study of sugar and coffee consumption. They describe the metamorphosis of coffee and sugar from luxury exotic goods, to medicinal products (prescribed as necessities), to common staples (in the form of café au lait) by the end of the eighteenth century. They argue that the revolutionary crowds in Paris ultimately took to the streets not so much to secure bread for their starving families, but rather to protest in outrage that cost of such “necessities” as sugar and coffee exceeded accepted norms. Jones and Sprang conclude that “even in the tough times of Year II, discourses of virtuous republican austerity provided only a deceptive guide to a transformed realm of popular expectations (56),” asserting a scholarly reappraisal of contemporary understandings of necessity and luxury in eighteenth-century France.

Maxine Berg likewise highlights urban middling consumers in her examination of the relationship between identity formation, civility, and the consumption of semi-luxuries in eighteenth-century Britain. Berg, like Jones and Sprang, insists that the distinction between ordinary and luxury consumption was “as much about a shift in ideas...as it was about the proliferation of consumer objects (68).” She explores the complementary associations between luxuries and semi-luxury goods in the production processes and marketing strategies of their producers. Decorative furnishings, mirrors, and rococo watch frames, marketed alongside of candlesticks, cutlery, and tea pots shared complex networks of manufacture and retail, as well as popular appeal as symbolic and useful possessions. Furthermore, imitative products like varnish which substituted for lacquer generated new industries and created distinctive products. Berg concludes that contemporary appreciation of novelty fueled an industry of imitations of ancient and exotic designs and materials rendering semi-luxury goods available for broader middling consumption. Studies on popular interest in tulips, both the plants and painted images, and the production of specific colors by Marina Bianchi and Sarah Lowengard further highlight the consumption of novelty and the science of imitation.

Well-crafted analyses by Marcia...

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