Face Value: The Consumer Revolution and the Colonizing of America by Cary Carson (review)

Face Value: The Consumer Revolution and the Colonizing of America is an expanded and updated version of Cary Carson’s landmark essay “The Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America: Why Demand?,” which first appeared more than two decades ago in the essay collection Of Consuming Interests. That volume explored colonial manners, goods, and social institutions in an effort to trace “the rise of America’s special brand of aggressive bourgeois consumerism,” and it quickly became essential reading for students of material culture.¹ Carson, then vice president of the Research Division at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, was in the vanguard of those championing the study of consumer behavior, and he issued two challenges that remain as relevant and thought-provoking today as they were back in 1994: first, to rethink the nature of desire and the inevitability of consumption; and second, to highlight the value of material culture for scholarly research beyond that of art and architecture historians and archaeologists, who already understood its value. His mission was subtle but transformative. Though previous scholars of the eighteenth-century consumer revolution emphasized supply—fueled by spreading colonization, access to raw materials, expanding trade networks, and free and coerced systems of labor—Carson staked a claim at the other end of the equation. “It was indeed a revolution,” he argues, “but a consumer revolution in the beginning. The better-known Industrial Revolution followed in response” (3). Seen from this perspective, store counters and homes were not final destinations in a linear march from production to consumption but a kind of middle ground where objects could be tested and evaluated, sometimes accepted, and at other times returned for redesign or refashioning. Consumption, in other words, is as much about people’s thoughts, feelings, and values—which are negotiated and changeable—as it is about things. A profusion of publications since “Why Demand?” testifies to how seriously scholars took up Carson’s call. Subsequent studies have not only incorporated objects into their analyses, but also broadened both the Atlantic regions and peoples considered as consumers, including Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, as well as women and native and enslaved peoples.

Western Europeans were, of course, buying more, even before Christopher Columbus set sail across the Atlantic. As Carson notes, older studies using surviving wills, probate inventories, museum collections, buildings, and archaeological remains to track changing consumer behavior from the fourteenth century have long demonstrated increased spending on individual products and total expenditures on consumption. Scholars also generally agree that the rate and range of these acquisitions escalated during the seventeenth century, and—for the Anglo-American colonies that are Carson’s subject of study—in the decades leading up to U.S. independence. “By the Revolution,” he asserts, “even some of the poorer sort had made ‘necessities’ of goods that had been their fathers’ ‘decencies,’ their grandfathers’ ‘luxuries’ and before that were simply unheard of” (13). But that people could afford better food and clothing or buy larger homes with more elaborate furnishings is only the preface of his story. It tells us what colonists did, but not how or why they did so. These questions about desirability and display, personal meaning and social interpretation, are Carson’s real passions and where he continues to make his most important interventions throughout the rest of the book.

The structure of Face Value will be familiar to readers of Carson’s earlier essay. He begins by outlining his approach to explaining the Anglo-American consumer revolution, offering five hypotheses, the most important of which are the emergence of a gentry culture and increasing population dislocation.² These two factors worked in tandem, because people on the move created less stable societies that needed new ways to evaluate and critique “migrants and travelers” (35). The result, Carson argues, was “status-communicating” behaviors in “standardized architectural spaces” (36), where a language of goods developed to evaluate appearance and behavior.

Carson then...