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

It is rare that one is asked to review a text that has already been hailed as a seminal work. But such is the case with Carson’s Face Value. The book’s genesis was an essay, “The Consumer Revolution in Colonial British America: Why Demand?,” initially published in the 1994 volume Of Consuming Interests.¹ Carson’s meaty chapter quickly became a “cult classic” (xv), as the author rightfully describes. The 1994 collected volume—with contributions by scholars interested in paintings, prints, architecture, clothing, dining, etiquette, shopping, and leisure—powerfully charted the dramatic cultural and material changes that took place in the long eighteenth century across the British Atlantic world, with a focus on elites in the North American colonies. It thus set out an interdisciplinary model that has remained at the core of a now-considerable body of scholarship about consumer taste and behavior. Yet, despite its importance, the volume went out of print. Given the opportunity to revise and expand his classic essay into a stand-alone book, Carson has risen to the challenge. He offers a vibrant reworking that is lively but cogent and clear, moving effortlessly between small bits of physical evidence drawn from individual artifacts to massive transatlantic demographic and socioeconomic transformations.

Carson retains his main argument: The migration of Europeans, primarily the British, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries created demand for different types of consumer goods, as users formulated a new system of social signaling that was portable and immediately graspable by viewers. This demand encouraged the innovations in manufacturing known as the industrious and industrial revolutions, not the other way around. Face Value, however, offers a fundamental revision. Carson expands his thinking to include “the dislocation of Africans and Native Americans,” which, he claims, together with the “great movement of European peoples” was “the definitive force that shaped modern consumer culture” (165). The material experiences of Native Americans and enslaved African Americans are a welcome addition. Carson, however, does not treat the practices of these groups with the same level of rigor as he does those of Anglo-American elites; he includes them only when they complement his pre-existing narrative.

Carson’s evidence and methodology are fundamentally interdisciplinary throughout. He borrows insights and evidence from economic history, social history, architectural history, political history, archaeology, and decorative arts (primarily furniture history). He is especially masterful at melding quantitative data about object ownership, drawn from tax lists and legal documents, with more subjective analyses of individual building’s and ceramic vessel’s social significance, discerned through the meticulous measuring of extant structures and the re-assembly of fragments recovered through archaeological excavations, respectively. Given his position as the retired Vice President of the Research Division at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Carson understandably draws from those bodies of research fundamental to the site’s ongoing reconstruction and interpretation— archaeology, social history, and vernacular architecture. Yet, though innovative for the 1990s, Carson’s model of interdisciplinarity now appears unnecessarily restrictive and arbitrary; clothing, paintings, and prints, as well as literary works, merit significantly less attention than other material forms. Interestingly, these are the areas that have generated the most analyses in recent years.

The book is most out of step in Carson’s seeming rejection of the new materialism and his continued commitment to social history. In recent decades, scholars working across the humanities and sciences have united around questions of objects’ agency and materiality, asking how things shape human behavior. Standing in opposition to this groundswell, Carson insists that objects are merely “tools” used for status performance, presenting his book as “a prescription for a new and different kind of social history” (66, xxiii), a sub-discipline that has waned in popularity. Carson’s decision not to wrangle with materiality and his commitment to changing the discipline of history alone may keep him from entering the burgeoning interdisciplinary discussion about things. Nevertheless, for those who...