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

Face Value is an updated version, now in monograph format, of Cary Carson’s classic “Why Demand” essay, first published some two decades ago in the important collection Of Consuming Interests, an essential resource for scholars of early American material culture. Also highly relevant to those working in other disciplines, this rich study, grounded in material culture, extends beyond Americans’ tangible world to explore their ways of thinking and being. Anyone interested in fully understanding the political, economic, social, and even intellectual life of colonists and their counterparts across the Atlantic should become acquainted with this book.

The book sets out to answer the central question, “Why Demand?,” the parameters of which are defined in the first chapter. Subsequent chapters then trace in more detail the emergence of that demand and what impelled it, exploring why people bought what they did, and when. The process leading up to the “consumer revolution” took several centuries, reaching a tipping point around 1750, when people in England and Europe began to see improvements in their standard of living that made furnishings more comfortable, shelters more permanent, and food more abundant and nourishing. “American colonists,” Carson notes, “aspired to these higher standards as well and used them as benchmarks against which to measure their success in overcoming the hardships of homesteading” (12). By the end of the 17th century and “accelerating” by the next, people began to purchase goods that served as cultural markers rather than objects of utility or comfort. Fashion soon “became a badge of membership in class-conscious social groups” that outwardly expressed social status, marked membership in particular groups, and were aspirational objects that strivers sought to acquire (34). These things became especially important among the increasingly mobile populations who, dislocated from the reputations they enjoyed among their own, had to reestablish bona fides among often wary strangers. Thus formed a new language based in material things, a “standardized system of social communications,” that broadcast one’s status and reputation to others. Readily adopted, this object-based language system served, “like paper money,” as common currency (57).

These broad observations are fleshed out in detail and nuance, supported by the array of evidence Carson brings to bear, from first-hand accounts and probate inventories to, compellingly, the artifacts themselves. And about those artifacts: Carson provides readers with a series of literal object lessons which appear throughout the book—detailed drawings and schematics of pieces of pottery and glassware, house plans and architectural details, painted portraits and the fashion conventions they perpetuated. Although this approach will be familiar to those trained to interpret material culture, it will help instruct those new to, or skeptical about, using artifacts as historical evidence.

Carson’s thesis about what drove consumer demand such that it eventually led to a “consumer revolution” is well-argued and can be broadly applied across time and space. He traces consumer demand as it sailed across the Atlantic, embodied in fashions, furnishings, architecture, and even food. These various objects were key players in theatrical rituals that both evinced and helped enact gentility, whether “self-centering” items for grooming or matching sets of dishware for formal dinners.

There is something about this argument, though, that seems just a little too tidy, a little too pat. The consumer drive detailed in Face Value is, at heart, of the conspicuous, status-seeking, Veblenesque sort. Curiously, Carson’s own resistance to this interpretation only reinforces it. Throughout, he claims the demand for new stuff was about more than simply “a footrace between gentlefolk and a pack of impertinent social climbers nipping at their heels,” more than just “elite boundary group maintenance.” The goods of gentility were, he argues, “regulator[s] of social interaction” (127–8). But how, really, was this anything other than status-seeking? If the “deployment” of objects was, as explicated in Face Value, truly about establishing barriers of entry...