CONSUMERISM

"Since our Wealth has increas'd, and our Navigation has been extended, we have ransack'd all the Parts of the Globe to bring together its whole Stock of Materials for Riot, Luxury, and to provoke Excess." So wrote a Scottish doctor, George Cheyne (1761–1743), in 1733, explaining what he considered to be the "nervous disorders" of his time. Such worries about excess consumption drew from deep wells: Christian teaching about the sins of greed, unrestrained appetite, and envy; humanist views that private wealth under-mined public virtue; and an economic paradigm in which to consume meant to waste. The same concerns infused this characteristic rhetoric, from an aristocratic proponent of sumptuary laws who demanded the "immediate suppression of bare-fac'd Luxury, the spreading Contagion of which is the greatest Corrupter of Publick Manners and the greatest Extinguisher of Public Spirit."

The economic and cultural changes that brought very different views of consumption to the fore were among the most far-reaching of modern European history. The birth of consumerism, the deliberate promoting of consumer demand, and the response to it, involved not only more goods and new practices in everyday life but also overhauling assumptions about the economy and redefining "needs" and therefore entitlements—all processes with political as well as social and cultural implications.

Pinpointing a single "consumer revolution" has proved impossible. Such a "revolution" has been qualified and backdated so often that most historians shy away from the term. How, then, does the nineteenth century fit into the long history of consumption? Revolutionary changes in productivity, the legal, political, and social fracturing of a society of orders, and Europe's expanding global and imperial networks did more than produce more goods, less expensively, from ever larger territories for more people. Dismantling systems that had traditionally regulated manufacture and commerce ushered in entirely new forms of distribution and retailing. The enterprise of selling (or retailing), indeed, became an ever more specialized, separate, and valued economic activity—the domain of stores, shopping districts of cities, lavish display, magazines, advertising, and, eventually, social science. This process is the heart of consumerism, and it first took shape in the nineteenth century, aimed at and practiced by a new middle class.

If the spectacular expansion of bourgeois consumerism was one side of the coin, the other was creakingly slow and uneven change in popular consumption. To be sure, agricultural productivity rose in the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century. Networks of food distribution became much more efficient. Grain riots, previously the preeminent form of popular politics, faded away throughout most of Europe by 1850. But nineteenth-century consumption was embedded in a deeply hierarchical society. Only toward the 1880s did Europe, primarily France and England, begin to see the more democratized consumption, cutting across class boundaries, that is associated with mass consumption.

eighteenth-century consumption

Some historians insist that the eighteenth-century British Empire saw a "consumer revolution." Much ink has been spilled in dissent. What has been established is a long, slow rise in consumer demand, driven by factors including falling prices for many basic goods for purchase (especially food); intensified labor (particularly of women and children); the production and importation of a vast array of new goods, and, in the middle classes, new codes of genteel behavior, new standards of cleanliness, and, perhaps, an early Romantic cultivation of aesthetic sensitivities. Middle-class families spent more on everything from furniture to china and pottery, mirrors and pictures, linens, carriages, and books.

Further down the social scale, people contented themselves with buying smaller items: soap, candles, and, less expensive printed fabrics. The poor made do with very little. A poor family in eighteenth-century England, for instance, would have owned, perhaps, one chair, battered pottery that had been passed down for two generations, and some spoons to eat with, but few knives, no forks, and no table linens.

Still, historians have charted rising consumption of tea, coffee, chocolate, sugar, and tobacco among a remarkably broad sector of society. They estimate that 25 percent of the population used one of these products once a day, to the distress of doctors (who denounced the traffic in stimulants and drugs) and to the delight of café and tavern proprietors. Such a genuinely broad pattern of consumption was inextricable from the new patterns of eighteenth-century sociability, including the rising readership of books and newspapers.

The First Industrial Revolution (from the mid-eighteenth through the early nineteenth centuries) brought innovations through the entire circuit of production, distribution, and consumption. The china manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795) did not owe his spectacular success to production-side innovations—experiments with factory labor and the techniques of glaze and design—alone. Wedgwood's business benefited from improved roads and canals; from the quickening trade in tea, coffee, and chocolate; and from population growth and rising incomes. On the consumerist side, Wedgwood lavished attention on design, fashion, and his product line, transferring the cachet of his tea services to snuffboxes and knife handles. He priced different lines of pottery and china strategically, aiming at different markets. He was extremely attentive to publicity, orchestrating newspaper articles that showcased his wares and famous customers. Matthew Boulton (1728–1809), the famous improver of the steam engine, was no less an innovator in promoting consumption in the "button trade," which included buttons, buckles, watch chains, candlesticks, and other ornaments.

Wedgwood, Boulton, and others pursued both modern commercial techniques and traditional state and courtly patronage. In this as in other respects, their careers reflected a period of transition. To become the queen's potter was a mark of Wedgwood's success; Boulton needed and sought connections to the king's architect, clockmaker, and so on. Court sponsorship played an even more central role in the circuit of production, distribution, and consumption across the channel. Sumptuary laws, which had attempted to limit consumption of luxury goods by status (for instance, granting only some people the right to buy and wear gold, silver, or silk), had fallen away by the end of the eighteenth century. But the states of continental Europe regulated the production of and commerce in almost all goods, from grain to clothing and furniture.

industrialization and new forms of commerce

In the early nineteenth century the processes already under way grew stronger. Productive capacities multiplied; transportation quickened; cities, with fashionable arcades and sprawling open-air markets alike, grew. The century also saw the dismantling of traditional regulation of commerce and production, first in France and in different stages across the Continent. Clothing, for instance, was already more freely bought and sold than other consumer goods, and in prerevolutionary France (as in eighteenth-century England), the clothing trade expanded as elites bought more, more expensive, and different kinds of clothes in what the historian Daniel Roche calls a new "culture of appearances." The French Revolution, however, abolished the laws that had carefully distinguished between those granted the privilege to sell fabrics and those allowed to make clothing. This new legal regime, combined with a revolution in textile and clothing production, ushered in fundamental changes in how commerce and retail could operate. The 1820s and 1830s brought stores selling what they produced: rudimentary ready-made in the form of shawls, cloaks, and children's clothing. Later, in women's clothing, couture houses began to sell fabric, clothing, and design—and to call the combination fashion.

With a second generation of stores in the 1850s and 1860s, a new urban consumerism came into its own. Already in the 1780s, shops with large glass windows on streets brightened at night by new gas street lanterns had dazzled wealthy visitors to London. But in the mid-nineteenth century the combination of economic development; political stability; rapid urban growth; massive investments in urban infrastructure in Paris, Vienna, London, and elsewhere; and the confidence of a new social elite made London's West End into a swank shopping district and ensured the success of the grands magasins in Paris: the Bon Marché (1852), Printemps (1865), and the Samaritaine (1869).

The grands magasins pioneered not only new modes of retailing but also new forms of sociability and leisure. They are a case study in how simple consumption could be transformed into consumerism, or the systematic cultivation of consumer demand—and of how the provisioning of needs became shopping, a fashionable, sought-after ritual. The new stores displayed fabrics, gloves, umbrellas, fans, and shoes in plate-glass cases rather than tucking them behind counters and in arrangements aimed to seduce with their sumptuousness and impress with their abundance and modernity. They offered calendars of special events such as fashion shows and concerts, hair salons, reading rooms, and displays organized around themes to draw customers in and to entertain them while in the store. In Émile Zola's (1840–1902) Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), the century's classic evocation of the cultural magnetism of department stores (based on the history of the Bon Marché and the Grands Magasins du Louvre), the fictional owner fills the central hall and stairway with umbrellas to create the image of "large Venetian lanterns, illuminated for some colossal festival." "Free entry" encouraged potential customers to browse and enjoy the experiences. Fixed, posted prices freed customers from negotiations with salespeople. Consumption did not require an inter-action with a producer, or even a merchant; it was an activity enjoyed with other shoppers.

The department stores illustrate a larger structural trend: the emergence of retail and consumption as increasingly autonomous and specialized economic activities. The new stores came to anchor distinctive shopping districts, removed from the smells and sounds of production in artisanal neighborhoods; cities were segregated by economic function as well as class. Although most nineteenth-century stores continued to make the goods they sold, and had custom shops for dresses, suits, or furnishings, the department stores, by definition, did not specialize. Their broad range of prices and goods underscored that the stores' expertise lay in choosing what to sell, how to make goods desirable, and how to make customers happy, rather than focusing on processes of production.

bourgeois consumption/middle-class consumerism

The clientele for these stores was decidedly middle class and female. Zola's portrait of women made delirious in department stores was a caricature, though one based on preconceptions common in his time. Since at least the eighteenth century, production (and technology) had been seen as male, and consumption, associated with hedonism, waste, and temptation, female. Still, retailers' appeals to women, women's responsibility for many purchases, and the centrality of goods to middle-class female identity were among the distinguishing features of nineteenth-century consumerism. Much of that consumerism focused on assiduously cultivating the home. Studies of budgets show that even in hard times, middle-class families tried to maintain spending on either housing or servants, both of which were benchmarks of middle-class status and dignity. Over the course of the century middle-class homes grew larger, with more rooms for specific functions: studies, sewing rooms, salons. Wealth was displayed in more plentiful and specialized furniture, upholstered in fine fabrics, or worked with exotic woods from the reaches of Europe's expanding empires, and by thick curtains, works of art on the walls, gilded chandeliers and clocks, jewelry and silver, pianos, and so on.

Some historians argue that specific middle-class tastes had a direct economic impact, giving small industries and high-quality artisans a remarkable resilience. There is no doubt of the power of possessions to shape identity and self-presentation, spelled out in countless etiquette manuals and furniture catalogs. Portraits and furnishings could provide links to a family's past; an elaborately decorated sewing machine could pay tribute to womanly virtue. Educated, tasteful consumption, preserving (or, if possible, raising) the family's status, balancing the household's books: these were tasks that fell to middle-class women across Europe. For middle-class men, too, identity and status were constructed with careful purchases: different suits and hats for business, family events, or weekends in the country; ostentatious watches; and other emblems of distinction.

popular consumption

What of patterns of consumption among the common people? This topic used to be framed as the history of the "standard of living" during industrialization, about which historians disagreed, often fiercely. They found it hard to measure wages and prices, however, and general conclusions remained elusive. More recent historical research has focused on more qualitative aspects of popular consumption. Peasant and working-class households were not self-sufficient, or isolated from consumption and the market, but they followed distinct, class-specific patterns of consumption, and those patterns were shaped by the cultural meanings attached to different goods.

For working people, food was the primary expense and priority. Bread took less of a house-hold's food budget, which meant increased spending on more varied foods. An 1872 French study of one hundred working-class families, for instance, found that thirty-nine ate meat daily, forty-four frequently, and seventeen rarely, significantly higher than a century earlier. As industrialization spread across Europe, drinking coffee, wine, rum, and other alcoholic beverages—already on the rise since the eighteenth century—continued to become more popular. Food and drink provided the core of social life. They were also barometers of hard times. Even at the end of the nineteenth century, European workers had to spend more to feed their families than did their counterparts in the United States. A European family with three or more children rarely ate meat at dinner and bought only inexpensive dark bread.

Clothing came second in popular budgets. The falling price of fabric in the 1860s enabled working people to wear lighter, warmer, and more comfortable clothing. But working people spent little on everyday garb. In a stratified culture, where one's dress on the street instantly flagged one's status and class, Sunday clothes were more important, for they provided an accessible form of social mobility, escape, and celebration.

Decent housing was expensive and in short supply everywhere in Europe; it was virtually beyond the common people's reach. Even in good times, working people had to settle for crowded, dark, and barely ventilated places. This, indeed, was one of the most significant lines that divided classes. Even when lower-middle-class families earned only a little more than their working-class counterparts, they spent their money very differently, often putting off marriage and children until they could afford to spend more on rent and properly bourgeois furnishings.

In the last few decades of the nineteenth century, however, the rise of consumerism was beginning to reach the common people, largely through the expansion of credit. As far as historians can determine, peasants were more likely than workers to save, largely because they hoped to acquire more land. But working-class life ran on regular infusions of short-term credit from bakers, grocers, and wine merchants in their neighborhoods, which drove up the price of food. Workers regularly resorted to pawnshops, getting loans at 5 or 6 percent interest against mattresses, linens, jewelry, and the occasional piece of family silver. From the 1860s onward, large-scale commerce began to adapt to the popular habit of buying on credit. In the 1880s the grands magasins Dufayel opened its doors in Barbès, a working-class neighborhood in Paris. Dufayel deliberately echoed the presentations of elite department stores, and it offered necessities and furnishings, from furniture and clocks to coal stoves, all on credit. By 1907 almost half of the working-class families of Paris had "subscribed," via door-to-door salesmen, to Dufayel's credit payment plans, and other merchants, attuned to the possibilities of a larger buying public, adopted credit plans as well.

mass consumerism

The last quarter of the century ushered in the Second Industrial Revolution, and, as one contemporary remarked, credit and advertising were as much a part of that revolution as electricity and oil. Forms of advertising multiplied in the last decades of the century, from handbills distributed on street corners to lavishly illustrated mail-order catalogs to posters. On this front, Paris was again a pioneer; tourists flocking to the world's fairs of 1889 and 1900 and innovations in graphic arts helped to turn the city into one of the largest advertising markets in the world. The same enterprises that extended credit, already experts in the new commercial world of the late nineteenth century, also turned their hand to publicity. Dufayel, for instance, proclaimed advertising to be "the soul of commerce" and sold advertising space in the city's kiosks, urinals, trams, railroad stations, at the centennial celebration of the French Revolution and world's fairs, and in new dance halls like the Folies Bergères and the Moulin Rouge.

Advertising quickly transformed the visual landscapes of late-nineteenth-century Moscow, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Berlin, and London. The combination of advertising's demand for experimental hard-hitting imagery and the marvelous spectrum of colors made possible by lithography attracted some of the preeminent artists and artistic schools of the period: Jules Cherét (1836–1932), Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), the Jugendstil artists in central Europe, the Munich Secession of 1893, and Russian futurist painters. While only the largest companies could afford advertising on this scale, changes in consumption made the prewar period in important respects the apogee of European commercial culture and a forcing ground of modernism.

Advertising illustrates the structural trend underscored earlier: the increasing investment in commerce and distribution as separate and value-enhancing economic activities. During the eighteenth century, advertising had been an afterthought; producers simply listed themselves in guides to business and even pioneers like Wedgwood sought to establish their reputation by word of mouth and court patronage. One hundred years later, advertising had its own enterprises, personnel, and trade journals that cast a critical eye on graphic artists' techniques and advertisers' strategies. As one of those journals declared, advertising had outgrown simple "empiricism," "it has become a true science, whose precise laws need to be discovered."

The late nineteenth century quickened the pace of consumerism across Europe. By the 1890s department stores could be found in many of Germany's provincial cities. Germany's most successful retailers included the Tietz family and Adolf Jandorf (1870–1932), who opened his most elegant and elaborate store, the Kaufhaus des Westens in Berlin, in 1907, marking the beginning of the Kurfürstendamm as Berlin's retail and entertainment center, in the same mold as London's West End. Selfridge's debuted in London in 1909, the child of Harry Gordon Selfridge (c. 1864–1947) from Marshall Field's in Chicago, whose elaborate merchandising was widely acclaimed. Selfridge's advertising proclaimed that the store changed shopping from "merely part of the day's work" to "pleasure, a time of profit, recreation and enjoyment." Moreover, recreation proper—or entertainment—also opened up as a new field for consumerism. Novel kinds of journalism fed sensationalized news to a wider reading public. World's fairs, music halls, spectator sports, circuses, dioramas and panoramas, and, by the late 1890s, movies were all pieces of a new entertainment industry that beckoned to new consumer-spectators. Within a decade of their start in 1894, the Pathé brothers (Charles [1863–1957] and Emile [1860–1937]) reached an international market for their short films at nickelodeons and had begun to open movie halls. There were ten such halls in Paris in 1907 and more than 150 in 1914. Still largely segregated by class, gender, and age, commercialized leisure was nonetheless robustly adaptable. Russian intellectuals might deplore the absence of middle-class political institutions, but modern middle-class commercial entertainment and consumerism thrived.

a consumerist economics/social science

It was at the end of the nineteenth century, too, that consumption itself began to command more sharply focused attention from economists and social scientists and to occupy a different place in the discursive structure of economics. Since the rise of political economy in the eighteenth century, consumption, if no longer necessarily conceived as an evil, had remained a distinctly minor issue. Bernard Mandeville's (1670–1733) Fable of the Bees (1714) satirized orthodoxies of economic restraint and the association of luxury with desire, or appetite, disorder, and disobedience. Mandeville and others argued that the "vice" of consuming luxuries actually promoted the nation's wealth. Adam Smith (1723–1790) saw consumption as one of the self-improving impulses of humanity that promoted economic development and enhanced the public good, contrary to the teachings of classical republicanism and in defiance of views such as those cited at the beginning of this article. Smith declared consumption to be "the sole end and purpose of all production." But there the subject stayed, a distinctly minor concern, while economists trained their gaze on production, wages, and value. Nineteenth-century critics of political economy worked in the same paradigms; Karl Marx's (1818–1883) brilliant passages on commodity fetishism depicted consumption as a realm of reification, mystification, and non-value.

These views began to change in the 1870s. One set of revisions came with the theory of marginal utility, whose proponents disagreed with classical political economy's (and socialism's) emphasis on labor as the source of value. All goods, they argued, had more or less (marginal) value depending on factors like the quantity of goods on the market and consumer preferences. Not production but pricing and the marginal utility of goods (established by rational, market-calculating individuals) were the keys to understanding value and to explaining the allocation of economic resources. Other intellectuals, many of them critics of the marginalists' abstract approach, zeroed in on social psychology and on the "cultural situations" in which consumption was embedded. The American Thorstein Veblen's (1857–1929) Theory of the Leisure Class appeared in 1899; in Europe, Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904) wrote on emulation, the German statistician Ernst Engel (1821–1896) and the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945) studied social patterns of consumption, Engel in search of laws that governed consumer expenditures and Halbwachs demonstrating that the weight of class and culture shaped people's expectations and "levels of living," disproving Engel's laws.

Europe in 1914 was still far removed from a society or culture of mass consumerism. Consumption remained deeply stratified by class until well after World War I. This was not a culture in which it made sense to speak of a "standard of living"; that term suggests norms, entitlements, and government commitments to maintaining or even democratizing consumption that only came later. The development of consumerism in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe paled by comparison with its growth in the United States, where a large domestic market, larger and more efficient networks of distribution, rising incomes (or the higher wages–mass consumption vision associated with Henry Ford), and less stratification converged to make the "American standard of living" the yardstick for the twentieth century. European intellectuals at the turn of the century worried about developments across the Atlantic, on the American horizon, about the "economic convulsions" of the present, and socialists fretted that mass consumerism and culture would sow political apathy. Right-wing thinkers warned the "more intimate mingling of the classes" would undermine social hierarchies and traditional values, and they mobilized nationalist and anti-Semitic rhetoric against "Jewish" retailers or "cosmopolitan" department stores. Contemporary concerns notwithstanding, on the eve of World War I consumer markets were small and local. Across Europe 90 percent of sales went through small shopkeepers. Europe remained a world of bourgeois consumerism, in which popular purchasing power was weak, class distinctions were plainly demarcated, and middle-class individuals' conceptions of taste were firmly yoked to their cultural influence and political power.

See alsoCities and Towns; Industrial Revolution, First; Industrial Revolution, Second; Paris; Sewing Machine; Trade and Economic Growth.

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Judy Coffin