Consumption and the World of Goods
The study of past society in terms of what it consumes rather than what it produces is - relatively speaking - a new development. The focus on consumption changes the whole emphasis and structure of historical enquiry. While human beings usually work within a single trade or industry as producers, as, say, farmers or industrial workers, as consumers they are active in many different markets or networks. And while history written from a production viewpoint has, by chance or design, largely been centred on the work of men, consumption history helps to restore women o the mainstream.
The history of consumption demands a wide range of skills. It calls upon the methods and techniques of many other disciplines, including archaeology, sociology, social and economic history, anthropology and art criticism. But it is not simply a melting-pot of techniques and skills, brought to bear on a past epoch. Its objectives amount to a new description of a past culture in its totality, as perceived through its patterns of consumption in goods and services.
Consumption and the World of Goods is the first of three volumes to examine history from this perspective, and is a unique collaboration between twenty-six leading subject specialists from Europe and North America. The outcome is a new interpretation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one that shapes a new historical landscape based on the consumption of goods and services.
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hetween pp 314 and 315
consumer culture in historical perspective
Understanding traditional and modern patterns of consumption in eighteenth
disease of the consumer society?
understanding the household
1a Indices of agricultural and industrial prices 16601820
European consumption and Asian production in the seventeenth and eighteenth
Consumption in early modern social thought
b Admiral Vernons attack on Porto Bello drawn from a letter from William
Hogarths The Reward of Cruelty 1751
numeracy in eighteenthcentury America
la Provenance of mathematical writing in provincial England
The book trade in eastern Europe in the seventeenth and early eighteenth
news and commerce round eighteenthcentury
Changes in English and AngloAmerican consumption from 1550 to 1800
The meaning of consumer behaviour in late seventeenth and early eighteenth
The production and marketing of populuxe goods in eighteenthcentury Paris
interpreting the consumer economy in the eighteenth
The changing roles of food in the study of consumption
a Lancashire consumer and her possessions
meaning and measurement in early modern England
advertisements Alkincoats American arithmetic Behmenist British Byrom Cambridge University Press capital cent changes Cheyne cloth coffee colonial commercial commodities conspicuous consumption consumer behaviour consumer demand consumer revolution Consumer Society consumerism durables Dutch E. P. Thompson Economic History eighteenth century eighteenth-century England electrical elite Elizabeth Shackleton England English Essay Europe European evidence example fashion France Freke French French formal gardens garden growth guild historians honnetiers household ibid idem important income increased India Industrial Revolution J. H. Plumb John Journal labour Lancashire late seventeenth literacy living London luxury manufacturing mass material culture McKendrick means merchants natural natural philosophy newspaper Oxford Paris patterns philosophers political population populuxe printing probate inventories production provincial purchase real wage Roy Porter sample seventeenth century social stockings sugar Table textiles things Thirsk tobacco trade traditional visual wealth Weatherill women York