Consumer Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Explanatory Device

The consumer revolution is a phenomenon of historical interpretation that has some basis in reality, but most historians now agree that its significance has been highly exaggerated. The concept of the consumer revolution came about because of failed explanations for the older debate about why the Industrial Revolution came to Britain first; the idea of consumer demand became a key explanation for the advent of the Industrial Revolution. The seminal work that identified a revolution in consumption practices originating in the eighteenth century is The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (1982). The book includes eight chapters about commercialization and the economy, politics, and society by editors Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb on topics as diverse as shaving, childhood, leisure, and Wedgewood pottery. In the book, McKendrick calls for scholars to turn away from studying changes in production and focus instead on shifts in consumption, which were a necessary complement to the Industrial Revolution. McKendrick argues that it was England's closely stratified society that led to the consumer revolution; people strove for, and could attain, vertical social mobility, which led to emulative spending (social mobility). Objects that were previously only available to the rich were now within reach of the middle class because of a rising real family income throughout the eighteenth century. This, McKendrick maintained, caused a shift in consumer patterns in the eighteenth century, which he has coined the consumer revolution.

Conceptual Outline of the Consumer Revolution

Historians have elucidated four major themes in the historiography of the consumer revolution. (1) The eighteenth century was a period of product innovation where an increased quantity and variety of objects were made in specialist workshops. (2) Consumption moved from the aristocracy to the middling and laboring ranks of English society. (3) There was a change in the distribution of goods from less formal market stalls to permanent shops. (4) The idea of luxury was reconceived so that it no longer had negative connotations of excess and vice and instead represented the increasing gentility of the English populace and fortunes of the British nation.

[Page 311]Historians now acknowledge that the so-called revolution in consumption had a very long gestation period, which began in the seventeenth century. Sumptuary legislation was done away with in 1604, and by the 1690s, contemporaries began to remark on the changing consumption patterns of the middling rank, evidenced by the rejection of woolen fabrics for more varied clothing choices, including cottons and calicos, that offered more versatility in terms of color. Cultural historian Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace used concepts of emulation and conspicuous consumption to explain the rising demand for linen, china, books, clocks, and furniture outside the ranks of the aristocracy in the 1720s. These items were available to a wider range of people because of changes in the method of production. From the late-sixteenth century through the eighteenth century, tens of thousands of rural workshops made fashionable objects for the consuming public. At this time also, there was an increasing international trade in luxury goods.

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