Commodities and consumers

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Commodities and consumers
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The consumer revolution

• When did consumers first come about?
• Why do we consume? Are consumer items luxuries?
• 1982 Neil McKendrick proclaimed The Birth of a
  Consumer Society, a consumer revolution
  preceding and accompanying the industrial
  revolution.
• Approach draws on cultural history, economic
  history, imperial history, history of ideas and
  history of art often global in its interests.

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How to explain it?

• Nb earlier growth revolution? End of threat
  of famine
• Imitation and emulation?
• Thrill of possession
• New credit systems
• New investments
• Diversification of trade and manufacturing
• Wealthy bourgeoisie
• Commercial as much as landed society nation of
  shopkeepers
• Shift from household self-sufficiency to
  commercially produced goods role of wife in
  household economy
• Polite society and taste

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Adult male average earnings
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The dangers of luxury

• Moral degeneracy, breeding idleness, corruption,
  effeminacy and dissoluteness.

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Obsessive and ridiculous fashions, often for
women who were depicted as particularly
susceptible to vanity and absurdity a sense of
fashion as all-consuming
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• John Dennis, 1711 Luxury is the spreading
  contagion which is the greatest Corrupter of
  Publick Manners and the greatest Extinguisher of
  Publick Spirit

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Fear of parvenues and social climbers, upstarts
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a disparity between outward display and inner
worth
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The danger of excess ill health literally
consumption
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• London Magazine when the tables of the
  shopkeeper, the mechanick and artificer, are
  replenished with cates and dainties unbecoming
  their rank their rooms furnished in a sumptuous
  manner, and themselves and their families appear
  cloathed in costly garments, much exceeding their
  stations in life, then it is that luxury and
  extravagence not only prejudices them, but
  detriments others of the same degree, by the
  frequent bankrupting, insolvencies and shutting
  up of shops it occasions 1754
• Economic decay subverting industry diverting
  money out of the country to pay for foreign
  imports undermining the landed interest
• The growth of luxury is a sure prognostication
  of the decline of empires The London Magazine
  1755 cf the fall of Rome
• Frenchified
• Often feared at times of war or crisis
• London and towns as sources of vice
• Christian and classical condemnation

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The defence of luxury

• Late C17th writers about trade the main spur to
  Trade, or rather to Industry and Ingenuity, is
  the exorbitant Appetites of Men which they will
  take pains to gratifie and so be disposed to
  work, when nothing else will incline them to it
  for did Men content themselves with bare
  Necessaries, we should have a poor world North,
  Discourses on Trade, 1691
• Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees or
  Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714)
• Questioned what luxury or comfort meant once we
  depart from calling every thing Luxury that is
  not absolutely necessary to keep a Man alive,
  then there is no Luxury at all what is calld
  superfluous to some Degree of People will be
  thought requisite to those of higher Quality.
• It is a received Notion that Luxury is as
  destructive to the Wealth of the whole Body
  Politick as it is to that of every individual
  Person who is guilty of it I cannot help
  dissenting from them in this point
• What is put to the Account of Luxury belongs to
  Male-adminstration, and it is the fault of bad
  politicks
• if imports are never allowd to be superior to
  the Exports, no Nation can ever be impoverishd
  by Foreign Luxury
• As to Luxurys effeminating and enervating a
  Nation, I have not such frightful Notions now as
  I have had formerly where military affairs are
  taken care of as they ought, and the Soldiers
  well paid and kept in good Discipline, a wealthy
  Nation may live in all the Ease and Plenty
  imaginable.

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Hume and Smith

• David Hume Luxury, when excessive, is the source
  of many ills, but is in general preferable to
  sloth and idleness, which would commonly succeed
  in its place, and are more pernicious both to
  private persons and to the public (1742).
  Sociability the more these refined arts
  advance, the more sociable men become they flock
  into cities love to receive and communicate
  knowledge, to show their wit or their breeding,
  their taste in conversation or living, in clothes
  or furniture Thus industry, knowledge and
  humanity are linked together by an indissoluble
  chain, and are found, from experience as well as
  reason, to be peculiar to the more polished and
  what are commonly denominated the more luxurious
  ages.
• Critics mistook the disorders of the Roman state
  and ascribed to luxury and the arts what really
  proceeded from an ill-modelled government and the
  unlimited extent of conquests. Refinement on the
  pleasures and conveniences of life has no natural
  tendency to beget venality and corruption.
• Where luxury nourishes commerce and industry,
  the peasants, by a proper cultivation of the
  land, become rich and independent while the
  tradesmen and merchants acquire a share of the
  property and draw authority and consideration to
  that middling rank of men who are the best and
  firmest basis of public liberty.
• Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations, 1776)
• Natural order of economies agriculture,
  manufacture, commerce. Consumption is the sole
  end and purpose of all production and the
  interest of the producer ought to be attended to,
  only so far as it may be necessary for promoting
  that of the consumer. The maxim is so perfectly
  self-evident that it would be absurd to attempt
  to prove it. Envy and admiration of the rich
  drive men to seek wealth and inequality meant
  this was an insatiable process. Though he also
  expressed anxieties about excessive luxury he
  thought the desire to better himself, meant man
  also saved and shunned prodigality though the
  principle of expense, therefore, prevails in
  almost all men upon some occasion, and in some
  men upon almost all occasions, yet in the greater
  part of men, taking the whole course of their
  life at an average, the principle of frugality
  seems not only to predominate but to predominate
  very greatly. it is thus that the private
  interests and passions of individuals naturally
  dispose them to turn their stock towards the
  employments which in ordinary cases are most
  advantageous to society.

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• John Tuslers Luxury no Political Evil, But
  Demonstrably proved to be Necessary to the
  Preservation and Prosperity of States (1780) a
  desire for Luxuries begets a love of property,
  makes a man attentive to the preservation of his
  wealth and will not suffer any order of men to
  vegetate in idleness.
• Luxury promotes circulation of trade
• The provided the incentive to work hard
• Recognition of its importance 1781 luxury
  produces vice and vice misery but luxury is,
  notwithstanding, essentially necessary to
  national greatness .. It is indeed true that
  nations have been undone by luxury but it is
  also true that no nation can subsist without it.

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Great variety of new consumer products available
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http//www.vam.ac.uk/collections/periods_styles/18
thcentury/index.html
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Early eighteenth century silk (Spitalfields)
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Late C17th Indian silk
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How far down the social scale?

• Henry Fielding referred to a vast torrent of
  Luxury which of late Years hath poured itself
  into the nation .had almost totally changed
  the Manners, Customes and Habits of the People,
  more especially of the lower Sort

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Tea

• It purges the blood, opens obstructions,
  strengthens the inward parts, sharpens the wit
  and quickens the understanding (Thomas Povey in
  1686).
• Originally valued for its purging quality and
  4-50 cups a day was a dosage. It was introduced
  to GB via Holland in the 1650s. Initially the
  preserve of the elite, within 100 years it had
  established a place in the mass market.
• Figures of consumption in 1690s only a few
  hundred pounds of China tea were imported by
  1757 the figure was 3m lbs. By 1780 the figure
  stood at 17m lbs of tea being imported. If we add
  tea that was smuggled, which could perhaps add
  50, we appreciate that what began as
  aristocratic preserve became a matter of mass
  participation.

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Tea, the East India Company and the State

• The trade was in the exclusive hands of the East
  India Company yet the state drew increasing
  amounts of tax from it.
• Duty on it reached 112 by 1783. But the vast
  increase meant that smuggling became rife and the
  EIC was unable to shift all its imports by the
  1770s 17m lbs of tea were in warehouses. The
  problem was enough to threaten collapse of
  revenues to the state therefore there was an
  attempt to sell it at a lower price to the
  Americans, though this wrecked market conditions
  in the colonies and raised the issue of taxation.
  This led to Boston tea party in Dec 1773.

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Coffee

• Legal imports rose from 5,700 cwt in 1700 to
  40,000 by 1770.
• Coffee houses. First in Oxford 1650, London 1651.
  By end of C17th London had several hundred 1734
  directory lists 551
• provincial proliferation York had 3 by mid
  1660s, 30 by late C18th. 1736 Norwich had 106
  coffee dealers

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Tobacco

• A similar story can be told about tobacco.
  Production in the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia
  and Maryland grew steadily throughout the C17th
  from 60,000 lbs in 1620 to about 25m lbs by 1690
  by 1728 it was 50m lbs a year and double that
  figure by the time of the American revolution.
• Initially the West Indies, and Barbados in
  particular, had played an important part in
  tobacco production but from the mid C17th
  onwards the islands were increasingly turned over
  to sugar production and tobacco cultivation
  became a specialism of N.America.
• At the time of the revolution it was far and away
  the most important export, worth nearly double
  the value of its nearest commodity rival, bread
  and flour.

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Sugar

• Towards middle of C18th sugar overtook grain as
  the most valuable single commodity entering world
  trade. The British and French Caribbean colonies
  supplied 70 of all sugar entering the N.
  Atlantic market in 1750, rising to 80 by 1787.
  The Americas as a whole supplied nearly all over
  Europes sugar imports. In 1700 total world sugar
  exports amounted to 57,000 tons this figure had
  risen to 286,000 tons by 1787. Over a similar
  period we can see that the number of slaves on
  British Caribbean islands rose from 64,000 in
  1680 to 480,000 by 1790. Sugar and slavery thus
  were pivotal to the economies of the W. Indies.

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Slavery

• Demand for slaves
• i) sugar-slave economies of W. Indies ii)
  agricultural plantations of N.America esp.
  Carolinas rice and indigo Virginia and Maryland
  tobacco.
• 1749 Eng commentator the extensive employment
  of our shipping in, to and from America, the
  great brood of seamen consequent thereon, and the
  daily bread of the most considerable part of our
  British manufactures, are owing primarily to the
  labour of negroes. By 1780 Jamaica produced
  50,000 tones of sugar, 1/2 of the Gb supply.
  1701-1810 slave imports to W.Indies totalled
  about 1.5m. Total slave pop was c.330,000 in 1700
  and nearly 3m by 1800.

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China

• Most tea came not from India but from China.
• 1793 Lord Macartney was sent as Amb to China with
  samples of GB manuf, taking an assrotment of
  artielces from manuf towns, includeing Norwich.
  The Emperor Chien Lungs reply was that Strange
  and costly objects do not interest me. As your
  Ambassador can see for himself we possess all
  things. I set no value on strange objects ... and
  have no use for your countrys manufactures.
• Restrictions on European traders.
• Passion for chinoiserie. Lacquered or jappanned
  furniture. figures, screens, cabinets, porcelain.

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Willow-ware pattern, still popular, was designed
in 1780 and manufactured by Spode.
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Wm Chamberss Designs of chinese Buildings,
Furniture, Dresses etc (1757). Chambers designed
a China house for Kew gardens with a ten story
pagoda.
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Political uses of consumer items
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• 1745 Ant-Gallican Association founded to promote
  British Manufactures, to extend the commerce of
  England, to discourage the introduction of French
  modes and oppose the importation of French
  commodities. This paved way for founding in 1754
  of the Society for Arts, Manufactures and
  Commerce. It had 2000 members in 1760s. It
  offered rewards for the invention by Britons of
  substitutes for items that were imported eg
  varnish (for lacquering perfected in Paris).

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