CONSUMERISM BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE

Mainstream scholarship traditionally treated consumption as a passive, private act. Producers, traders, or financiers had economic interests, not consumers. As James Madison put it in the Federalist Papers in 1787: “A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes.”Footnote ⁵ Neo-classical economics treated consumption as a set of maximizing choices that had changed little over time. Social historians focused on workers, middle classes, or farmers, but almost never on consumers.

As traditional working class movements waned, women’s history highlighted the crucial role of women as consumers, and the effects of the post-World War II boom became clear, consumption began to receive its due. Beginning in the 1980s, new scholarship, including the seminal work of Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb and that of Robin Wrightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, spawned a still-rising tide of historical scholarship.Footnote ⁶ Economists such as Gary Becker studying human capital and the family as an economic unit also recast consumption as the intersection between macroeconomic trends and individual action.Footnote ⁷

Five major contributions made by Trentmann in his massive work deserve to be highlighted: the origins of modern consumerism, the role of the state in shaping consumption, a new definition of consumption as both private and public, a skewering of the Western critique of consumption, and insightful comparisons between consumption in the industrialized West and industrialized East. While recent scholars have argued that Ming China or Renaissance Italy created consumer societies, Trentmann makes a strong case that they did not. In these societies, antiquity was still prized above fashion, and purchased goods were as important as assets as they were as commodities to be used. Most of all, “Like Renaissance Italy, late Ming China failed to generate a sense that consumption might make a positive contribution to state, society, and economy.”Footnote ⁸ By contrast, in seventeenth-century the Netherlands, and still more in Britain in the eighteenth, “fashion was institutionalized into an industry, with its own spaces, calendar, and media”.Footnote ⁹

As Trentmann shows throughout his work, the state powerfully shapes consumption. When Western European governments fostered trade on a global scale for the first time – and, tragically, massive enslavement of Africans – sugar, rum, tea, coffee, chocolate, and cotton stimulated demand. Industrialization, too, did not simply expand the goods available to consumers. Public services, provided by or regulated by the state – water supply, electricity, telephones, transportation – transformed daily lives. These were services that were consumed, but that also stimulated more consumption. Department stores, appliances, easily washable clothes, and automobiles depended on public services. Industrial societies in the twentieth century also vastly expanded parks, swimming pools, and public spaces. Trentmann thus expands the definition of consumption from private to public goods in ways that many scholars will have to debate and explore. While the Depression set back consumption, confronting the Depression finally moved consumption onto center stage. Building on work by Victoria de Grazia and Amy Randall, Trentmann argues that regimes as diverse as the New Deal, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Conservative Britain sought to convince consumers that the state could best meet their needs through a specific mix of regulation and private initiative.Footnote ¹⁰ The recent boom in consumption during globalization, too, argues Trentmann, has depended heavily on governments that lowered interest rates, cut taxes, and reduced regulation. Contemporary tourism would be unthinkable without airline deregulation and massive state investment in airports. Governments also expanded consumption in the broadest sense, he says, through welfare. “In the twentieth century, the advance of consumption was as profound outside the marketplace as within it.”Footnote ¹¹ Our obsession with choice, advertising, and shopping distracts us, says Trentmann, from understanding the full impact of modern consumption. Many industrial societies choose to provide services through government or government-supported or subsidized means. “As countries get richer, private consumption makes up less of GDP.”Footnote ¹² In the nineteenth century, no country spent even three per cent of GDP on social welfare. By the late twentieth century, twenty per cent was typical.Footnote ¹³ Between 1954 and 1974, non-wage incentives in American firms, largely sheltered from taxation by government action, went from twenty per cent of payroll to thirty-seven per cent.Footnote ¹⁴

Similarly, despair over crazed consumers buying themselves into bankruptcy says more about the moralists than the consumers, and ignores the role of the state. “The idea of a more sober, restrained past is the stuff of myth, not history.”Footnote ¹⁵ “In England in 1700, every second head of a household left behind unpaid debts at death.”Footnote ¹⁶ Trentmann rejects the profligate, debt-ridden consumer as the driver of consumption. It was governments that loosened up credit through deregulation of banks, interest rates, and social welfare. “For many Americans in the 1990s and 2000s – a period of stagnant wages and rising inequality – the credit card acted as a private substitute for a missing welfare state.”Footnote ¹⁷ Trentmann argues the consumers have often wisely used credit when times were good and then cut back. At its peak in 2009, when the full force of the recession hit, household debt in the US rose to eighty-seven per cent of the level of the nation’s economic output; by 2017, it had still only reached sixty-six per cent, despite almost eight years of recovery.Footnote ¹⁸

Trentmann also sketches a new intellectual history of consumption. Early modern Britain and the Netherlands created “a favorable climate of ideas and institutions that encouraged men and, especially, women, to join the ranks of wage earners and consumers”.Footnote ¹⁹ One of the joys of Trentmann’s scholarship is his interweaving of ideas and material culture. Swift’s quip that “the souls of fashionable folk are to be found in their garments” captures the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century along with Smith’s definition of consumption as the “sole end of production” and Mandeville’s fable of the bees pursuing obsessive gain and creating the common good. Trentmann trenchantly points out that the focus on production by Marx, classical economists, and reformers during industrialization obscured the ongoing expansion of consumption for all classes during the nineteenth century. Indeed, the stubborn hold of this tradition helps explain why social scientists and historians in the twentieth century long neglected consumption. What Fabian and Christian moralist R.H. Tawney decried as the “Acquisitive Society” in 1920 was a society dedicated to ownership and protection of property, not to buying and acquiring goods.Footnote ²⁰

One of the delights of Trentmann’s marriage of theory and practice is the revelation of how the same tired themes have reoccurred as critiques of consumerism and how rarely these critiques have been tested. “Complaints about conspicuous consumption by the rich and by others who spend beyond their means in an attempt to imitate them are as old as human civilization.”Footnote ²¹ Rousseau, Veblen, Adorno, and Galbraith have been recycled endlessly, including by more recent authors such as Benjamin Barber and Neal Lawson.Footnote ²² Trentmann makes short shrift of these jeremiahs. Rousseau failed to see how oppressed the poor were by lack of access to markets. Conspicuous consumption was worse among pre-industrial elites, contra Veblen, than in the ranks of the twentieth-century rich. Adorno knew almost nothing about the consumer culture he denounced. Radio, he argued, was destroying classical music. In contrast to Galbraith’s “private wealth, public squalor”, almost all societies have spent more on public consumption as they have grown richer. Nor was Galbraith right about consumption deadening the intellect and driving inequality. Spending on books boomed in the 1950s. Inequality lessens consumption; consumption does not increase inequality. Just as important, there is “a curious mismatch between real trends in spending and the ink most theorists have devoted to the consumer as a shopper buying yet another branded handbag”.Footnote ²³ Total consumption has changed little. Housing, clothes, and personal goods now take the place of food. In the 1950s, many Europeans spent forty-five per cent of their income on food; by 2007, it was ten.

Bourdieu is one theorist Trentmann finds useful: the freeing up of income has allowed Western consumers to experiment with choice, what Bourdieu called the search for distinction.Footnote ²⁴ Trentmann draws on the insights of anthropologists in recognizing that people invest goods, even those purchased for everyday use, with a variety of social meanings, involving status, security, community.Footnote ²⁵ “The empire of things expanded in part because possessions became increasingly important carriers of identity, memory, and emotions.”Footnote ²⁶ As even one of the angriest critics of consumption admits, “For shopping to have such a grip on our lives, it has to connect to some of the prime drivers of what it means to be human.”Footnote ²⁷ Trentmann denies that modernity has become distinctly attached to goods; we have changed our attachments, not our needs: “All societies, rich and poor, have emotional relationships with goods.”Footnote ²⁸

Finally, Trentmann outlines a new comparative, global history of consumption. Free trade and British hegemony spread markets, new goods, and habits worldwide, although Europeans exaggerated their own uniqueness.Footnote ²⁹ “The contrast between ‘traditional’ tribal Africa, where homo economicus had not yet set foot, and a ‘modern’ Western world of goods, inequality and individualism was a convenient figment of the imperial imagination.”Footnote ³⁰ While the modern history of African and Middle Eastern consumption is still being written, Trentmann argues that East and South Asia may have evolved their own distinctive path as consumer societies. In the West, societies urbanized, created regimes based on citizenship, and only then felt the full force of commercialized consumption. Asians have become “modern before they were urban”. And, unlike the West, political rights have lagged behind social ones. In Asia, “Citizenship meant duties, not rights.”Footnote ³¹

As a result, Asian consumerism has helped create modernization. Indian families in the countryside that got electricity “saved more than their neighbors, invested more in the education of the children, and bought more consumer goods”.Footnote ³² Americanization as the ideal type of consumerism should be discarded as Japanese, Chinese, and perhaps even Middle Eastern models of consumer society prove more relevant for global trends. Trentmann suggests that, as the history of consumer societies lengthen in Asia, we may need to re-write the Western history of consumption. Asian societies appear to accept consumption with less moralism and to check its excesses with more equanimity. Most sermons and bestsellers decrying “consumerism” hail from the United States and Europe, not Japan, India, and China. India has one of the most vigorous consumer NGOs in the world: the Consumer Unity and Trust Society, founded in 1983. By creating a state-sponsored consumer movement to check its own state-owned and subsidized enterprises, “Communist China rules with consumers, not against them.”Footnote ³³ Trentmann has less to say about the Middle East, but even here, his insights are instructive: “The Islamic revival has been not so much anti-consumerist as about creating a distinctive style of consuming with its own range of products”, not just halal meat, but halal films, cosmetics, and hotels, for example.Footnote ³⁴

CONSUMPTION BETWEEN COOPERATION AND INDIVIDUALISM

One of the most profound ways that societies have differed in their consumption is in the success of consumer cooperation. As the essays in A Global History demonstrate, consumer cooperation in some form has emerged in almost every country. Worldwide, an estimated one billion people are members of a cooperative economic organization, but the two most popular kinds of cooperatives are agricultural cooperatives and credit cooperatives, also known as credit unions. Consumer cooperatives are the third most common kind of cooperative, with producer or worker-owned cooperatives and service cooperatives much less common still.Footnote ³⁵

Two major contributions of the immense volume edited by Hilson and her collaborators are its global perspective on consumer cooperation and a re-thinking of the factors making for consumer cooperation’s success or failure. Consumer cooperation arose and flourished during the first era of globalization, when a liberal world economy emerged during the nineteenth century. Its growth slowed during the mid-twentieth century as welfare states and monopoly capitalism strengthened. The individualist consumerism of the second era of globalization in the late twentieth century brought the collapse of once strong consumer cooperative movements in Austria, Belgium, France, and Germany, and severely weakened those in Britain and Canada.Footnote ³⁶

One key to the early forms of consumer cooperation in almost every country was the dividend given to cooperative members based on their purchases. The dividend concept originated with the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers in northern England, founded in 1846, and popularized by G.J. Holyoake’s Self-Help By the People, published in 1858 and widely translated or summarized.Footnote ³⁷ Dividends put money or credit into consumers’ pockets and symbolized that consumers owned the cooperative. Liberal, socialist, and Christian missionaries alike spread the gospel of cooperation. Catholic priests from Canada and the United States promoted cooperatives in Central America and the Caribbean, with particular inspiration coming from the Antigonish movement in Quebec.Footnote ³⁸ Adding to the indigenous African-American tradition of self-help through mutual insurance in the United States were influences as diverse as the visit of Japanese Christian cooperative leader Toyohiko Kagawa to the US in 1935 and study tours by African-American activists to Antigonish in Quebec and Mondragon in Spain.Footnote ³⁹ Antigonish even influenced Korean cooperation where, as in Japan, Christians had a significant influence in developing cooperatives.Footnote ⁴⁰

Consumer cooperation always differed from agricultural cooperation and credit unions because it had to wrestle with whether or not to identify with socialist or working-class parties. This difference helps to explain why consumer cooperation has not succeeded as well as other kinds of cooperation. Two broad paths emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: cooperatives could be aligned with Socialist or working-class movements, or they could be neutral and apolitical, at least not associated with a political party. Vooruit (Forward) in Ghent, in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, is the most famous example of the former path and influenced Socialist and working-class parties all over the world.Footnote ⁴¹ By contrast, British and Scandinavian cooperatives officially maintained political neutrality, as did a strong group of French cooperatives influenced by the economist Charles Gide.Footnote ⁴² This separation from partisan politics occurred, at least officially, even though a large proportion of these cooperative movements’ members were working class and most political observers aligned the cooperatives with social democratic parties. Although the Belgian path was eventually rejected by the international cooperative movement, even an apolitical stance did not prevent many consumers from seeing consumer cooperatives as fundamentally working class. One of the virtues of A Global History is to show that those European consumer cooperative movements that collapsed or declined – Austrian, Belgian, British, French, and German – never convinced consumers in the late twentieth century that cooperatives transcended their working-class origins.Footnote ⁴³

Politically neutral or not, genuine consumer-controlled cooperatives have always fostered political education, which is why dictatorships feared them. Dulce Freire and Joana Dias Pereis show that many Portuguese consumer cooperatives survived under the authoritarian Estado Novo from 1926 to 1974 by leveraging their apolitical status.Footnote ⁴⁴ Even apolitical cooperatives served as sites for political education and civic participation under dictatorships and colonial regimes, as seen in Portugal, Spain, and Korea.Footnote ⁴⁵ Communist dictatorships rarely allowed cooperatives independence, despite rhetorical support. After initially relying on consumer cooperatives and even flirting with direct product exchange in a moneyless economy, the Soviets recreated a retail system with a range of stores in the 1930s. Cooperatives went from 59.2 per cent of retail turnover in 1932 to twenty per cent in 1937 and succeeded only in rural areas.Footnote ⁴⁶ The Chinese Communists eliminated cooperatives, although their rural collectives under government control were sometimes, inaccurately, described as cooperatives.Footnote ⁴⁷ When cooperation declined in democratic countries, it still laid the foundation for consumer movements. As Simon Lambersens and his colleagues put it in the case of France, “Educating people to cooperate was replaced by simply informing the consumer.”Footnote ⁴⁸

By illuminating the divergent histories of consumer cooperative movements in industrialized countries in Europe, North America, and Asia, A Global History makes an important contribution to scholarship. The standard arguments for the failure of consumer cooperatives have been that they lacked capital, were slow to innovate, and did not exploit economies of scale as did major commercial chains. None of these arguments hold up conclusively.Footnote ⁴⁹ English, Scottish, and Scandinavian cooperators were far in advance of most of their commercial competitors in creating vertically integrated, highly capitalized wholesaling operations. As Hilson shows in her essay on the early history of British cooperatives, they pioneered in integrating wholesale and retail, introducing advertising, emphasizing quality as well as price, and introducing self-service supermarkets.Footnote ⁵⁰ The English Cooperative Wholesale Society was astonishing in its global reach already in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵¹ The multinational Nordisk Andelsforbund, founded in 1918, supplied Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish cooperatives.Footnote ⁵²

So, why have some consumer cooperative movements thrived while others, including some of the largest and once most innovative, failed? The once powerful British consumer cooperative movement never exploited its economies of scale. When it finally merged local cooperatives in the 1970s, “most of the mergers did not happen from positions of strength, but were carried out only as a last resort and sometimes resulted in complete or partial failure”.Footnote ⁵³ Nor did the British shed their focus on the working class. By contrast, Italian, Japanese, and Scandinavian consumer cooperation succeeded by judicious innovation. Scandinavian consumer cooperatives not only pursued larger scale, but pioneered in advertising, educating consumers, and emphasizing quality. In 1939, a quarter of all Norwegians lived in a household that belonged to a cooperative. The Swedish cooperative federation, Kooperativa Forbundet (KF), had over a third of the retail food sector during the 1930s and 40s. In 1934, the two large Finnish wholesale cooperatives accounted for forty per cent of retail sales in Finland.Footnote ⁵⁴ Too often, Scandinavian consumer cooperative success has been attributed to unique characteristics of the region’s civic-minded or homogenous populations or its pragmatic social democratic traditions, even though the cooperatives resolutely sought political neutrality. In fact, as Espen Ekberg explains, in one of the most analytical essays in A Global History: “The Nordic cooperatives simply found efficient ways of re-aligning modern retailing practices with the more traditional virtues of the cooperative model.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Swedish coops invested already in 1925 in one of their country’s largest advertising agencies.Footnote ⁵⁶ By contrast, French consumer cooperatives in the 1970s “were not quick to become computerized or start advertising”.Footnote ⁵⁷

Italian consumer cooperatives are the best example of success in Europe outside of Scandinavia. Coop consumatori is the market leader in mass retailing with 7.9 million members. It is true that, because much of Italian retailing remained small scale longer than elsewhere, the cooperative movement was “the pioneer of modernization”, creating supermarkets, offering self-service, and creating larger stores. Yet, in the end, Italian cooperatives faced the same challenges – mass advertising, brand consciousness, the decline of working class communities – as other cooperative movements.Footnote ⁵⁸ As Hilson explains Patrizia Battilani’s argument on the Italians’ success:

Swiss and Spanish consumer cooperatives flourish in strikingly similar ways: breadth beyond one class, an emphasis on quality not just price, and quality embracing health, environmentalism, and consumer protection.Footnote ⁶⁰ The two largest consumer cooperatives in Spain in 2010 accounted for thirteen per cent of the retail food market among the eleven largest entities in the sector, with the cooperative Grupo Eroski as the third largest retailer in the country.Footnote ⁶¹

NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE HISTORY OF CONSUMPTION

What new directions do these impressive volumes by Trentmann and Hilson and her collaborators suggest? First, we need to integrate the history of consumption and consumer cooperation into economic and business history, and bring insights from the latter fields into the study of consumption and cooperation. Except for England’s Cooperative Wholesale Society, consumer cooperatives have almost always depended on capitalist sources of production.Footnote ⁶² But far too much of the history of both consumption and cooperation does relatively little with the history of retailing or with economic analysis. Similarly, mainstream economists and business historians typically ignore cooperation. Greg Patmore and Nikola Balnave note that the Business History Review, published at Harvard University, has never published research articles dealing specifically with consumer cooperatives.Footnote ⁶³

How have consumers shopped in the past and how has shopping changed over time? Despite impressive membership numbers of cooperators, many cooperators apparently did only a small share of their shopping at the cooperatives. In Belgium 1938, for example, 416,000 families in a population of about 6.5 million belonged to consumer cooperatives, which may have represented around twenty per cent of households. But cooperatives accounted for only 3.15 per cent of total sales.Footnote ⁶⁴ We need to know more about consumer behavior over time in order to understand why individualist consumption or cooperation takes the form that it does. Trentmann’s research suggests that by focusing on food and clothing, cooperatives missed the twentieth-century revolution in homemaking. Women had previously only done what was necessary to cook and wash. Men did barely that. Appliances, more spacious dwellings, and the eight-hour day created homemaking. Women could now shop for variety and quality. Men spent roughly twice as much time on domestic chores and repairs in 1945 as in 1900. The home became the “energy cell of consumer culture”.Footnote ⁶⁵

Why do consumer cooperatives arise at all? The standard argument is that consumer cooperation arose during the late nineteenth century, when working-class families felt oppressed by high prices. Cooperation declined with the fall of food prices and the growth of commercial retail in the post-1945 era.Footnote ⁶⁶ What was true for Australia and New Zealand supposedly holds elsewhere: “consumer cooperatives tended to be established at the back-end of an economic slump, or when prices and the cost of living were increasing”.Footnote ⁶⁷ Yet, the late nineteenth century was a time of falling food prices in terms of real wages. Cooperatives did grow during World War I’s scarcity.Footnote ⁶⁸ But when food prices fell over the late twentieth century, Italian, Japanese, Scandinavian, Spanish, and Swiss consumer cooperative movements all flourished, while those in Austria, Belgium, France, and Germany all collapsed, along with those in Argentina, Australia, and South Korea. Trentmann’s work suggests that, not scarcity, but quality and choice were always much more important factors behind consumer behavior, including for cooperators. Cooperatives that grasped this succeeded.

Neither Trentmann, nor Hilson and her collaborators study brands. Yet, brands are crucial assets – and feared icons. Children recognize major brand logos by age three. To Naomi Klein, brands bewitch the innocent into mindless consumption.Footnote ⁶⁹ Thanksgiving, the oddly American holiday, was created entirely by marketers, going back to Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book [sic] in 1846, who wanted a secular national holiday that could help unify an increasingly diverse country. The subsequent evolution of Thanksgiving is the product literally of advertising by commercial companies promoting their brands – Swift’s Premium Turkey, Eatmor Cranberry Company, Diamond walnuts (for turkey dressing), and Borden’s pumpkin pie filling.Footnote ⁷⁰ Buying a product connects people, or, as Adam Arvidsson puts it, “People may ‘bowl alone’, but they socialize around brands.”Footnote ⁷¹ Hartmut Kaelble argues that a European identity has begun forming through the popularity of Europe-wide brands.Footnote ⁷² During China’s reform era, its leaders realized that Western and Japanese brands attracted consumers everywhere, not simply in China, whereas almost no Chinese brands had much esteem. Through diligent improvement and concentrated marketing, Chinese firms have improved their position. In 2011, the China Market Research Group found that eighty-five per cent of Chinese consumers preferred foreign brands. By 2016, only forty per cent did. Similar trends appear to be at work elsewhere in Asia, with local firms learning to compete with L’Oreal, Nestle’s, and the host of brands owned by Unilever.Footnote ⁷³ A true history of consumption and cooperation’s success or failure would draw on why people buy the brands they do, drawing insights from market research and consumer psychology.Footnote ⁷⁴

Finally, we need to write a new political history of consumption and citizenship. Traditional political philosophy believed that consumers could not exercise effective power as citizens. Activists on both left and right have feared consumption as inimical to political community. As Eric Hobsbawm lamented, “Participation in the market replaces participation in politics; the consumer takes the place of the citizen.”Footnote ⁷⁵ The growth of consumer activism across the industrialized world challenges this pessimism.Footnote ⁷⁶ Just as importantly, perhaps many political struggles in the past could be reinterpreted as battles over consumption, not simply production, as Alan Milward argued already in 1981 in an insightful essay, “Tariffs as Constitutions”.Footnote ⁷⁷ Market riots over high prices began a history that continued with attacks on agricultural tariffs as “bread taxes” and led to demonstrations against housing shortages and inflation. The growth of consumerism, combined with the social welfare state, led some observers to hope that a more consumer-oriented society would be more equal and less dominated by the wealthy.Footnote ⁷⁸ The pioneering market researcher and Labour activist Mark Abrams prophesied during World War II that “we have moved and are moving towards a much more egalitarian state by means of transferring purchasing power from the rich to the poor, and from those who live on property to those who live by manual labour”.Footnote ⁷⁹

Contra Hobsbawm, do consumers have identifiable rights that they can expect to be honored and around which they can organize? On 15 March 1962, US President John F. Kennedy listed the right to safety, the right to be informed, the right to choose, and the right to be heard as basic consumer rights. In various, slightly altered forms, these rights have shaped movements around the world, particularly those in the International Organisation of Consumer Unions, and form the basis of both European Union guidelines and the United Nations Guidelines on Consumer Protection.Footnote ⁸⁰ The ubiquity of consumption should not lead us to assume passivity on the part of consumers. As Trentmann suggests, consumers can exercise more choice and autonomy than the tidal wave of mind-numbing advertising might suggest. Citizens can participate in a robust consumer culture and still keep their political consciousness – ill-informed or biased as it may be – relatively separate. When the Labour government tried to treat citizens only as consumers, it had relatively little success. In Britain, few people who use public services see themselves narrowly as “consumers”, but rather as patients, members of the public, or service users.Footnote ⁸¹ Cooperation, in new political forms that we have still to evolve, may emerge as a path by which consumption develops. In any case, we can expect a new political history of consumption to emerge as historians re-examine old conflicts in a new light. As they do, these two milestone works by Trentmann and Hilson and her collaborators will remain widely read for decades.