Enlightenment thinkers rarely used the word “consumption,” but they spoke incessantly of “luxury,” a multivalent term that became the principal idiom through which writers discussed the moral, social, and political implications of consumption. Controversy over luxury was a proxy for the first modern debate on consumption. The discussion of luxury shifted decisively at the turn of the eighteenth century, when two writers – François Fénelon and Bernard Mandeville – laid the foundations for a vigorous Enlightenment debate. Drawing on ancient and medieval critiques, Fénelon argued that luxury corrupted morals, scrambled the social order, and destroyed states. Mandeville countered by advancing a bold apology for luxury. Far from weakening states, he argued, luxury generated prosperous and powerful nations. Gender would play a key role in the debate that ensued. Whereas critics of luxury like Jean-Jacques Rousseau warned that excessive consumption effeminized men, rendering them unfit for public service, defenders of luxury like David Hume claimed that material well-being was the sign of a civilized society in which men and women frequently interacted. In the second half of the eighteenth century, certain thinkers sought to resolve the debate. Political economists argued that if consumption was directed toward productive ends, wealthy and powerful nations would avoid corruption and endure. Meanwhile, luxury producers incorporated critiques of luxury by designing natural and healthy products. Criticism of luxury did little to slow the pace of consumption.

The contemporary world seems obsessed with stuff: how to get it, what to do with it, how to get rid of it. Although historians long assumed that rising consumption began with industrialization, we now know that the pace of consumption accelerated in the early modern world well before the age of mass production. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, women and men began to accumulate more clothing, carry more personal accessories, fill their households with more furnishings, and wear, smoke, snort, eat, and drink prodigious quantities of colonial products. Although scholars debate whether to call this growth in consumption “revolutionary” or “evolutionary,” they agree that is was transformational. It changed how people looked, ate, socialized, and thought, giving rise to debates about moral progress and ushering in new forms of revolutionary political activism. This book has offered a new interpretation of the consumer revolution by incorporating questions of empire, political economy, global trade, slavery, material culture, philosophy, politics, and revolution. One important theme that remains to be explored, however, is the relationship between consumption and the environment. Any solution to the climate crisis will require a revolution in how humans think about – and practice – consumption. Although today nothing seems more natural than relentless consumption, it, too, has a history. Heightening awareness of the fact that consumption in the contemporary world is a historical construct, an outcome of contingent historical factors, is an important first step toward resolving the climate crisis. For any invention of human society can be reinvented.

How was consumption able to rise so dramatically before the age of the Industrial Revolution? The consumer revolution was the result of incremental changes in urban growth, agricultural specialization, commercial development, and proto-industry. Global trade was also a major factor. While agriculture, industry, and intra-European trade expanded gradually in the eighteenth century, intercontinental trade between Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas soared, expanding the horizons of the European material world. Global trade introduced European consumers to an array of products from distant lands, from Chinese porcelain and tea to Indian cotton textiles to American tobacco, coffee, chocolate, and sugar. Slavery was integral to global trade. On the west coast of Africa, European merchants traded Indian cloth for human captives, whom they shipped to the Americas in the largest forced migration in human history. In the Americas, European-descended enslavers brutally forced the enslaved to produce large quantities of commodities (tobacco, sugar, and coffee) for European consumption. Global trade also gave rise to import substitution as Europeans producers made cheap imitations of Asian porcelain and textiles. Such import substitution was part of a broad shift from the consumption of high-quality, durable materials that stored value over long periods of time to cheaper, more fragile semidurables that were rapidly replaced. This shift marked the birth of modern materiality and accelerated the fashion cycle.

This chapter traces the rise of consumer goods in Europe and its colonies between 1650 and 1800. Women and men consumed ever larger quantities of clothing, personal accessories, household furnishings, and colonial products. However, any claim that the growth of consumption was “revolutionary” must confront two powerful objections: (1) that there were strict social limits to the spread of new types of consumption; and (2) that the growth of consumption was less sudden than it appears, having roots in the urban life and court society of preceding centuries. Taking these objections seriously, the chapter argues that consumption grew most intensively among nobles, gentry, professionals, skilled artisans, and better-off farmers. Many peasants, unskilled laborers, migrants, and enslaved people were excluded from participating in the consumer boom. Consumption was also gendered, with women leading the way in the acquisition of clothing. In the Americas, where indigenous Americans, European-descended settlers, African-descended slaves, and free people of color interacted, heterogeneous forms of consumption proliferated. The hybridity of sartorial culture reflected degrees of agency and self-fashioning among different socioracialized groups. The growth of towns and the advent of royal courts had encouraged new forms of consumption before 1650, but Europe experienced a more thoroughgoing social transformation in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The volume of goods increased, their variety widened, and their social reach deepened.

This chapter traces the rise of consumer goods in Europe and its colonies between 1650 and 1800. Women and men consumed ever larger quantities of clothing, personal accessories, household furnishings, and colonial products. However, any claim that the growth of consumption was “revolutionary” must confront two powerful objections: (1) that there were strict social limits to the spread of new types of consumption; and (2) that the growth of consumption was less sudden than it appears, having roots in the urban life and court society of preceding centuries. Taking these objections seriously, the chapter argues that consumption grew most intensively among nobles, gentry, professionals, skilled artisans, and better-off farmers. Many peasants, unskilled laborers, migrants, and enslaved people were excluded from participating in the consumer boom. Consumption was also gendered, with women leading the way in the acquisition of clothing. In the Americas, where indigenous Americans, European-descended settlers, African-descended slaves, and free people of color interacted, heterogeneous forms of consumption proliferated. The hybridity of sartorial culture reflected degrees of agency and self-fashioning among different socioracialized groups. The growth of towns and the advent of royal courts had encouraged new forms of consumption before 1650, but Europe experienced a more thoroughgoing social transformation in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The volume of goods increased, their variety widened, and their social reach deepened.

Why did women and men want more stuff? What did such goods mean to those who produced, marketed, purchased, and used them? This chapter examines the social and cultural context of the consumer revolution. Borrowing from sociologists Thorstein Veblen, Georg Simmel, and Norbert Elias, historians have long explained the rise of consumption in terms of social emulation. According to this theory, lower social groups imitated higher social groups, spreading new practices of consumption down the social hierarchy. However, while social emulation did occur, it does not explain everything. Patterns of consumption did not always reflect traditional social hierarchies. Examining eighteenth-century material culture, this chapter suggests an alternative approach, which considers how producers, retailers, commentators, and consumers attached meanings to consumer goods and creating a host of new consumer values, including novelty, fashion, selfhood, domesticity, comfort, simplicity, authenticity, cleanliness, health, and exoticism. Such values reflected the development of a modern Enlightenment consumer culture that valorized the present over the past. The social ramifications of eighteenth-century consumer culture were complex. Rising consumption was accompanied by egalitarian ideas, but it did not always promote social mobility. Many consumers bought into the world of goods to reinforce horizontal claims of respectability, not to leap into a new class. Poor laborers who could ill afford to express new consumer values through consumption were marginalized.

Historians have been slow to examine the political ramifications of the consumer revolution. Europe and the Americas experienced intense political strife in the eighteenth century, culminating in the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and Latin American revolutions. Did the consumer revolution (lowercase “r”) have anything to do with these political Revolutions (uppercase “R”)? This chapter provides a framework for understanding how consumer goods became implicated in revolutionary movements. It argues that activists during the age of Revolution politicized consumer goods in three ways. First, by protesting against the “despotic” commercial regulations and consumption taxes at the heart of imperial political economies, activists politicized colonial goods, such as tea and tobacco. They demanded that such “necessities” circulate freely and at low cost. Second, citizens imbued everyday objects with revolutionary meaning. Material objects like the tricolor cockade mediated revolutionary ideas and aspirations, enabling citizens to participate in and express their allegiance to (or rejection of) evolving political projects. Finally, consumer activism shaped debates on slavery. The enslaved of Haiti launched the era’s greatest attack on slavery, overthrowing a brutal system of production that provided Europeans with large quantities of colonial products. Further, abolitionists in Europe and North America protested slavery by abstaining from slave-produced sugar. They argued that consumers had the power to effect large-scale change through a new mode of collective action: the boycott.

The growth of consumption in the eighteenth century helped produce new cultural practices associated with the Enlightenment. Books were a special sort of consumer good. Their proliferation and variety encouraged multiple modes of reading that changed the relationship not only between reader and text but between self and society. While novels invited “intensive reading” and encouraged the belief in an inner emotional world, books, newspapers, and ephemeral literature stimulated “extensive reading” and the formation of a vibrant public sphere. Although the public sphere was not as bourgeois, rational, and oppositional as Jürgen Habermas claimed, the circulation of print did broaden and intensify public discussion of reformist projects. Consumption also shaped Enlightenment sociability. The material environments of Enlightenment sites of sociability facilitated socio-intellectual interaction. Men and women ate meals at salons, sipped coffee at cafés, and sported new fashions in public gardens, giving rise to robust conversational publics. Such polite sociability softened social hierarchies insofar as it created a broad cultural elite among the nobility and certain professional groups, but it also created new forms of exclusion on the basis of wealth and property. Although plebeian sociability sometimes intersected with that of elites, it often unfolded in the separate arenas of the tavern, street, and marketplace. Gender, too, remained a vector of exclusion, though wealthier women devised ways to participate in salons and attend public gatherings.

This chapter examines the marketing of consumer goods. Shops proliferated in the eighteenth century, as did the ranks of peddlers, smugglers, and street sellers. While most shops sold basic goods over rough-hewn counters or through open street-windows, many luxury and semiluxury shops adopted new strategies to lure well-off customers into their establishments. “Shopping,” a word coined in this period, became a leisure activity for women and men of the upper and middling classes. Retailers extended credit to customers to boost sales. New methods of advertising fueled demand. Marketing occurred mainly at the site of the shop, but printed trade cards and handbills, some of which were illustrated with exotic images, increasingly stimulated interest in goods. Advertisements also appeared in newspapers and fashion journals. Mediated by merchants and retailers, new channels of dialogue opened between producers and consumers, supporting a reciprocal relationship between supply and demand. Not only were more points of contact between retailers and customers established but more information flowed between them. The information exchanged in this dialogue created feedback loops between producers and consumers that often (though not always) stimulated supply and demand. Thus, demand was neither a direct emanation of primordial human needs nor an automatic response to commercial manipulation. It was a social and cultural force that developed through communication systems mediated by information brokers of all types.

If studies of the French Enlightenment have tended to reduce political economy to Physiocracy, they have further tended to reduce Physiocracy to grain. This is not all that surprising. The Physiocrats’ dogmatic insistence on the liberalization of the grain trade, combined with the French crown's efforts to implement that policy in the 1760s and 1770s, triggered fierce debate among men of letters and strident protest by ordinary consumers. And yet, even as one dispute swirled around a quintessential French necessity, bread, another raged around luxury, a highly charged concept in its own right in the eighteenth century. Indeed, Enlightenment debates on consumption burned at both poles of the material world—necessity and luxury—to produce a rich and varied literature of political economy. By shifting attention from necessity to luxury, this chapter not only provides a new perspective on Physiocracy but exposes deep fissures between the ideas of the Physiocrats and those of other Enlightenment economic thinkers, notably the associates of Jacque-Claude-Marie Vincent de Gournay and Adam Smith.

Long before the Physiocrats came on the scene, François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon and Bernard Mandeville set the basic terms of the eighteenth-century debate on luxury. Tutor to Louis XIV's grandson, the duc de Bourgogne, Archbishop Fénelon prepared his pupil for the moral reform of the French kingdom by penning a work of fiction, Les aventures de Télémaque, fils d'Ulysse (1699), which would become one of the most influential texts of the eighteenth century. In the book, Fénelon crystallized classical and Christian critiques of luxury by describing how the consumption of expensive and fashionable goods extinguished virtue, wreaked havoc with the social order and sapped the power of nations. As his preceptor Mentor warns Telemachus, luxury “corrupts manners” by encouraging a vicious culture of material display that renders men “slaves” to false desire as it spreads throughout the social hierarchy. “Even those who are poor will affect to appear wealthy, and spend as if they were so: they will borrow, they will cheat, they will have recourse to a thousand indirect methods” to obtain the trappings of the elite.

Indigenous to the Americas, tobacco was integral to Native American culture since time immemorial. Although it played key roles in Amerindian religion, healing, and sociability, Europeans remained unaware of the plant until 1492 when Christopher Columbus and his crew spied men “with a lighted stick in hand, and certain dry herbs wrapped in a certain leaf, also dried, so as to form something like paper musket […] and lighting it on one end, they suck or swallow from the other, taking in that smoke with their breath, which numbs their flesh and nearly makes them drunken.” Over the course of the next three centuries, as colonial planters in the Americas exported the leaf to Europe and Africa in ever larger quantities, tobacco became one of the most widely disseminated goods in the Atlantic world.