Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, the term underwent a miraculous metamorphosis. Consumption progressively ceased to mean waste or destruction and instead became something positive and creative. From the late seventeenth century, economic commentators began to argue that the purchase of goods and services not only satisfied individual wants but, in the process, enriched a nation by enlarging the market for producers and investors. Personal vanities, like a snuffbox or extravagant clothes, could yield public benefits, at least in material terms. Such linkages unsettled earlier moral certainties. A major milestone was Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in 1776, in which he argued that ‘consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.’5 Notwithstanding this dictum, Smith and his immediate successors were some way from making consumption the centre of economics, let alone from imagining that there could be sustained growth. This had to wait until the 1860s–’70s, when W. S. Jevons, Carl Menger and Léon Walras argued that it was consuming, not labour, that created value.

  The apotheosis of the consumer may have started in economic thought, but it was completed by politics. In the years around 1900, ‘the consumer’ arrived on the political stage as the twin of the citizen, using the power of the purse to promote social reform, first in the United States and Britain but soon in France and elsewhere in Europe, too. It was only after this, in the interwar years when mass-produced, standardized goods took off, that companies and advertisers made the customer the ‘king’ of the marketplace. In the next few decades, users of health, education and sports services started to be addressed as ‘consumers’, until, by the 1960s, observers sighted a whole new type of society: a ‘consumer society’. By the late twentieth century, it was no longer just goods and services but emotions and experiences that were being consumed. Nevertheless, the older association with ‘using up’ was never completely lost. Wilhelm Roscher, the founding father of historical economics in nineteenth-century Germany, once remarked that a coat was not consumed until its fibres were coming apart. Tellingly, the Japanese term – specially created in the 1880s – remains shōhi, which combines ‘to spend’ (hi) with ‘to extinguish’ (shō). In an age when we are once again becoming aware of the finite resources of the planet, this broader, material conception of consumption has a lot to say for itself.

  The changing meaning of the term reflects the advance of capitalism since the fifteenth century, which spread markets, purchase and choice more widely across society. Yet it would be too narrow to focus our attention exclusively on shopping and changes in spending power. Consumption is about more than purchasing. Even as shopping has been in the ascendant in the modern world, people have continued to access things and services via other channels, including gifts, company-sponsored gyms and holidays and, especially in the last fifty years, through health, housing, education and welfare provided by the state. Shopping will receive its fair share of attention in this book. But we must also appreciate how goods are used, for this is how they give shape and meaning to social life and identity.

  This book, then, aims to follow the life cycle of consumption as fully as possible from demand and acquisition through to use, collection and, ultimately, disposal. This means it will give attention to the desire for goods that lay behind demand, including the fashion for Indian cottons in eighteenth-century Europe, that for European dress in nineteenth-century Africa, or the emergence of new European tastes for exotic goods such as coffee, tea and chocolate. Preferences for these goods were neither pre-existing nor stable but had to be created. And they changed over time, as colonialism and capitalism rebranded such products for Western mass markets. Cultures, too, varied in the kind of goods they prized. Some (like Ming China) valued antiquity, while others (like the Dutch Republic and early modern England) increasingly pursued novelty. Acquisition is the next link in the chain of consumption. Here, in addition to purchase and purchasing power, we will need to examine the contribution of credit and saving. But we should also not forget ways that do not involve shopping through which goods reach people, such as when households pass on goods to family, friends and charity, or the remarkable recent transformation of cooking and gardening from work into hobbies that take up considerable amounts of time and money. The final link in our chain is when goods reach the end of their social life: broken, outdated or simply no longer wanted by their owner. It is about waste but also storage and reuse.

  Just as important as time and money are the spaces of consumption. Here the department store has dominated the scene as the icon of modernity. Equally fascinating, though, is the vibrant mix of shops and retailing surrounding it, from street sellers and the co-operative shop to the neighbourhood store. And so, more generally, are the spaces where leisure time was (and is) spent. These range from commercial enterprises, like the early cinemas and dance halls, to public swimming pools and company-sponsored fashion shows. And we need to follow the link between public and private life; in particular, the crucial entry into the home of running water, gas and electricity which set in motion new habits and expectations and attracted new appliances. We also want to know not only how much money was spent on a radio, a washing machine or an air-conditioner, and who bought them, but how they changed the character and rhythm of daily life. Comfort, cleanliness and convenience – to use an eighteenth-century phrase – were dynamic drivers of consumption.

  Today, consumption is at the centre of a heated public debate between two rival camps pointing their moral artillery at each other. On one side stand progressive and social democratic critics who attack the juggernaut of shopping, advertising, branding and easy credit for turning active, virtuous citizens into passive, bored consumers. In this view, people have been made to desire and buy things they do not want and which they have neither the money for, nor the time to enjoy. ‘Artificial wants’ have replaced ‘authentic needs’. People are overwhelmed by too many choices and increasingly short-sighted. Like a hamster on its wheel, they are trapped in a spend/work/consume cycle, leaving them unhappy and lonely, mentally unstable and deeply in debt. Years of such mindless consumption and the search for instant gratification have dulled their hearts and minds to the plight of others. Private, self-centred hedonism has killed the public spirit. ‘Consumerism’, to give it its unfriendly label, is a new kind of totalitarianism: ‘the gulag replaced by Gucci’, in the words of one commentator.6

  On the opposite side are the champions of consumption, first and foremost classical liberals who cherish freedom of choice as the bedrock of democracy and prosperity. Citizens, in this view, should have the right to follow their preferences and make their own choices without some authority telling them what is good or bad. Making choices in the marketplace is like voting in elections. To interfere with the former would undermine the latter. To be Free to Choose, as Milton and Rose Friedman put it in 1979 in their popular American book and the ensuing TV series, was not only the best but the only way to promote ‘both prosperity and human freedom’.7 How this vision conquered the United States has been elegantly told by Lizabeth Cohen in A Consumers’ Republic.8 Similar views are heard today across the globe, often grouped under the umbrella of neo-liberalism. They have had support, too, from some social democrats who accept that people have the right to comfort, fun and little luxuries. Greater choice of more goods and services, some hoped, would weaken old hierarchies of class and taste and nurture a more pluralistic society. In 2004, Britain’s New Labour prime minister Tony Blair declared: ‘I believe people do want choice, in public services as in other services.’ Giving parents and patients greater choice as ‘citizens and consumers’, he insisted, would improve schools and hospitals.9

  Such a political and moral defence of choice has not occurred in a cultural vacuum. It benefited from wider changes in society that created a more tolerant and favourable atmosphere for goods and pleasure in the 1970s and ’80s. Perhaps, the French writer Michel de Certeau noted, people were not all passive dupes but creative, even rebellious, defending their autonomy wit
h their own distinctive lifestyle. Youth subcultures, others observed, used fashion, mopeds and popular music to challenge conformity. Shopping, writers in gender studies added, was not all frivolous but could be empowering, giving women, who did most of it, new identities and public presence. Postmodernism swept across a simple divide between ‘authentic’ and ‘artificial’ desires and scrambled the hierarchy of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste. If reality did not contain a singular point of view but was constructed by different discourses and interpretations, who was to say whether a person’s love of Elvis was any less genuine or worthy than someone else’s for Wagner? Anthropologists carried out fieldwork in affluent societies and reported that shopping and consuming were profoundly meaningful social experiences, not acts of mindless accumulation. People found and expressed themselves through their possessions.10

  This book does not set out to adjudicate a moral debate, let alone decide whether consumption is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Consuming is too diverse and its history too rich to fit either extreme model: complacent mass consumption or individual freedom. The book’s main aim is a different one: it wants to step back and give readers a chance to look at the subject from a historical perspective, to explain how consumption evolved the way it did over the last five centuries. This means it is, above all, interested in questions of process. To be precise, it concerns the interplay between two processes: one is how institutions and ideas shaped consumption over time; the other is how consumption, in turn, transformed power, social relations and value systems.

  In order to observe the changing interplay between these forces effectively, we cannot restrict our view to either individual preferences or general abstractions. Recent psychologists have shown how misleading it is to view preferences as rational in the way mainstream economists tend to do. What people choose depends on how the choice is framed; people are more likely to buy meat that is labelled positively, as 75 per cent lean, than negatively, as containing 25 per cent fat, to give a very simple example.11 This is a fundamental insight, but there is no reason to apply it only to the present, as recent psychological experiments have done. History is a vast laboratory within which this kind of framing took place. Trade, empires, cities and ideologies all framed the context in which people lived their lives, tickling some desires and repressing others, shaping habits and spreading ideas about taste, comfort and what constituted the good life. Money and time matter, as we shall see. Economists have asked how and when households and their members trade leisure for income, deciding to sell their labour on the market to enable them to buy goods in return. This is important but too narrow a conception of demand, for it does not tell us what compelled households to want more goods in the first place, nor what they then did with them. We therefore need to look at the forces that impinged on households as well as the choices they made. Material desires are not a modern invention. But they can be cultivated and amplified or neglected and silenced. The last five hundred years were a period of sustained amplification. This book offers a history of demand broadly understood.

  One major framing force has been morality, and it remains so today. People and rulers have carried with them notions of good and bad behaviour, proper and improper spending, fair and unfair prices, excessive and moderate ways of living. But these also change over time, as ideologies rise and fall and material realities change. The positions in today’s moral debate briefly sketched above are echoes of a much longer historical battle. Once viewed like this, their main value is as part of the historical puzzle rather than as analyses that are either right or wrong; as chapters in the history of ideas more interesting for revealing the force and legacy of traditions of thought than for telling us what consumption is actually like. Instead of rushing to join today’s moral debate, then, we should realize that these positions are steeped in history. To say that consumption is totalitarian, for example, can obviously be challenged by pointing to the very real differences between power in one of Stalin’s labour camps and that exerted by luxury brands, however seductive. More interesting is to explore how such thinking travels in the furrows ploughed by earlier thinkers. The critique of consumerism as a new fascism goes back to the 1960s, to Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian film director and writer, and the Marxist émigré Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse warned of the coming of a One-dimensional Man, a book that became a best-selling consumer article in its own right.

  While Marcuse’s pessimistic diagnosis of social control and repression may have gone out of fashion, a good deal of today’s public debate continues to take its lead from the critique of consumerism that flourished during the post-war boom. No single book has cast as long a shadow as John K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, first published in 1958. An economist by profession – he had been in charge of keeping prices stable in the United States during the Second World War – Galbraith was a liberal intellectual with a social mission. He portrayed a new and dangerous kind of society emerging from the war. With peace restored, mass consumption was called upon to absorb the expanded manufacturing capacity created during the war. To make this happen, Galbraith wrote, production could no longer just satisfy wants: it had to create them, with the help of advertising and salesmen. A vicious cycle was set in motion that propelled people to live beyond their means (with the help of consumer credit), entrenched business more deeply at the centre of power, and, perhaps most worryingly, favoured individual materialism over civic-mindedness, creating, in his famous phrase, an atmosphere of ‘private opulence and public squalor’.12

  More generally, as we shall see, the idea that citizens are dehumanized, enslaved and corrupted by the lure of things reaches back to Karl Marx via Jean-Jacques Rousseau all the way to Plato in ancient Greece. In the later Middle Ages and early modern period, spending on fashionable clothes, lavish weddings and fine furniture was met with widespread disapproval and even prohibition. It was denounced for setting off a spiral of emulative spending – what is often called ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ – and for undermining values and social hierarchies. It was also attacked for draining money from public coffers. Perhaps most troubling, avarice and the lust for things were said to distract Christians from the true life of the spirit. In his City of God, begun in 413, St Augustine, one of the fathers of the Church, had traced the lack of restraint all the way back to original sin and Adam’s eviction from paradise: the ‘error and misplaced love which is born with every son of Adam’.13 The lust for things and the lust for flesh sprang from the same source.

  The view that being and having are opposites thus has a very long history. But so has an alternative trajectory that sees people as only becoming human through the use of things. From the seventeenth century onwards, there were a growing number of voices which gave consumption new legitimacy. The longing for more, in this view, was driving human ingenuity and civilization.

  Readers, like this author, will have their own moral point of view. What is ‘extravagant’ or ‘frivolous’ to one may be an ‘essential’ need for another. For an understanding of history, however, it is not very enlightening to view the past only through one’s own moral filter. Rather, we need to take the changing attitudes of historical actors seriously – the positive and ambivalent as well as the critical – especially if we want to understand how ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ came to expand as much as they did. Pointing the finger at the manipulative power of advertisers and brands has tended to shut the door too quickly on this richer story of the human engagement with goods.

  The aim, though, of this book is not only to appreciate consumption as the outcome of historical forces. Consumption, in turn, also changed states, societies and daily life. To see this clearly, we need to break with a tradition that has treated material culture as a separate sphere of everyday life. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt, the progressive ex-president of the United States, told American historians that the ‘great historian’ of the future would not only portray great events but ‘will in as full measure as possible present to us the every-day life of t
he men and women of the age’.14 Just over fifty years later, the French historian Fernand Braudel opened his trilogy on civilization and capitalism in the early modern world with an entire volume on The Structures of Everyday Life. Such a distinct treatment provided a feast of insights, not least about the power of eating and drinking habits and the routines of daily life that persisted alongside a market economy. But it came at a price. Treating daily life, the market and politics as separate spheres made it all but impossible to follow the interplay between them. This made the approach particularly cumbersome for modern history, broadly the period from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, when these spheres became ever more entangled. For Braudel, whose creative vision had emerged while working on the sixteenth century, ‘material civilization’ was a ‘shadowy zone’.15 In the modern world, by contrast, it advanced to the centre of politics, with the standard of living, housing and eating, leisure time, shopping and waste establishing themselves as core elements of public concern and policy.

  The growth of consumption – in terms of its sheer bulk, change and material throughput – means that we are dealing with a new dynamism that has left few aspects of public life untouched. This book follows this momentum and assesses its consequences for social life and politics. To do so, it presents an alternative account to that of the ‘affluent society’, which has continued to inform the popular imagination and treats consumption as a phenomenon – or disease – of the decades following the Second World War: the era of the boom, the Wirtschaftswunder or les trente glorieuses. This is the period commonly associated with the rise of hedonism, the power of marketing and advertising men, the coming of the credit card, self-service supermarkets and, above all, the American way of life. It is to these years that commentators trace the root cause of today’s fixation with consuming more and more. Consumption, in this view, stands for private choice, rampant individualism and market exchange. Chronologically, it is largely a post-’45 story, with the United States the model for others to follow.