SIX - THE RIGHT STUFF

Summary

An increase in the quantity of material goods consumed in Britain, the so-called ‘consumer revolution’, has been identified in various periods of early modern and modern history from the sixteenth century onwards, but particular emphasis has been placed on the rapid increase in manufacture and ownership during the eighteenth century (the classic work on the subject is MacKendrick, Brewer and Plumb's 1982 volume The birth of a consumer society: the commercialisation of eighteenth century England). The precise characteristics of this ‘revolution’, and indeed whether the term is appropriate at all, have been disputed, but a few uncontroversial points can be made: the quantity of goods manufactured and exchanged in Britain per head of population increased dramatically between about the sixteenth century and the present day. The main growth in production was in ‘luxury’ goods: things like toys, ornaments and mirrors, jewellery, books, baubles and fripperies, or in more luxurious and varied versions of ‘essentials’: more fashionable clothes, finer and more varied ceramics, luxury foods like chocolate, spirits, liqueurs, sweets, drugs like tobacco and so on. Although the wealthier classes were responsible for the highest proportion of this increase, consumption of material goods increased throughout society. The consumption of ‘luxurious’ imports like tobacco and tea soon came to be considered staples and necessities, even by the poor. Many of the new goods required the importation of raw materials which strengthened global aspects of the capitalist economy; plantations in the Caribbean and America produced coffee, tobacco, sugar, cocoa and cotton; south Asia and Indonesia produced tea, hardwoods, silk, dyes and spices.