Although Tad Skotnicki only briefly considers a small selection of economists who have theorized consumption in the past, this book promises to be of interest to historians of economic thought on account of its archival reconstruction of two early movements of consumer activism that comprised one part of a broader background social context in which early economic theories of consumption developed. The first movement that Skotnicki reconstructs is the abolitionist consumer activism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the second is the activism of the National Consumers’ League at the turn of the twentieth century, which targeted worker exploitation. Some recent work in the history of economic thought has focused on how economists have theorized consumption, with attention to the history of early American economics (e.g., Philippy Reference Philippy2022), the reform strategies of the early home economists in North America (Philippy Reference Philippy2021, Reference Philippy2022; Le Tollec Reference Le Tollec2020; Maas Reference Maas2021), studies of interwar accounts of consumer sovereignty (Desmarais-Tremblay Reference Desmarais-Tremblay2020), and studies of both rural and urban family consumption activities undertaken by the interwar female consumer economists (see, among others, Van Velzen Reference Van Velzen, Barker and Kuiper2003; Le Tollec Reference Le Tollec2020; Becchio Reference Becchio2019; Bankovsky Reference Bankovsky2020; Philippy Reference Philippy2022; see also Betancourt and Philippy Reference Betancourt and Philippy2023). Skotnicki’s book provides insight into several movements that existed at the same time as the development of these earlier economic theories of consumption, and it does so in a way that exceeds the account of the rise of institutions of consumer freedom provided by Margaret Reid and others (e.g., Reid [1938] Reference Reid1945). In other words, The Sympathetic Consumer is of interest because it details a little-known chapter in the history of the rise of early consumer movements, explaining how, long before contemporary forms, activists encouraged consumers to be sympathetic to the plight of slaves and exploited workers in production processes.
Chapter One (“The Rise of the Sympathetic Consumer”) introduces the contemporary concerns of Fashion Revolution consumer activists working to alert consumers to their personal responsibility for modifying their purchases of clothes produced with socially undesirable processes. This intuitive start allows Skotnicki to introduce the book’s key historical concern, which is about showing how contemporary consumer activism (with which we are more familiar) is not really a new phenomenon at all. Although contemporary consumer activism is often positioned (and sometimes derided) as a distinctive outgrowth of late twentieth-century liberal capitalism, Skotnicki’s aim is to show that such activism dates back to the expansion of industrial and colonial economies in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sympathy (theorized as an access to moral judgment by David Hume and Adam Smith) did not merely allow people to feel the misery of enslaved or exploited workers. For Skotnicki, it also assisted projects of power, domination, and governance, because, at least in some cases, the enslaved themselves remained largely mute, represented through the consumer activist’s imagination and subject to the desires of consumers. Consequently, the account does not advocate for or against the sympathetic consumer but rather shows how sympathy in consumption developed within a certain economic order.
Chapter Two (“Abolitionist Visions”) focuses attention on the abolitionist consumer movements of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in both the US and Britain. Merchant families and families with aristocratic lineage in the US became exposed to antislavery ideas through the messages of Christian activists and pamphleteers (particularly through the work of dissenting sects like the Quakers). These messages exhorted people to avoid purchasing the produce of slave labor, which was “polluted with blood.” Skotnicki makes the story vivid with colorful references to archival resources of this period. This chapter also reveals the intersecting impact of conflicts in the American colonies (which culminated in the political founding of the United States), as well as the economic instability of the Caribbean sugar colonies during those conflicts. For Skotnicki, the American Revolution disrupted trading patterns and revealed the dependence of sugar colonies on provisions and trade with others in North America. Abolitionist advocacy also shifted from colonial America to metropolitan Britain, displaying similar whites (and women) in Britain, Europe, and the US intersected with the lived resistance of non-white slaves themselves, supported in turn by the advocacy of formerly enslaved persons (Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, and Phillis Wheatley, among others). Skotnicki tracks the contours of a growing movement, which historians have called the “revolutionary Atlantic,” with supporters of various social backgrounds (including bourgeois reformers, miners, artisans, and women, as well as the enslaved themselves). The main point is that the idea of the sympathetic consumer was one important piece in this rejection of slavery: consumers were asked to “feel with” the slaves. In spite of the importance of the shopkeeper in imperial commerce, activists encouraged consumers to imagine themselves as the most important figure in this network: if consumers did not buy sugar and rum, shopkeepers would not stock them and the institution of slavery would come undone.
Chapter Three shifts attention to turn-of-the-twentieth-century consumer activists, including the National Consumers’ League and the consumer cooperatives, which sought to install consumer cooperative wholesalers and retailers in the place of the sullied shopkeeper, to facilitate moral consumption. These developments are presented by Skotnicki as sharing the same basic ideas of abolitionist consumer activism, which became extended to include concern for exploited workers (migrant laborers, enslaved children, poor working women, and workers at risk of industrial accident, etc.). Brief attention is paid to the work of Charles Booth and the women of the Hull House in Chicago (including Florence Kelley), along with Jacob Riis. Skotnicki also tracks the influence of middle-class Oxford don Alice Acland, who founded the Women’s Cooperative Guild in 1883. Of noteworthy interest is the account of how buying and selling changed during this period, with the rise of arcades, department stores, exhibitions, and so on. For the very first time in history, workers began to rely on the market (rather than household production) for basic provisions, with bread, margarine, jam, tobacco, clothes, shoes, and other staple goods available for purchase even by workers. Poor workers could also access the spectacle of budding consumer culture in the public displays of department windows, early cinema, mass-market journals and newspapers, and other entertainment. The archival research permits Skotnicki to illustrate how these groups addressed consumers across different constituencies, envisioning the consumer as the hub of a system of production, distribution, and exchange, where consumer sympathy with the exploited could motivate significant institutional change.
Being mainly interested in aspects of the background culture that accompanied the emergence of economic theories of consumption, I found myself less interested in chapters Four, Five, Six, and Seven (although there is still some fascinating material contained within). Chapter Four highlights the techniques and practices (the ways of seeing) that were bound up with sympathetic consumption, and Chapter Five reconstructs what Skotnicki takes to be the moral arguments implied by different versions of consumer activism. Chapter Six tracks specific challenges faced by consumer co-op activists, in a manner that perhaps moves beyond the scope of Skotnicki’s book (given its primary interest in the nature of the mobilization of an idea of sympathetic consumer in history). One challenge to consumer cooperation came from the trade unions (notwithstanding significant overlaps in membership), who did not like that consumer cooperative stores were selling to workers who were not trade union members and who also wanted consumer co-ops to ensure that their own workers were unionized. The Women’s Cooperative Guild played an interesting role because it defended the unionization of cooperative store employees (against the position of the Cooperatives Wholesale Society). Other more predictable challenges arose from the ranks of non-cooperative “middleman” shopkeepers, who often boycotted cooperative wholesale stores entirely. At this stage of the discussion, Skotnicki perhaps missed an opportunity to show how cooperation in consumption was prioritized over cooperation in production in Britain (e.g., Marshall [1889] Reference Marshall and Pigou1925; Marshall Reference Marshall and Zanotti2014; Zanotti Reference Zanotti and Zanotti2014; Zamagni Reference Zamagni, Marshall and Zanotti2014; Bankovsky Reference Bankovsky2018), a point that could have potentially supported Skotnicki’s side interest in showing how the idea of a sympathetic consumer developed within a certain economic order. Chapter Seven then shifts attention to the nature of the sympathetic consumer today, describing three crucial features, tracing parallels with earlier versions, and identifying the close links between consumer activism and business interests in profit.
For me, Skotnicki’s explanation of how Karl Marx’s account of the commodity fetish drives the analysis left me a little confused, and I wondered whether much was gained by its inclusion. I also think the book could be improved by a more accurate depiction of the economic theories of consumption that were (albeit only briefly) considered. Although consumption may well be reduced to the technical idea of demand in William Stanley Jevons, Alfred Marshall had a more complex account of “productive consumption” (as the necessaries—both physical and conventional—that permit brute existence and efficiency) ([1890] Reference Marshall and Groenewegen2013, p. 58). Beyond the briefest of references to Charles Gide, Simon Patten, Thorstein Veblen, and John A. Hobson, there was not much on the economists’ account of the consumer or consumption, with the family consumer economics tradition overlooked (Hazel Kyrk, Elizabeth Hoyt, Margaret Reid, Dorothy Brady, etc.). In this sense, the selection of economists was patchy. Margaret Reid, for example, had her own account of the rise of the consumer movement ([1938] Reference Reid1945), which may have interested Skotnicki. That said, Skotnicki’s book was not intended to be about economic conceptions of consumption but rather about the history of an early notion of the sympathetic consumer, mobilized by activists in ways that contributed to institutional change in support of a liberal economic order. What should be of interest to history of economic thought scholars is how Skotnicki’s history of sympathetic consumer activism fleshes out some aspects of the background culture of the emergence of economic theories of consumption that have not always been referenced in the economists’ understandings of the rise of the idea of consumer freedom.
