Abstract
Campbell examines where precisely the increased demand came from that made the English industrial revolution possible. Scrutinizing the theories put forward by economic historians, he shows that neither the suggestion that this was due to a new attempt to manipulate demand, nor to an increased stress on fashion, nor even an emphasis on social emulation, makes sense. What the data does show is that the ‘new propensity to consume’ that drove the revolution came mainly from the middle classes, and was for luxury goods rather than necessities. While what was also clear was that this increased demand was closely related to significant cultural developments, such as an expansion of leisure-time pursuits, the rise of novel-reading, an increase in the rate at which fashions changed, together with the rising importance of the cult of romantic love.
If consumer demand, then, was the key to the Industrial Revolution, social emulation was the key to consumer demand.
Harold Perkin
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- 1.
Elizabeth Waterman Gilboy, ‘Demand as a Factor in the Industrial Revolution’, in R. M. Hartwell (ed.), The Causes of the Industrial Revolution in England (London: Methuen, 1967), pp. 121–38; Eric L. Jones, ‘The Fashion Manipulators: Consumer Tastes and British Industries, 1660–1800’, in Louis P. Cain and Paul J. Uselding (eds), Business Enterprise and Economic Change (Kent State, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1973), pp. 198–226.
- 2.
Jones, ‘The Fashion Manipulators’, p. 199.
- 3.
Gilboy, ‘Demand as a Factor’, p. 122.
- 4.
Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa Publications, 1982), p. 9.
- 5.
Gilboy, ‘Demand as a Factor’, pp. 122–3.
- 6.
There was a related controversy over whether the home or the overseas market played the more significant role in contributing to the increased demand for goods. This appears to have been settled in favour of the home market, with, as McKendrick observes, the export thesis no longer commanding general support (see McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 180). For further discussion and confirmation of this opinion, see A. H. John, ‘Aspects of English Economic Growth in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century’, Economica, 28 (May 1961), 176–90; D. E. C. Eversley, ‘The Home Market and Economic Growth in England, 1750–1780’, in E. L. Jones and Edmund Mingay Gordon (eds), Land, Labour and Population in the Industrial Revolution (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), pp. 206–59; and W. A. Cole, ‘Factors in Demand, 1700–1780’, in Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey (eds), The Economic History of Britain since 1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 36–65.
- 7.
Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 91.
- 8.
Elizabeth E. Hoyt, ‘The Impact of a Money Economy upon Consumption Patterns’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 305 (May 1956), pp. 12–22; Kusum Nair, Blossoms in the Dust: The Human Factor in Indian Development (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962), p. 56.
- 9.
This has long been recognized as the problem of economic traditionalism as manifested in the backward-sloping supply curve of labour. What has not been given equal emphasis, however, is the fact that such traditionalism is an equally effective obstacle to modern consumer behaviour.
- 10.
Jones, ‘The Fashion Manipulators’, p. 200 (italics as in original).
- 11.
William Cobbett, Rural Rides … with Economical and Political Observations, ed. E. W. Martin (London: Macdonald, 1958), p. 222.
- 12.
Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 23; Walter Minchinton, ‘Convention, Fashion and Consumption: Aspects of British Experience since 1750’, in Henri Baudet and Henk van der Meulen (eds), Consumer Behaviour and Economic Growth in the Modern Economy (London: Croom Helm, 1982), p. 22; Jones, ‘The Fashion Manipulators’, p. 216.
- 13.
For further discussion of this important dimension of the problem see pp. 38–57 below.
- 14.
McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 11.
- 15.
Perkin, Origins of English Society, pp. 96–7.
- 16.
See, in addition, Eric Pawson, The Early Industrial Revolution: Britain in the Eighteenth Century (London: Batsford Academic, 1978), pp. 77–8.
- 17.
McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 10.
- 18.
Ibid., p. 56.
- 19.
Ibid., p. 38.
- 20.
Ibid., pp. 14–16.
- 21.
Ibid., pp. 20–1.
- 22.
Ibid., p. 22.
- 23.
Ibid., pp. 22–3.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 98.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 41.
- 26.
Ibid., p. 54.
- 27.
Ibid., p. 56.
- 28.
Ibid., p. 60.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 74.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 92.
- 31.
Ibid., p. 36.
- 32.
The repeal of sumptuary legislation cannot be held to be a significant factor facilitating this new propensity to consume luxury goods for this had occurred a good deal earlier. As Baldwin observes, ‘the reign of Elizabeth marked the zenith of sumptuary legislation in England’; whilst James I’s accession to the throne heralded the abolition of the majority of the penal laws relating to dress (see Frances Elizabeth Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1926), p. 249). Although isolated attempts were made during the first half of the seventeenth century to impose restrictions on what were regarded as excesses in apparel, these received little support and appear in any case to have been largely ignored.
- 33.
McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 63.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 69.
- 35.
Georg Simmel, ‘Fashion’, American Journal of Sociology, 62 (May 1957), 541–58, reprinted from International Quarterly 10 (1904). See also International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, David L. Sills (ed.), 1968, s.v. ‘Fashion’, by Herbert G. Blumer.
- 36.
McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society, p. 171.
- 37.
Ibid., p. 172.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
Pawson, The Early Industrial Revolution, p. 77.
- 40.
Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects, pp. 7–8.
- 41.
Ibid., p. 14.
- 42.
See, for example, J. H. Plumb, ‘Commercialization and Society’, in McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society, pp. 265–335.
- 43.
Ibid., pp. 265–85.
- 44.
Ibid., pp. 282, 284.
- 45.
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957); Leo Lowenthal and Marjorie Fiske, ‘The Debate over Art and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Mirra Komarovsky (ed.), Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957), pp. 33–96; J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770–1800 (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1961).
- 46.
John Tinnon Taylor, Early Opposition to the English Novel: The Popular Reaction from 1760–1830 (New York: King’s Crown, 1943), p. 40.
- 47.
Ibid., p. 54.
- 48.
Ibid., p. 65.
- 49.
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), p. 284.
- 50.
Ibid., p. 282.
- 51.
Ibid.
- 52.
See, in this respect, Denis de Rougemont, Passion and Society, trans. (Montgomery Belgion, rev. edn) (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), and, for a slightly different view, John Alan Lee, ‘The Romantic Heresy’, Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology, 12 (1975), 514–28.
- 53.
That these various phenomena are closely interrelated would seem to be fairly obvious. Not only did romantic love form the main subject-matter of novels, it was also a principal leisure-time activity. At the same time, the rapid turnover in the popularity of novels matched that of fashions in dress, which, in their turn, played an important part in attracting potential lovers. Dances, concerts and race-meetings were, of course, important occasions for establishing such liaisons. A final common factor is the prominent part played by women in all these spheres, something that was also true of the consumer revolution itself. See Neil McKendrick, ‘Home Demand and Economic Growth: A New View of the Role of Women and Children in the Industrial Revolution’, in Neil McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb (London: Europa Publications, 1974), pp. 152–210.
- 54.
Thirsk, Economic Polity and Projects, p. 23.
- 55.
Minchinton, ‘Convention, Fashion and Consumption’, p. 22.
- 56.
McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society, pp. 14–16.
- 57.
Ibid.
- 58.
Ibid., p. 13.
- 59.
To ‘justify’ consumption in terms of its contribution to production is not really to ‘justify’ consumption at all for the moral superiority of work values remains intact. It is rather to point to the inescapable conclusion that some level of luxury consumption has to be tolerated. Unless one is going to claim, however, that individual consumers were successfully able to use this argument to counter their own ascetic tendencies, it is necessary to look elsewhere for the beliefs and values that justified the new propensity to consume luxury goods.
- 60.
For evidence of the strength of opposition to luxury consumption on moral and ascetic grounds see Gordon Vichert, ‘The Theory of Conspicuous Consumption in the Eighteenth Century’, in Peter Hughes and David Williams (eds), The Varied Pattern: Studies in the Eighteenth Century (Toronto: A. M. Hakkert, 1971), pp. 253–67.
- 61.
Ibid., p. 256.
- 62.
Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. and enlarged edn by L. F. Powell, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), vol. 2, pp. 291–2.
- 63.
Quoted in Vichert, ‘The Theory of Conspicuous Consumption’, p. 260.
- 64.
There is also something rather strange about this concentration upon the justification of luxury consumption per se given the emphasis in the standard account upon the role of emulative motives. One would have imagined that the focus would have been on those writers who justified emulation.
- 65.
Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage, pp. 224–5.
- 66.
Haller has identified ‘spiritual equalitarianism’ as the ‘central force of revolutionary Puritanism’ in England. See William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism, or the Way to the New Jerusalem as set forth in Pulpit and Press from Thomas Cartwright to John Lilburne and John Milton, 1570–1643 (New York: Harper, 1957), p. 86.
- 67.
Even if one accepts that the Restoration signalled the defeat of the harsher forms of Protestantism, and Calvinism in particular, it still seems improbable that deeply ingrained moral attitudes would be swept away quite so quickly.
- 68.
This view does present the bourgeoisie as inheriting the power and wealth of the aristocracy, and thus, to some extent, those objects which are their symbols. But to concentrate on seeing the process in these terms is, in effect, to ‘de-ethicize’ consumption and fail to regard it as a form of conduct that is expressive of basic values.
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Campbell, C. (2018). Accounting for the Consumer Revolution in Eighteenth-Century England. In: The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79066-4_2
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