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As we shall see in the remainder of the book, two fractures show up time and again in analyzing the political economy of consumption. The first tension is whether the evolution of consumption is one of continuity or transformation. Those, like Trentmann, who advocate for continuity argue that consumption is a dynamic evolution, not a phenomenon that should be associated with more recent times or any particular place. Rather, they argue that consumption and consumer culture extend back into time and across geographical locations, with no sharp break between a consumer society and a pre-consumerist past (Trentmann, 2009). As Trentmann stated, “things are an inextirpable part of what makes us human” (2016: 678).

Continuity advocates point to the importance of consumption beyond the usual Western European and American locations and back into the distant past. In tribal societies people not only ate, clothed and sheltered themselves but also consumed beyond bare necessities, often using consumption as a mark of status (Sassatelli, 2007). The Roman Empire was famous for its system of transportation that facilitated trade (Trentmann, 2009: 191). Marco Polo’s voyage in the thirteenth century marked the beginning of long-distance trade in high-value items between Asia and Europe. His accounts of the riches of the Great Han, including exotic horses, elephants and leather shoes, inspired further voyages and an expansion of Asian possessions in Europe by the aristocracy and (perhaps ironically) the religious hierarchy – an inventory in 1295 at the Vatican listed quite a collection of Mongolian silk (McCabe, 2015: 18–19). Moving in the other direction, Western imported goods were integrated into Middle Eastern markets by the sixteenth century (Stearns, 2001). An important part of this scholarship highlights the number of things that were in people’s houses as evidence of their propensity to consume (Margairaz, 2012: 193). In China, during the late Ming dynasty (up to the first half of the 1600s), books were an important household item, as were Japanese-made fans, lacquered tables, gold-painted screens and cosmetic boxes (Trentmann, 2016: 47).

Even McKendrick et al.’s definition of consumption for novelty and fashion can be found in more locations and further back in time than is often assumed. In Ming China, people exhibited a taste for changing sleeve lengths, demonstrating the importance of fashion, and one scholar at the time lamented that for “young dandies in the villages … even silk gauze isn’t good enough and [they] lust for Suzhou embroideries.” Merchants would create gigantic banners, some as much as 10 meters high and lit by lanterns at night, to attract customers (Trentmann, 2016: 47). In Zanzibar, off the East African coast, status items such as jewelry and umbrellas were important markers of social standing. Although consumption has evolved, expanded and intensified, it has a much longer history in much more diverse geographic space than is often acknowledged (ibid.: 677).

Similarly, innovations that facilitate consumption, such as credit, also have a long history. Credit is useful because it allows the purchase of more expensive items without prior saving and facilitates continued consumption during temporary periods of reduced income. The Code of Hammurabi in Mesopotamia in 1752 bc laid out the terms of debt bondage in which men could pledge themselves or other family members into the service of a creditor to pay off their debts (a practice that still continues in some countries, such as India). Over time there has been an incredibly wide range of arrangements between debtor and creditor – from those granted based on personal relationships of trust, such as when bartenders would chalk up their drinkers’ debts on a slate above the bar until it was wiped clean by payment, to those backed by collateral, such as a pawnshop, to those backed by law, such as the debtor’s prison, where creditors could have delinquent borrowers confined until they paid up (Wiedenhoft-Murphy, 2016).

For those that view consumption through the continuity lens, there is rarely such a thing as a new problem. For every perceived disaster seen by analysts focused on current trends, the continuity researcher can point to a historical precedent. For example, the concern that globalization creates problems for local producers and sacrifices local tastes and culture is hardly new. Long-distance trade has been practiced throughout much of the sweep of recorded history. As early as the tenth and eleventh century, a long-distance trade in commodities was well established, with cotton, textiles, spices, silks and curtains being shipped across the Indian Ocean (Trentmann, 2009: 191). The worry that new, low-cost retailers such as Walmart, or, even worse, online sellers such as Amazon, will destroy their competitors also has a historical precedent. The same debates, with the same alarmist tones, occurred in the 1800s, when early department stores used low prices, one-stop shopping and innovative advertising techniques to pioneer purchasing as a recreational activity (Haupt, 2012: 272). Yet small-scale retail survived. Department stores took only 3 percent of total retail by 1914 in Western Europe (Trentmann, 2016: 205). The concern that consumption represents a social failure, in which people vainly attempt to show off and emulate, has been repeated in many different times in many different contexts (ibid.: 677). Centuries ago, in Italy, critics lamented the vanity of the market for beauty products, including fake hair, which was demanded not only by the predictably preening nobility but also by more humble artisans and innkeepers (ibid.: 30).

In contrast, transformationists see sharper breaks in consumption. This does not mean that there are no historical precedents for trends or that there are no antecedents for revolutions in consumption, but that certain periods can be identified as notably different from the past. In one particularly bold example of this, McKendrick et al. (1982) claim that the “birth” of the consumer society could be pinpointed to the third quarter of the 1700s in England, which was the richest country at the time – alternative birthplaces include the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, Renaissance Italy and seventeenth-century France (McCabe, 2015: 2–3). These authors justified their sharp period break with some impressive statistics. Sales of non-necessities such as soap, candles and beer increased at more than twice the rate of population growth over the last fifteen years of the eighteenth century (McKendrick et al., 1982: 29).

For McKendrick et al., it was not that people’s desires for consumption changed, but incomes and prices certainly did. Starting in the 1600s, the expansion of trade and the establishment of agricultural plantations reduced the price of many little pleasures, such as tobacco, tea, coffee and sugar (Pennell, 2012: 75). Coffee gained popularity as a puritanical alternative to alcohol, which improved performance rather than hindering it (Sassatelli, 2007). The use of tobacco also spread widely, famed for its positive medical properties and ability to calm the nerves (McCabe, 2015: 73). The price of sugar dropped so much during the seventeenth century that the consumption of candies was possible for more than just the nobility, and the dessert course was introduced (ibid.: 57–8). According to McKendrick et al., this represented the “democratization” of consumption, in which spending habits that were once the exclusive purview of the very rich spread to the wider masses of the population, creating a consumer society, as opposed to a society that had some consumers (1982: 14). “All other classes imitated as best they could – which was much better than in the past” (ibid.: 11).

Transformationists argue that consumption should not be analyzed through “presentism,” which is looking at the past through the lens of, and in preparation for, the present by ascribing motives and values where they might not belong (McCracken, 1987: 142). For McKendrick et al., the revolution of the late 1700s provided people with the income to pursue the consumption that they had always wanted, but for other transformationists the break between the pre- and post-consumer society is also about culture and values in very different political, economic and social contexts. For example, many value systems before the 1700s, often based on religious doctrines from Christianity, to Islam, to Confucianism, were highly critical of worldly affluence and the excessive consumption that it spawned (although this did not prevent the upper levels of the religious and aristocratic hierarchy from living in ostentatious luxury). The earlier evidence on the continuity of consumption from Ming China, for example, needs to be tempered with the fact that most people did not think of themselves as consumers or even greatly value certain types of consumption that were associated with luxury or excess (Clunas, 2012; McCabe, 2015: 1). Different authors point to different periods in which these attitudes started to change. McCracken (1988), for example, points to Queen Elizabeth’s ostentatious consumption as a crucial feature of courtly behaviour in sixteenth-century England as one turning point. Generally, for these transformationists, the consumer society was created by a change in society’s cultural attitudes around consumption (Stillerman, 2015).

Consumerism was also often at odds with the strong influence of tradition, often reinforced by legal constraints on consumption (Stearns, 2001: 4–9). Sumptuary laws that restricted what people were allowed to own were placed on a shockingly wide range of goods: in fourteenth-century Venice, tapestries could not measure more than 1.5 meters and gilded fireplace furnishings were outlawed; in the late 1500s in England, “gentlemen entering London had their swords measured and broken if they were too long for their status” (McCabe, 2015: 24). Depending on your interpretation, these laws were in place either to protect people from overspending on fads or to ensure that consumption was a visible marker of the existing social hierarchy (Shammas, 2012: 212). The justification for sumptuary laws often used the anti-consumption language of the “sin of luxury” and the economic dangers of “extravagance” (Hunt, 2003: 64). By the seventeenth century these laws gradually began to disappear. Although some types of consumption (for example, drugs and prostitution in many countries) are still outlawed, these restrictions are rarely designed to reinforce social hierarchies. A consumer society was not present before the 1700s for three reasons: consumers were a small minority, new items were not consistently generated, and consumerism was criticized as a moral failing because it ran counter to tradition (Stearns, 2001: 8–9).

Transformationists can make similar claims about the changes surrounding consumer credit. While credit has a very long history, the social attitudes about both lending and borrowing have changed drastically. Charging interest on loans – called usury – was frowned on by most religions. It was punishable by excommunication in the Catholic Church and is still forbidden in Islam. Judaism permitted charging interest to those from other religions, and so some Jews (who were often banned from other occupations) earned their income by lending money, a practice that was often viewed by Christians with considerable distaste. Christianity gradually relaxed its strict prohibitions so that usury came to mean charging unreasonably or immorally high interest rates (Wiedenhoft-Murphy, 2016). On the borrower side, although aristocrats would frequently go into debt using the collateral of their good name and the poor were often forced into debt to purchase staples, in the nineteenth century being a debtor was seen as a bit shameful (Stillerman, 2015). As we will discuss in chapter 3, the negative stigma of borrowing began to wane in the twentieth century, so that one might argue that, currently, it is completely acceptable never to be free of debt.

Others argue that the eighteenth-century transformation to the consumer society was driven not just by growing incomes and changed attitudes but also by a massive social and economic project. E. P. Thompson’s classic “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (1967) argues that, during the transition to industrialized, capitalist wage labour, employers and governments constantly complained of the lack of discipline, material ambition, punctuality and attendance by workers, who were accustomed to a more relaxed, less acquisitive lifestyle. The moral authority and socializing influence of organizations such as churches and schools had to be brought to bear to shame people out of “sloth,” as they insisted on sleeping in when they were tired, taking customary holidays (such as “Saint Monday”), or knocking off early to go to the pub or to spend time with their children rather than keeping their noses to the grindstone to improve their material standing (Princen, 2005).

The second source of dispute revolves around whether consumption is driven by those who buy or those who make. Perhaps the most transparent title given to these two camps might be productivist and consumerist, although the more alliterative titles of “sucker” (productivist) and “savvy” (consumerist) might be more memorable (Paterson, 2017: 142–3). We will return to many versions of this argument in the rest of the book, but the general idea of the productivist camp is that both the income and the desire to consume are heavily influenced by the political economies that govern production. In the period between the seventeenth and the twentieth century, many European countries saw a transformation in the economic system from feudalism, in which the aristocracy ruled over its serfs in a largely agricultural system with joint rights for the use of land, to capitalism, in which land – along with all other inputs in production, except labour – is largely privately held.

Many productivists argue that this transformation revolutionized how people consume and the manner in which products are provided in several important ways. First, as much of the population shifted from having access to goods and services produced on their land, or in the broader non-market context of the feudal manor to which they belonged, to working for wage income, they relied much more on purchasing items from the market. The move between feudal agriculture and capitalist wage labour was not always voluntary or peaceful. In England, people were forced out of agriculture and into the wage labour market through the enclosure movements, which privatized common lands on which the feudal peasants relied as additional land for things such as raising livestock, making an agricultural livelihood almost impossible for many.

For productivists, the income that permits consumption is dependent on the amount and distribution of the spoils of the production process. While McKendrick et al. were correct in claiming that, in the eighteenth century, England was more affluent than other nations, it was also true that the limited national income and the uneven manner in which it was distributed meant that even in the nineteenth century many in that nation, especially those in the urban working class and in rural areas, earned so little that consumption activities, as we now know them, would have been a remote dream.

In the town of Preston in 1851, 52 percent of all working-class families with children below working age could not earn enough to rise above the poverty line even if they were employed full time for the year, which would have been a rarity (Hobsbawm, 1975: 221). Here is a description of the consumption of workers in England in 1844: “The potatoes which the workers buy are usually poor, the vegetables wilted, the cheese old and of poor quality, the bacon rancid, the meat lean, tough, taken from old, often diseased, cattle, or such as have died a natural death, and not fresh even then, often half decayed” (Engels, 1850: 68).

Competition for a customer base with very limited incomes coupled with a lack of government regulation over production practices resulted in serious quality issues for many products. A common practice at the time was to cut bread with sawdust as a cost-saving device. A study published in the medical journal The Lancet found that, in England during the 1850s, all of the bread, all the butter, half of the oatmeal, and just under half of the milk sampled were adulterated (Hobsbawm, 1964: 84–7).

Consumption is determined not only by income but also by prices, which are influenced by the system of production. The price reductions after the 1600s that were so important in the democratization of some long-distance goods – coffee, sugar and tobacco, for example – were the result of the despicable system of slave labour, which had a devastating long-term impact on the African countries from which slaves were captured (Nunn, 2008).

Further, according to the productivists, the desire for consumption is not independent of the process of production. People’s wants and needs do not originate with themselves. Rather, consumers are manipulated into purchases that they would not have desired if not given a nudge by the seller. This is not a new phenomenon. As a widespread activity, advertising appeared in newspapers in the UK as early as the eighteenth century, but it has evolved and been considerably refined over time (Stillerman, 2015). As an article in the Printers’ Ink journal in the 1920s approvingly noted, “advertising helps to keep the masses dissatisfied with their mode of life, discontented with ugly things around them. Satisfied customers are not as profitable as discontented ones” (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2015: 155).

At the turn of the twentieth century, advertising was an unregulated wild west, where fantastical falsehoods were used to lure consumers (Dawson, 2003). This was especially common in health-improving products, which often advertised the curative properties of cocaine, laudanum and alcohol. To take one example, in 1905 Anheuser-Busch advertised Malt-Nutrine as a “scientific preparation of malt and hops” that “your physician will tell you … will aid materially in the digestion and assimilation of food eaten. Dyspeptics, invalids and convalescents especially are benefited” (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Anheuser-Busch advertisement, from Theatre Magazine, February 1905; www.bonkersinstitute.org/medshow/buschtonic.html

Consumer rebellion against blatantly false claims, and the increased regulatory oversight of advertising that followed, changed the message but not the degree of manipulation, a topic to which we will return throughout the book. To provide just one example of how productivist scholars worry about the impact of more modern advertising, according to economist Juliet Schor’s study of advertising to children at the turn of the 2000s, “by 18 months babies can recognize logos … During their nursery-school years, children will request an average of 25 products a day … children between the ages of six and twelve spend more time shopping than reading, attending youth groups, playing outdoors or spending time in household conversation” (quoted in Paterson, 2017: 211).

Finally, productivists often point out that what at first appear to be decisions around consumption may actually be decisions about production. In the early Industrial Revolution families increased their consumption of tobacco, tea, sugar and candles. This could be interpreted positively, as people having sufficient income for the consumption of life’s little luxuries. Productivists, however, point out that all of these items were crucial to maintain energy and provide light to help poorly nourished workers toil incredibly long hours, many of which, especially for women, were in the home under the “putting-out system” that paid per unit produced (Trentmann, 2016). Some productivists also argue that consumption fills a void in people’s lives created by the current system of production. Workers’ inability to lead fulfilling work lives in the harsh, regimented, top-down control structures of wage labour led to consumption as an alternative sphere in which they could exercise control and express creativity (Bauman, 2008: 59–60). As the “sucker” nickname for consumers implies, it is probably also fair to say that the productivists are more pessimistic and critical of the role of consumption in society than the consumerists.

Consumerists tend to view people as much more “savvy” in their consumption activities. This is not to deny that sellers frequently attempt to influence and manipulate their customers but to stress that the final decision in any act of consumption belongs to the consumer. Consumerists point to the fact that people consume in order to express their “own sense of identity” (Paterson, 2017: 143) through assemblages of commodities, cannily providing for their families, liberating themselves through transgressive displays, and engaging as savvy co-producers of brands. James Twitchell (1999), to whose writing we return in chapter 6, was an emblematic celebrant of this turn, casting it as a refreshing step away from the “scolding” tradition of productivists. Twitchell pointed out that increased consumption had expanded human welfare because it has genuine meaning, as people quest for affiliation, recognition and purpose. The power of the consumer is also shown when multinational firms bend their product offerings to local tastes rather than being able to alter tastes to meet their existing product offerings (Trentmann, 2009: 201–2). An obvious example of this might be that the champions of assembly-line food uniformity, McDonald’s, introduced different menu items tailored for the tastes of different markets, producing the McVeggie in India and, much to the delight of those in the Eastern US, a McLobster during the summer months.

Consumerists also turn the table on the productivists by arguing that many revolutions in business and industry were actually driven by consumer demands. Rather than claiming, as the productivists do, that transformations in industry and trade led to the creation of products that had to find a place in consumer homes, consumerists argue that it was desire for more and novel products that created the impetus for industrialization (Trentmann, 2009: 196). For example, the expanded desire for porcelain, which had spread to the lower aristocracy and growing bourgeoisie, led to new production techniques pioneered by the English company Wedgwood (McKendrick et al., 1982). Many of the innovations in commerce and finance, such as the provision of credit and insurance, which was crucial in the time-consuming and uncertain business of long-distance trade, were caused by the demand for luxury consumption (Sassatelli, 2007: 23). More generally, consumerists argue that modern consumption preceded and provided impetus for the transformation of the economy toward industrial capitalism (Mukerji, 1983; Stillerman, 2015).

The consumerist and productivist positions are very different interpretations of who drives consumption and thus, often, the merits of a consumer society. For consumerists, consumption is driven by our genuine desire to use products in the process of “fashioning who we are” (Trentmann, 2016: 681). Productivists, on the other hand, argue that what we want, and whether we can have it, is driven by producers, creating real questions about whether we are better off at higher levels of consumption. This can sometimes appear a bit like the “chicken vs. egg” debate. Was it consumer demand for luxuries that led to the first long-distance trade, or was it the provision of luxuries from that trade that caused the demand for these products?

As with many of these types of debate, fence-sitters argue for a “multi-causal approach” in which both play a role in the rise of consumption and in driving consumer behaviour (Sassatelli, 2007: 13). This is the space occupied by writers such as Ben Fine, who argues that consumption takes place neither at the behest of a producer wielding the whip hand, nor in a realm of free expression and choice ruled by clear-eyed consumers, but in ways that compromise both. In Fine’s view, while demand for commodified goods such as fashion is indeed generated and manipulated by producers seeking to increase sales, the strategies and successful campaigns to do so are in turn responsive to changing social currents, cultural shifts, and exogenously emergent demands (say, for “sweat-free” clothing or for the promotion of positive body-image) (Fine, 2002).

Contemporary sociology has also tried to reconcile the two sides of the consumption coin, most influentially through “practice theory,” which focuses on how consumption fits into the things we do in our everyday lives (our “practices”). In Warde’s (2017) formulation of the term, practices are the things we say and do, connected through understandings, know-how, descriptions, emotional states, motivations and rules. Practice theory is an attempt to allow for the intentionality and agency of consumers in how they interact with objects. They do so as part of finding meaning, satisfaction and sustenance through their day-to-day practices. At the same time, they do so under rules and constraints put in place partly by commercial interests who want us to buy stuff and partly by groups, organizations and other communities of practice (such as groups of cycling or motoring enthusiasts or gourmet cooks). We consume primarily not as a practice, in Warde’s view, but almost always as part of our other practices – the purposeful, meaningful and expressive (building model trains, playing saxophone) as well as the unconscious everyday (heating our homes or taking a shower).

Practice theory does attend to the presence of commercial interest in the development of practices. But it also tends to reject arguments that are holistic – that connect practices to a set of “unified driving forces across the whole of the institutional complex” (Warde 2017: 170). Warde argues, for example, that, “even though producers try to mould our practices in line with their commercial interests, the practices are not dictated by producers of goods and services but rather directed by the symbolic and practical purposes that people pursue while going about their daily lives” (ibid.: 76–7). And so they are. But these purposes are equally open to conditioning not just by individual businesses who would like you to make Pepsi a part of your practice rather than Coke but by a systemic imperative that you live your life increasingly through the commodities it generates as a means of its self-expansion. It is in our commitment to a holistic explanation, rooted in an overarching, dominant system that governs the way we produce and reproduce our social existence, that our approach here deviates from practice theory, and it is in many ways a return to earlier forms of critique that do not shy from macro-scale analysis.

The commodity forms which, as Warde stresses, have colonized practices have done so as part of a political and cultural push to shape our means of going about our daily lives: to privatize and commodify them. To get at an explanation for consumption, we have to look at want, desire, meaning, purpose, and how these are developed in and through practices; but, in order to connect consumption to political economy, we have to situate this within a system whose logic is independent of these things, and possibly at odds with them.