Journal of Contemporary History Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and

New Delhi, Vol 39(3), 373–401. ISSN 0022–0094.

DOI: 10.1177/0022009404044446

Frank Trentmann
Beyond Consumerism: New Historical
Perspectives on Consumption

If there is one agreement between theorists of modernity and those of post-

modernity, it is about the centrality of consumption to modern capitalism and
contemporary culture. To thinkers as different as Werner Sombart, Emile
Durkheim and Thorstein Veblen at the turn of the twentieth century, con-
sumption was a decisive force behind modern capitalism, its dynamism and
social structure. More recently, Anthony Giddens has presented consumerism
as simultaneous cause and therapeutic response to the crisis of identities
emanating from the pluralization of communities, values and knowledge in
‘post-traditional society’. Post-modernists like Baudrillard have approached
consumption as the semiotic code constituting post-modernity itself: ulti-
mately, signs are consumed, not objects. Such has been the recent revival of
theoretical interest in consumption that the historian might feel acutely embar-
rassed by the abundance of choice and the semiotic and, indeed, political
implications of any particular approach. Which theory is most appropriate for
the historical study of ‘consumer society’? What is being consumed, by whom,
why, and with what consequence differs fundamentally in these writings:
should we study objects, signs or experiences, focus on the drive to emulate
others or to differentiate oneself, analyse acquisitive mentalities or ironic per-
formances, condemn resulting conformity or celebrate subversion?
It is helpful to note that the theoretical debate about consumption in the last
two decades has in the main been driven by a philosophical engagement with
‘modernity’ (or its disappearance), not by an empirical reassessment of the
historical dynamics of consumption; in stark contrast with, say, Sombart’s
earlier empirical work on luxury, or the Frankfurt School’s research into mass
society. The changing pictures of consumption thus followed on a changing
assessment of ‘modernity’, not vice versa, and this theoretical dynamic
inevitably had a decisive effect on how consumption and the consumer are
portrayed in these texts. We encounter the ‘modern consumer’, the ‘traditional
consumer’ and the ‘post-modern consumer’ as ideal-typical constructs. These
may be well suited to provide commentary on the condition of ‘modernity’
or ‘post-modernity’. They are less helpful for a historical understanding of

I am grateful to C. Beauchamp, J. Bourke and J. Brewer for their comments, to S. Schwarzkopf for
his assistance and to the ESRC and AHRB for the award L 134341003. For the ESRC-AHRB
Cultures of Consumption research programme, see www.consume.bbk.ac.uk. This article was
completed and accepted in December 2002. For most recent bibliographic trends see the Journal
of Consumer Culture, the Cultures of Consumption web page and links, and note 4 below.
374 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 3

consumption, since they present holistic, static and finished end-products

rather than problematize how (and whether) these different types have
emerged, developed, and stood in relation to each other in different societies at
different times.
What, then, should be the unit of enquiry for historical research? Should we
write a history of ‘consumerism’ or ‘consumer society’, of ‘consumption
regimes’ or ‘consumer culture’? Historians have largely sidestepped this inter-
pretive problem. The prolonged debate about the merit of ‘class’ and ‘society’
shows that this is not because the profession is theory-challenged. Far from
it, it might be argued that ‘consumer society’ or ‘consumerism’ have been
adopted just as ‘class society’ became problematic. One reason for this con-
ceptual silence may be found in the formative split between the two principal
approaches to consumption in the first wave of historical studies in the late
1970s and 1980s, a split that has effectively limited the contribution of history
to the broader debate about consumption in the social sciences and humani-
ties. Two largely self-referential enterprises emerged. One project traced the
birth of ‘modern consumer society’ in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
Western Europe and the Atlantic world. The second focused on shopping and
mass consumption, particularly the late nineteenth-century department store.
These selective enterprises not only ignored many other forms, sites and mean-
ings of consumption, but the temporal gulf between them disguised the incom-
mensurability of their respective notions of modernity. Historians interested in
the former project turned to the ‘modern’ acquisitive desire for commodities
and ‘novelties’ amongst a broadening middling sort and some artisans.
Historians working on the latter, by contrast, argued that a modern consumer
society only developed once the large bulk of society, freed from the regime of
needs, was able to enter a system of ever-expanding goods and desires. The
conceptual and empirical gulf between the two groups was deepened further
by different methodological upbringings, the first steeped in anthropology and
culture, the latter in social history and gender studies. Whereas historians of
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Holland and Britain worked with a
theory of culture inspired, in part, by Durkheim and Mary Douglas, where
‘need’ is as much a cultural construct as ‘desire’, writers privileging the twenti-
eth century often employed an essentialist definition of needs that stood in
stark contrast with the ‘culture’ of consumerism. In short, here was a disagree-
ment about the very essence of human existence and culture.
The theoretical divide underlying the chronological gulf in studies of con-
sumption was deepened by competing national traditions of historiography. In
Germany, the belated turn to consumption emerged from within the Weberian
development of social history as Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Rather than being
present at the birth of modernity, consumption here was one of its offspring;
and even then (like other cultural subjects) it was less a subject in its own right
than a source of answers to questions about class and status.1 Hence the

1 E.g. H.-U. Wehler in a paper on ‘Deutsches Bürgertum nach 1945’ at Bielefeld University, June
Trentmann: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption 375

almost iconic status of Bourdieu (rather than, say, Baudrillard) in German

history seminars. Bourdieu’s treatment of taste and consumption in the forma-
tion of habitus can be easily accommodated within Gesellschaftsgeschichte;
after all, Bourdieu’s idea of ‘the choice of the necessary’, though not econo-
mistic in the strict sense, continues to present the ‘habitus’ of the working
class as the learned outcome of their material situation.2 In North America, by
contrast, the recent revival of interest in consumption has been driven by a
very different historiographical dynamic: the disillusionment with social
history, especially with the ‘working class’, and the shift to gender and post-
structuralism. Instead of producing ‘false’ needs, new sites of consumption,
such as the department store, offered opportunities for an emancipation of the
self and the transgression of dominant gender hierarchies. The late Victorian
metropole suddenly exhibited some of the very features of post-modernity
avant la lettre.
If the strategy of Gesellschaftsgeschichte was to use consumption to buttress
social history by showing just how subtle and distinctly ‘modern’ class and
status were, feminist and post-structuralist approaches turned to consumption
to question the very notion of modernity underlying social history. Either way,
consumption was instrumentalized. It was not the principal subject or
problem. Interest in consumption remained highly selective and fragmented.
The department store spoke to questions about the gendering of public spaces,
identities and desires. Advertising spoke to questions about semiotics. There
were few connections here with the historiography on food, leisure and
fashion.3 There was little dialogue with the fresh and expanding literature in
anthropology and geography exploring systems of provision, material culture,
life-histories and the processes and spaces connected to consumption before
and after purchase.4 The synergy between the social sciences, history and the
arts that had fostered studies of the birth of the consumer society stands in
stark contrast to the situation for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.5

2001, now in H.-U. Wehler (ed.), Konflikte zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts (Munich 2003), chap.
9. For a different kind of social history in Germany, see W. Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A
Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (New York 1992; orig. 1980).
2 As the sociologist Don Slater has observed, this ‘is a disappointing conclusion, one that recapitu-
lates some now familiar prejudices and wishful thinking — that somehow the working class (or
women or others) are unclouded by ideology (or by ‘mythology’ in Barthes) because they are com-
pelled by real necessity, by a functional relation to things, or because they know things through
direct labour, through their hands’. Consumer Culture and Modernity (Cambridge 1997), 163.
3 For important exceptions, see P. Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian
City (Cambridge 1998); F. Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in
Late Twentieth-century Britain (London 1996) and C. Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Mascu-
linities, Fashion and City Life 1860–1914 (Manchester 1999).
4 D. Miller (ed.), Acknowledging Consumption (London 1995), which remains the best critical
entry into debates in the social sciences and humanities. See also now the second edition of Ben
Fine, The World of Consumption (London 2002).
5 Synergy that is well reflected in J. Brewer and R. Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of
Goods (London 1993).
376 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 3

There were simply too few historical building blocks for a general debate
about the changing physiology of ‘modern consumer society’ in its subsequent
adolescence, maturity or old age, let alone for a general historical narrative.
The aim of this article is to outline some of the questions that may help
structure such a debate. Should we think in terms of a linear expansion of
western consumerism ending in global convergence? What was the underlying
dynamic of this expansion and where should we locate its modernity? What
was the place of consumption in social and political relations, and what do
these connections (and disconnections) tell us about the nature of ‘consumer
society’? More broadly, what are the meanings of consumption and what
should historians include or exclude? ‘Consumerism’ and ‘modern consumer
society’, it will be argued, are concepts with diminishing analytical and con-
ceptual usefulness that have privileged a particular western version of modern
consumption at the expense of the multi-faceted and often contradictory
workings of consumption in the past and are increasingly at odds with the
current debate about the cultures and politics of consumption.

Despite the explosion of books on subjects related to consumption in the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many studies address self-sufficient com-
munities rather than engaging in a shared dialogue. In an insightful article five
years ago, Peter Stearns observed the lack of connection between discussions of
early modern and modern consumer society and turned to a stage theory to link
the two.6 Stage one witnessed the emergence of consumerist desire in early
modern Europe and focused on dress and household items. Stage two saw the
expansion of consumerism in the mid-late nineteenth century and was marked
by a profusion of goods and leisure, the proliferation of retail outlets, and the
spread of consumerist values into social spheres as diverse as child-rearing and
pornography. As Stearns acknowledged, such a simple two-stage model called
for a sharper periodization and more regional diversification. Consumerism in
World History is the result of his further reflections and extends his question
about European stages to the rest of the world. The geographic extension of the
subject, however, was not accompanied by a rethinking of the underlying
assumptions of western modernity. What is distinctive about modern society,
Stearns reiterates, is ‘consumerism’, defined as the lure of material goods. This
consumerism first emerged in eighteenth-century Western Europe, and from
there was exported to the rest of the globe. The thesis follows directly from two
interrelated a priori ways of viewing the subject: the definition of an acquisitive
individualist mentality as the defining feature of modern consumer behaviour
and, since this originated in the West, a view of expansion that looks from the
epi-centre (West) outwards. Both of these views are open to question.
‘Consumerism’, for Stearns, ‘describes a society in which many people

6 P. Stearns, ‘Stages of Consumerism: Recent Work on the Issues of Periodization’, Journal of

Modern History, 69 (1997), 102–17.
Trentmann: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption 377

formulate their goals in life partly through acquiring goods that they clearly do
not need for subsistence or for traditional display.’7 Analytically this collapses
different units of enquiry. Consumerism appears as mentality, behavioural
motivation and individual action, as well as commercial institutions and a
defining feature of society at large. It is problematic to read back from
increased consumer spending the dominance of consumerist mentalities. For
many people, it might be very ‘necessary’ for subsistence to purchase a car in
suburban America, because of the lack of public transport and a dispersed
socio-economic and cultural infrastructure, not because of a consumerist
definition of one’s goals in life.8 Does this make these Americans more con-
sumerist than the privileged citizens of New York or London or Tokyo who
can forgo car purchase because they have the spending power to purchase a
centrally-located flat? The acquisitive, materialist focus of ‘consumerism’
neglects the significance of forms and modes of consumption which do not
centre on the commercial purchase of goods, such as visits to a club or
museum, and the consumption of services and experiences more generally.
Even shopping, that most basic form of consumption, involves a variety of
functions from voyeurism to a search for ‘authentic sociality’; Daniel Miller’s
ethnographic studies in London have noted ‘how shoppers struggle to make
specific purchases that will not just reflect but act directly upon the contra-
dictions they constantly face between the normative discourse that tells them
who they and their family members should be, and how they find them in their
specificity as individuals’.9 Consumption can be about managing familial and
social relationships, not merely self-centred acquisitiveness.
The first consequence of the narrow concept of ‘consumerism’ is thus a self-
fulfilling prophecy. Stearns finds what he is looking for: materialist con-
sumerism as a key feature of western modernity. A less tautological approach
would have been to compare acquisitive consumerist behaviour with the full
spectrum of forms of consumption and their motivations; there is little here
about alternative radical, social-democratic or nationalist consumer politics,
and what there is is viewed only in terms of resistance to consumerism. Yet,
alternative visions of consumption have often been integral to the very shape
and development of capitalist societies; for example, through the popular Free
Trade movement in Victorian and Edwardian Britain which was driven by
ideals of the citizen-consumer and dark fears of alien materialism and excess.10

7 P. Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (London

2001), ix.
8 E.g. see J.M. Segal, ‘Consumer Expenditures and the Growth of Need-required Income’ in D.
Crocker and T. Linden (eds), Ethics of Consumption: The Good Life, Justice, and Global
Stewardship (Lanham 1998), 176–97; and the debate in J. Schor (ed.), Do Americans Shop Too
Much? A New Democracy Forum (Boston 2000).
9 D. Miller, The Dialectics of Shopping (Chicago 2001), 55f.
10 See F. Trentmann, ‘Civil Society, Commerce and the “Citizen Consumer”: Popular Meanings
of Free Trade in Modern Britain’ in F. Trentmann (ed.), Paradoxes of Civil Society: New
Perspectives on Modern German and British History (New York 2003), 2nd edn, 306–31; F.
Trentmann, ‘National Identity and Consumer Politics: Free Trade and Tariff Reform’ in D. Winch
378 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 3

To group contemporary mobilization under ‘anti-consumer protests’ misses

the attraction of different approaches to consumption and the contribution of
consumer movements in the European Union and, with lesser success, more
globally to a widening transnational system of trade regulations.11
The second consequence is to reinforce a sharp dichotomy between ‘tradi-
tional’ and ‘modern’ society, East and West, societies defined by reciprocity
and status versus societies driven by individualism and markets.12 Just as the
consumerist fixation obscures the diverse forms and alternative modernities of
consumption shaping western societies (which include reciprocity), so it re-
inforces a picture of less dynamic, ‘traditional’ societies in the East (ignoring
their economic dynamism). As for the modern West, so for the traditional
East, the cultural dynamics shaping subsistence and what sociologists have
termed ‘ordinary consumption’ is simply bracketed.13 For the early modern
period, Stearns thus grants China the display of expensive goods and high
quality cloth, but these, he argues, were isolated instances of luxury, limited to
the very wealthy, and incorporated into traditional styles and values. Eastern
tradition, in other words, killed the dynamic energy of consumerism and the
ever-changing tastes and goods this set free in the West.
This equation of tradition with a lack of dynamism side-steps the consider-
able significance of consumption to social order and change in non-western
societies. In the Mughal empire, ‘a great king was a great consumer’, in Chris
Bayly’s words.14 Legitimacy of rule depended on a diversity of styles and the
encouragement of artisans and traders to produce them. It was not any
absence of fashion or diverse and changing tastes that marked the principal
difference between this phase of ‘archaic globalisation’ (Bayly) and later
global consumption systems, but the push towards uniform, standardized
goods in the latter. Even more than India, China in the Ming period exhibits
plenty of examples of what Veblen would later term ‘conspicuous consump-
tion’.15 At the level of popular consumption, more people consumed everyday
luxuries like tea and sugar in eighteenth-century China than in eighteenth-
century Europe outside England. Nor was European consumption at this

and P.K. O’Brien (eds), The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688–1914
(Oxford 2002), 215–42; E. Furlough and C. Strikwerda (eds), Consumerism against Capitalism?
(Oxford 1999).
11 D. Vogel, Trading Up: Consumer and Environmental Regulation in a Global Economy
(Cambridge, MA 1995).
12 For critiques, see A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural
Perspective (Cambridge 1986), 3–63; M. Bevir and F. Trentmann (eds), Markets in Historical
Contexts: Ideas and Politics in the Modern World (Cambridge 2004).
13 J. Gronow and A. Warde (eds), Ordinary Consumption (London 2001).
14 C.A. Bayly, ‘The Origins of Swadeshi (Home Industry): Cloth and Indian Society,
1700–1930’ in Appadurai, Social Life of Things, op. cit., 300 and C.A. Bayly, ‘ “Archaic” and
“Modern” Globalization in the Eurasian and African Arena, c. 1750–1850’ in A.G. Hopkins
(ed.), Globalization in World History (London 2002), 47–73.
15 G. Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China
(Chicago 1991).
Trentmann: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption 379

stage marked by some distinctive, uninterrupted development. As Kenneth

Pomeranz has emphasized, a conventional contrast between a ‘normal’ Euro-
pean trend of continued expansion and a defective pattern of interrupted
growth in luxury consumption elsewhere is undermined by evidence that
European consumption levels remained static during a period of overall eco-
nomic growth in the first half of the nineteenth century.16 The advance of
Western Europe might have had less to do with some original European revo-
lution of consumerist desire than with other sources, such as access to coal and
the exploitation of the New World.
Attention to parallels and contingency in the earlier period might also
radically shift our understanding of contemporary global consumption. For
Stearns, the question of consumption in Asia and Africa is one of reception
and degrees of resistance. In what is perhaps the most ambitious part of the
book, Stearns turns to religion to explain where the tidal wave of consumerism
swamped societies and where it has been blocked or channelled into different
directions. Where a rival value system with strong notions of otherworldliness
existed, as with Confucianism in China or Islam in the Middle East, advance
was slow. Where no such alternative value system existed, as in sub-Saharan
Africa, consumerism advanced more easily. How consumption relates to other
value systems and moral institutions is an important question that deserves
more comparative analysis. Yet, the reduction of consumerism into an acquisi-
tive mentality might unnecessarily cast consumption and religion as competing
self-defining universes. Why presume that an expanding consumer society
requires a decline in religious intensity? ‘In the West’, Stearns argues, ‘con-
sumerism rose amongst powerful strains of Christianity, but in an atmosphere
where religious intensity, on the whole, was in decline.’17 This is curious. For in
Britain, that paradigm of the first consumer society, religious intensity was
steadily increasing in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; evangelicals
might have stressed the link between Christianity and commerce but they
remained vocal opponents of consumerism. As with Victorian Britain, so with
postwar Japan, there is an implicit assumption about the rival forces of
‘markets’ and ‘culture’ at work. Stearns is surely right about the pressure of
Americanization in postwar Japan, yet, again, the contrast between traditional
values and an alien individualist materialism misses much that is most inter-
esting and distinctive about Japanese consumption. For millions of housewives
who made up the Japanese consumer movement, consumption was embedded
within a larger universe of civic values that blended ideas of citizenship,
national identity and the organic interest of producers and consumers.18

16 K. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World
Economy (Princeton, NJ 2000), 117–22. Cf. Prasannan Parthasarthi, ‘The Great Divergence’, Past
and Present, vol. 176 (2002).
17 Stearns, Consumerism, op. cit., 112.
18 P. Maclachlan, Consumer Politics in Postwar Japan (New York 2002). See also L.C. Nelson,
Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in South Korea (New York 2000).
380 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 3

How much global convergence is there around consumerism? Stearns points

to pockets of resistance, Islamic revival, the indigenization of goods, blending
of styles, and uneven distribution of wealth and leisure, but on the whole his
evidence, from Disney to Pokemon, suggests the steady global advance of con-
sumerism. Stearns, in a concluding reflection on ‘Who wins?’, is careful to
balance an older élitist critique of mass consumption with an emphasis that for
many people consumption serves ‘social and personal interests . . . [and] is not,
always, as shallow as it seems’.19 Yet, again, the tendency to reduce consump-
tion to a materialist acquisition of goods by individuals makes it difficult to
explore the multi-faceted workings of consumption in society and politics.
Consumerism erodes identities and can disorient individuals, it is argued, even
though it does not necessarily mean a complete surrender to ‘western values’.
Consumerism, measured in a rise in material standards, ceases to add happi-
ness in established consumer societies. Stearns’ book might be read most
profitably as a final twentieth-century reflection working within an older
tradition of historical sociology, reaching back to Weber, turning to materialist
consumerism as a way of explaining the rise of the West. Yet consumption in
the late twentieth century has become as much about services, experiences, and
citizenship as about the acquisition of goods. In Britain, to take a society where
this shift in discourse, practice and identity advanced especially rapidly in the
1990s, consumption and consumers entered the workings of such diverse
spheres as health care, transport and government. The postwar consumer
movement is on the verge of becoming a citizens’ movement. The older model
of ‘consumerism’, which, after all, originated with an élitist and academic
critique of mass consumer society, is ill-equipped to penetrate the different
transmutations of consumption in society.20 Weber’s fear of a ‘Genussmensch
ohne Herz’ (hedonist without heart) and Marcuse’s later ‘one-dimensional
man’ consumed by a compulsive desire to purchase goods, were important
chapters in the history of ideas. They may not be not the best analytical tools to
come to grips with contemporary developments, where consumer identities
have become suffused with questions of civic participation, cultural identities,
and social and global justice, as well as with a drive to acquire goods.
Social differentiation and uneven penetration is the contrasting theme of
Heinz-Gerhard Haupt’s critical survey of Konsum und Handel in nineteenth-
and twentieth-century Europe. Haupt puts South-Western and Eastern Europe
back into a story normally dominated by their north-western neighbours.
Whereas ‘consumerism’ presumes the growing autonomy of a consumerist
mentality, Haupt’s approach is more concerned with consumption as a process

19 Stearns, Consumerism, op. cit., 141.

20 This argument is at odds with U. Wyrwa’s idea that ‘ “consumer society” can be a useful ana-
lytical concept only if it preserves its original critical impulse and takes consumption’s destructive
aspects into account’. ‘Consumption and Consumer Society’ in S. Strasser, C. McGovern and M.
Judt (eds), Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth
Century (Cambridge 1998), 447. See also M. Prinz (ed.), Der lange Weg in den Überfluss:
Anfänge und Entwicklung der Konsumgesellschaft seit der Vormoderne (Paderborn 2003).
Trentmann: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption 381

and its role in stabilizing or eroding social solidarities. This has three related
analytical advantages. First, it gives as much attention to food and clothing as
to more spectacular forms of consumption. Second, it rightly insists on
the importance of scarcity as well as abundance in the making of consumer
societies, and on the contribution of the state. Finally, it situates consumption
in important non-commercial settings, like the household and public spaces, as
well as in retailing.
Haupt argues for a categorical distinction between the nineteenth and the
twentieth century. Nineteenth-century Europe was a ‘consumer society’, a
social context in which a particular set of goods was available to certain
groups who used them for self-representation. Twentieth-century ‘mass con-
sumer society’ was qualitatively different, not only because an expanding set
of goods became accessible to more people, but because ‘distinction’ through
possession was becoming more complex as consumption became connected
with many more social, political and cultural formations.21 Haupt offers a
kaleidoscopic picture of ‘consumer society’ giving due space to differences
between regions, generations, genders and professions. If there is little doubt
about the general upward trend in the consumption of meat and alcohol, the
picture remains one of sharp divergence across Europe well into the twentieth
century. Skilled workers in France enjoyed lean meat while their unskilled
brethren remained dependent on offal. In Spain, many were facing famine
after the drought of 1905. In rural Austria, coffee only became part of the diet
after the second world war.
Nor was the triumph of ‘modern’, nationally-integrated markets over ‘tradi-
tional’ subsistence systems complete in early twentieth-century Europe. In
Italy, less than one-third of all farms produced for the market as late as the
1930s. Again, the increase in real wages and disposable income in the late
nineteenth century, well established for Britain, France, Germany and Sweden,
was a far from general European phenomenon, side-stepping much of the
Habsburg empire. Even in the 1950s, 60 per cent of income was spent on food
and drink in Southern and Eastern Europe, a figure already left behind in
Britain and amongst skilled workers in Germany by the turn of the century.22
Even for North-Western Europe, this is not a simple narrative of moderniza-
tion. The arrival of the department store proceeded parallel to a rise in the
number of travelling salesmen and hawkers.23 And the spread of the depart-
ment store was not an automatic reaction to urbanization and industrializa-
tion either — comparatively, France was advanced in the first, but not in the
latter. Here, as elsewhere, Haupt’s sensibility as a comparativist sheds fresh
light on old subjects, urging future research to leave the nation state as the

21 H.-G. Haupt, Konsum und Handel: Europa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen 2002),
20f.
22 Ibid., 25, 26, 29.
23 See also M. Finn, ‘Scotch Drapers and the Politics of Modernity: Gender, Class and National
Identity in the Victorian Tally Trade’ in Daunton and Hilton, Politics of Consumption, op. cit.,
89–107.
382 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 3

natural unit of enquiry and instead to compare phenomena across societies,

such as the distinct conditions that favoured the emergence of particular retail
organizations in some cities but not in others.
How consumption relates to collective identities and social solidarities has
been a subject more extensively explored by sociologists and anthropologists
than by historians. Haupt’s short reflections on consumption in relation to
gender, ethnicity and nation are thus welcome; generational changes, so
crucial to current debates,24 are a subject historians have yet to explore more
fully. Normative discourses of separate gender roles did not necessarily match
social realities of consumption — some men did cook — but they set the
framework in which consumers oriented themselves. At the same time, the
identification of women as consumers also opened up new spaces of action, as
in the department store, and, we might add, in civil society more broadly,
especially through the expanding network of co-operative women at the turn
of the twentieth century, where questions of consumption and citizenship were
intimately linked.25
The transformation of Europe into a ‘mass consumer society’ in the course
of the twentieth century is the theme of the second half of Haupt’s study. Here
again, the emphasis is as much on limits as on triumphs, and on ruptures as
much as linear expansion. Scarcities and rationing during and after the two
world wars receive as much attention as the growing consumer spending on
furniture, clothing and entertainment. The reader is reminded of the social
exclusion that continues to keep the material dreams of consumerism out of
reach of large segments of European societies, not least pensioners and single
mothers. Throughout, Konsum und Handel situates changing trends within
the broader social contexts of economic growth and welfare patterns.
Recognition of the multiple and often divergent functions and meanings of
consumption raises questions about the very usefulness of working with two
large ideal-typical systems of ‘consumer society’ and ‘mass consumer society’.
The picture of a nineteenth-century ‘consumer society’ emerges more ambiva-
lent than the concept signals. It suggests boundedness and fractures rather
than any unstoppable or defining social system. As a dominant social forma-
tion it was limited to particular regions and cities as well as to particular
classes. There may have been growing consumption, but very few societies
and social solidarities had yet become defined by the practices or mentalities

24 B. Gunter, Understanding the Older Consumer: The Grey Market (London 1998); P. Thane,
Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues (Oxford 2000); J. Vincent,
‘Consumers, Identity and Old Age’, Education and Ageing, 14, 2 (1999), 141–58; M. Nava and A.
McRobie (eds), Gender and Generation (London 1984); Stephen Kline, Out of the Garden: Toys,
TV, and Children’s Culture in the Age of Marketing (London 1993); B. Gunter and A. Furnham,
Children as Consumers: A Psychological Analysis of the Young People’s Market (London 1998).
25 F. Trentmann, ‘Bread, Milk and Democracy: Consumption and Citizenship in Twentieth-
century Britain’ in Daunton and Hilton, Politics of Consumption, op. cit., 129–63; G. Scott,
Feminism and the Politics of Working Women: The Women’s Co-operative Guild, 1880s to the
Second World War (London 1998).
Trentmann: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption 383

associated with it. Just as it is debatable to speak of a ‘class society’ if its

members do not principally define themselves in terms of class, so we might
ask when it was that individuals and groups came to define themselves as
‘consumers’. Though the economic use of the term can be traced back to
rare instances in the early eighteenth century, the ‘consumer’ as a distinctive
identity, as a form of self-description by individuals and groups and as a uni-
versal category of ascription and analysis by business, politics and academia
only appears to have come fully into its own in mid-, late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Europe and North America. Even then, the neo-classical
view of the rational, utility-maximizing individual that emerged out of the
marginalist revolution of the 1870s was not the only (or the principal) repre-
sentation of ‘the consumer’ competing for social and political attention at the
turn of the twentieth century. To many radicals and liberals, ‘consumers’ were
informed, ethical users of necessaries, performing important civic roles, as in
J.A. Hobson’s image of the ‘citizen-consumer’ in Edwardian Britain or in the
work of the National Consumers’ League (NCL) to improve working condi-
tions and civil rights in early twentieth-century America.26 A more open,
descriptive and less normative definition of ‘consumer’, based on the act of
purchase rather than its underlying motivation or set of commodities, appears
a rarer, second stage, such as when the NCL in 1925 proclaimed that ‘every
person who buys anything, from a bun to a yacht, is a consumer’.27
Greater attention to contested meanings of the consumer in societies
with different political traditions and socio-economic dynamics might tell us
much about the changing salience of ‘consumer society’.28 In South Korea, for
example, where the second half of the 1980s alone saw a 75 per cent real
increase in the rate of consumption expenditure, a public debate developed
about ‘excessive consumers’. Yet polls asking South Koreans to identify where
they thought that excessive consumption lay in their everyday lives, produced
children’s education at the top of the list, above leisure and travel.29 The

26 K.K. Sklar, ‘The Consumer’s White Label Campaign of the National Consumers’ League’ in
Strasser et al., Getting and Spending, op. cit., 17–35; F. Trentmann, ‘Civil Society, Commerce and
the “Citizen Consumer” ’ in Trentmann, Paradoxes, op. cit., 306–31; N. Thomson, ‘Social
Opulence, Private Asceticism’ in Daunton and Hilton, Politics of Consumption, op. cit., 51–68. E.
Furlough, Consumer Cooperation in France. The Politics of Consumption, 1834–1930 (Ithaca
1991).
27 In the NCL’s official history, as quoted in L. Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism: The National
Consumer’s League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill,
NC 2000), 22.
28 See P. Maclachlan and F. Trentmann, ‘Civilising Markets: Traditions of Consumer Politics in
Twentieth-century Japan, Britain, and America’ in M. Bevir and F. Trentmann (eds), Markets in
Historical Contexts, op. cit., chap. 9.
29 With 23.5 per cent for education, and 19.8 per cent for entertainment, leisure and travel, and
well below, durables with a mere 8.7 per cent; from a 1993 national survey cited in S. Kim,
‘Changing Lifestyles and Consumption Patterns of the South Korean Middle-class and New
Generations’ in C. Beng-Huat (ed.), Consumption in Asia: Lifestyles and Identities (London
2000), 71f.
384 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 3

meaning of ‘consumption’ and the identity of the ‘consumer’ and its place in
social and political processes here is a radically different one from that in the
luxury debates of eighteenth-century imperial Britain, or well-known western
debates about mass consumer culture and ‘conspicuous consumption’ in the
early twentieth century, premised on a binary of Bildung/culture versus con-
sumption/leisure.
How uniform and distinctive is European ‘mass consumer society’, the
ideal-type used by Haupt for the twentieth century? Is there sufficient coher-
ence and similarity amongst patterns of consumption in the last half-century to
make this term as useful for the 1990s as for the 1950s? Here Haupt follows,
on the one hand, Hartmut Kaelble’s argument for a general trend of con-
vergence, even though pointing to disruptive moments and qualitative shifts
(from class to life-style) and, on the other, Victoria de Grazia’s seminal
distinction between an American ‘consumption regime’ characterized by indi-
vidual choice in the marketplace and a European regime where consumer
citizenship is sought through social participation and economic redistribution
via the state.30 It is debatable how well these two arguments fit with the analy-
sis of a ‘mass consumer society’. These ideal-typical distinctions might capture
particular dimensions of consumption in particular societies at particular
times while obscuring alternative developments at others; growing awareness
of the limited significance of Fordist ‘mass’ production suggests caution about
models of ‘mass’ consumption.31 European developments in the twentieth
century might be even more diverse than Haupt allows. First, it can be argued
that the ‘European model’ contained different types of political organization
and economic redistribution through which consumer citizenship was exer-
cised — focusing more on civil society at the turn of the twentieth century and
to some degree again at the turn of the twenty-first, but on the state in the
period in between. Second, the consumption of social and public services
(from welfare to culture) should be a more integral part of the analysis of
‘mass consumer society’. Groups suffering from social exclusion and low
income, for example, may very well be left out of a consumerist dream world,
but they nonetheless are significant consumers of other things — water, social
housing, education, television and so forth. Even for more privileged con-
sumers, the place and force of mass consumption (through markets) will
remain inadequately explained unless it is connected to a study of the changing
provision and understanding of public services; the presence of consumer
discourse and practices in health care, to take one example, is pronounced in
Britain. Some consumer movements argue that the contrast between ‘choice’

30 H. Kaelble, ‘Europäische Besonderheiten des Massenkonsums’ in H. Siegrist, H. Kaelble and

J. Kocka (eds), Europäische Konsumgeschichte: Zur Gesellschafts- und Kulturgeschichte des
Konsums (Frankfurt/Main 1998), 169–204; V. de Grazia, ‘Changing Consumption Regimes in
Europe, 1930–1970’ in Strasser, Getting and Spending, op. cit., 59–83.
31 See J.A. Tooze, ‘Endless Possibilities? Historical Alternatives to Mass Production Fifteen
Years On’, Social History, 25 (2000), 247–50.
Trentmann: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption 385

and political organization that underlies the ideal-typical contrast between

America and Europe was a false choice in the first place and can be overcome.
Transnational trends, not least through European integration and consumer
advocacy, make for different regulations and possibilities in the sphere of con-
sumption to-day from those in the first half of the twentieth century, often
eroding the autonomous powers of states.

So far we have discussed the attraction (and limitations) of distinguishing

between different large-scale systems (consumerism, consumer society, mass
consumer society). Yet how to account for the dynamism generated by con-
sumption in societies in transition from one system to another? For societies in
Northern and Western Europe, this question is especially pertinent for the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, partly because of growing overall
purchasing power, but even more so because of the changing institutions,
practices and sensibilities of consumption. The transformation of retailing was
the engine of this change. Recognition of its centrality, however, has generally
been framed through a narrow definition of modernity. The department store,
in particular, has become synonymous with the rise of ‘modern’ consuming
practices and sensibilities. The department store, which began to dot the urban
landscape of Europe in the last third of the nineteenth century, owes part of
its image as a pioneer of modernity to being contrasted with an atavistic,
backward-looking and older community of small retailers. This negative
assessment, Uwe Spiekermann argues convincingly in Basis der Konsumgesell-
schaft, needs to be historicized as a construct inherited from earlier academic
and party-political contestation in imperial Germany. Gustav Schmoller, the
doyen of the historical school of political economy, deliberately downplayed
the contribution of retailers to German modernization in order to highlight
that of the German state.32
Between 1867 and 1910 shops expanded by 512 per cent in Germany, a
greater rate of increase than that of the population (343 per cent). These num-
bers, Spiekermann shows, hide a tremendous evolution and diversification of
retailing. Instead of the caricature of the gemütliche, single shopkeeper, a spec-
trum of shops and retailing forms emerge, from the Magazin and travelling
depots (Wanderlager), to itinerant traders and chain stores. The department
store was merely one amongst several functional responses to the commercial-
ization of society and one that incorporated evolutionary changes first
developed in other settings. As Spiekermann points out, the department store
in Germany was not only small in terms of material significance, with less than
2.5 per cent of retail sales on the eve of the first world war, but its fragmented
lay-out, such as different cashiers for different parts of each floor, discouraged
the emergence of the ‘flâneur’, the rambling and browsing shopper.33

32 U. Spiekermann, Basis der Konsumgesellschaft: Entstehung und Entwicklung des modernen

Kleinhandels in Deutschland, 1850–1914 (München 1999).
33 Ibid., 381.
386 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 3

Diversification and differentiation, not concentration, emerge as the engines

of modernity. Spiekermann’s principal historiographical aim is to write retail-
ing back into narratives of modern German history. He recovers very different
‘modern’ forms of retailing, many of which fit poorly a Weberian image of
modernization — an observation that can be extended to other spheres of con-
sumer culture, such as advertising.34 Communal experiments with centralizing
sales in marketing halls could not compete successfully with the small shops
and street traders who worked closer to customers and offered more attractive
sales and credit. The Wanderlager, often decried by contemporaries as the very
essence of shoddiness, here are reassessed for their modernizing potential: they
developed efficient business structures, commercialized rural areas and distrib-
uted the surplus of industrial society in the form of remainders. The study thus
complements the recent rediscovery of ‘modern’ elements of shopping in
arcades and shop-windows in the early modern period.35 Looking ahead, it
should also encourage a more ecumenical appreciation of the persistence of
rival retailing practices and spaces, including street markets, second-hand con-
sumption, car-boot sales and charity shops.36 There needs to be more exchange
between theorists, sociologists and historians, before any transition to ‘post-
modern’ or ‘post-traditional’ consumer culture can be meaningful.
The modernizing force of retailing partly lay in its heterogeneity and its
ability to learn from rival challenges. Rather than presenting organizations
and movements locked in ideological conflict, Spiekermann focuses on
processes of collective learning. The battle between consumer co-operatives
and profit-oriented shopkeepers thus becomes a story of successful adaptation,
as the latter formed purchase federations on the model of the former to
benefit from economies of scale. Far from lagging behind, retail continued to
outspend industry on advertisement well into the interwar years, and far from
being passive outlets for industry’s products, small shops emerge as a vital
source of marketing. Shopkeepers not only adjusted their display and (increas-
ingly finished) goods with a view to a particular social clientèle, but this
differentiation went hand in hand with a growing routinization of communi-
cation and sales techniques within the shop. Professionalization and sales-
training self-consciously advanced this process. Customers and retailers alike

34 The infant profession of advertising had to manoeuvre within a cross-fire of competing

projects of modernity and tradition, and its successful expansion depended partly on its ability to
incorporate some traditional criticism, for example by championing aesthetic communication; see
C. Lamberty, Reklame in Deutschland, 1890–1914: Wahrnehmung, Professionalisierung und
Kritik der Wirtschaftswerbung (Berlin 2000).
35 See C. Walsh, ‘The Newness of the Department Store: A View from the Eighteenth Century’
in G. Crossick and S. Jaumain (eds), Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department
Store, 1850–1939 (Aldershot 1999), 46–71; and M. Hilton, ‘Review Article: Class, Consumption
and the Public Sphere’, Journal of Contemporary History, 35, 4 (October 2000), 655–66. J.
Benson and L. Ugolini (eds), A Nation of Shopkeepers (London 2003).
36 A. Clarke, ‘ “Mother Swapping”: The Trafficking of Nearly New Children’s Wear’ in P.
Jackson, M. Lowe, D. Miller and F. Mort (eds), Commercial Cultures: Economies, Practices,
Spaces (New York 2000), 85–100.
Trentmann: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption 387

lost their personal distinction and habits. Shopkeepers and sales personnel
were asked to discipline their own chattiness and bad moods, and refrain from
self-expression (such as the use of strong perfume), while managing customers
with universal sales techniques rather than individual charm. New skills were
needed to classify consumers entering the shop, to anticipate a type’s desires,
but also to demonstrate the meaning of consumer sovereignty by pointing
towards a range of higher quality, more expensive goods.37 Spiekermann’s
study suggests a new normative trend at the turn of the twentieth century,
though, at times, a concern with retrieving the agency of retailers threatens to
ignore the agency of consumers. Clearly, the changing relationship between
personal and routinized interactions involved both consumers and retailers.
Future research will need to explore the different ways in which shops and
customers could mix elements of the universal commercial and uniquely per-
sonal, even intimate, in different areas of consumption. To what degree
modernity resulted in depersonalization, as Spiekermann suggests, needs to be
tested against the different forms of self-representation people perform in
different arenas of consumption. As the American example of sales personnel
introducing themselves by first name and place of origin suggests, there may
be no linear trend or normative yardstick. Consumers (and retailers) may want
to encourage personal exchange and a sense of community in a particular
space — the fancy neighbourhood store which sells personal identity as much
as goods — but not in others — the wholesale or outlet centre selling for
price. Historians have yet to chart how different societies have developed and
managed these different offerings of the consuming self.38

Any serious discussion of consumer society must trace the practices and mean-
ings of consumption as they are woven into social structures and actions that
lie beyond the shop counter. Instead of oppositional models of analysis (con-
sumption versus production) and of sequential models (consumer society after
class society), the challenge of the next generation of work will be one of
integration. The study of consumption has the potential to bring together the
study of work, politics, family and collective identity in fresh ways. Indeed, it
needs to do so if it wants to avoid the fate of historiographical marginalization
experienced by earlier ‘leisure studies’.39 New studies on shopping and factory
meals offer new approaches for broadening the social relations of consump-
tion.
37 Spiekerman, Konsumgesellschaft, op. cit., 596ff. N. Gregson and L. Crewe, Second-Hand
Cultures (forthcoming).
38 For the transition from critiques of mass consumption to its acceptance in mid-twentieth-
century Germany, see most recently, D. Briesen, Warenhaus, Massenkonsum und Sozialmoral
(Frankfurt/Main 2001), albeit with a narrow focus on select academic and conservative élites.
39 Recent historical studies of tourism have tried to capitalize on the seminal sociological works
by Urry and MacCannell on the centrality of touristic sensibilities for the experiential dimension
of modern consumption: S. Baranowski and E. Furlough (eds), Being Elsewhere: Tourism,
Consumer Culture and Identity in Modern Europe and North America (Ann Arbor, MI 2001).
388 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 3

How much the ideological valorization of consumption has changed in the

last few decades is reflected in Erika Rappaport’s significant study of shopping
in London’s West End in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Instead of commercial exploitation or oppression, Shopping for Pleasure is a
story of consumers’ agency. Shopping became an emancipatory activity
through which middle-class women defined a new sense of bourgeois feminine
identity, carved out new public spaces, and became energized as political
actors. This approach carries obvious affinities with recent theoretical interest
in the ‘subversive’ nature of consumption.40 Rappaport makes several impor-
tant revisions to popular theories. Thus, the analysis of credit purchasing and
legal cases regarding married women’s debts reveals the significance of the
legal context for familial consumption. Instead of supporting Veblen’s idea of
‘conspicuous consumption’ as a source of social status, Rappaport shows how
‘legislators, judges, and husbands perceived “excessive” consumption as
potentially undoing that position’.41 There is a keen eye for distinct perceptions
of consumer culture within groups as well as tensions between them. The
arrival of department stores divided residents and retailers alike, some anxious
about its disruption of established gender roles and idyllic neighbourhoods,
others greeting it as a vehicle of female improvement.
In the commercial expansion of the West End in the late Victorian and
Edwardian period, both the nature of consumption and the identity of the
shopper were redefined. The gaze of the flâneuse, developed in several maga-
zines, extended the spatial and emotional dimension of consumption beyond
the materiality of commodities. One way of reading Rappaport’s book is to
see here one stage in the contestation of ‘the consumer’ as a new social actor.
Middle-class women and organizations as well as journalists, playwrights and
businessmen all tried to capture ‘the consumer’, and in the process redefined
pre-existing social identities, especially those of women. Musical comedies of
the department store, Rappaport argues, ‘housed socially acceptable yet erotic
narratives about the mingling of classes, sexes, and money’ that shaped
modern identities.42 Other genres distinguished between the educated flâneuse,
whose window-shopping expanded a sense of humanity, and the irrational
shopper, whose addictive pursuit of fashion resulted in a loss of individuality.
Who did the women think they were? There is at times a conceptual slippage
here that obfuscates the genealogy of ‘the consumer’ as a social identity.
‘Consumers no doubt came away with many readings of the [department
store] plays’, Rappaport acknowledges.43 But did theatre-goers necessarily see

40 J. Fiske, Reading the Popular (Boston 1989) and also M. de Certeau, The Practice of
Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA 1984).
41 E. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End
(Princeton 2000), 69. See also M. Finn, ‘Working-class Women and the Contest for Consumer
Control in Victorian County Courts’, Past and Present, 161 (1998), 116–54 and her forthcoming
book The Character of Credit.
42 Rappaport, Shopping, op. cit., 180.
43 Ibid., 187.
Trentmann: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption 389

themselves as ‘consumers’ when they went to a music hall? How did indi-
viduals respond to being bombarded with rival images and expectations of ‘the
consumer’? The utopian and dystopian dimensions are important in them-
selves, but they also alert us to the need to know more about the spectrum in
between.
How the growing interest in consumption can refresh our thinking about
industrial society is illustrated by Jacob Tanner in Fabrikmahlzeit, a highly
original book on food at the industrial workplace in Switzerland in the first half
of the twentieth century. The canteen functions as a prism of overlapping
discourses and practices that connect work and home, individual productivity
and social welfare, profit and health. Tanner encourages us to see workplace
and family, production and consumption in the same frame of analysis, rather
than as separate universes attracting separate communities of historians. The
story begins with the scientific shift at the turn of the twentieth century from
labour physiology to nutritional physiology. Whereas the first conceived of the
human body in terms of energy and thermodynamics, the latter privileged a
biochemical model in which hormones and vitamins provided vital signals and
information. Instead of a fuel tank, the body became a communication system.
Consequently, ‘muscular thermodynamics’ came to be less influential than
previous studies of industrial modernity and Taylorism assumed.44 At the
workplace and beyond the factory gate, a new politics of food emerged that
approached questions of productivity, social harmony and national hygiene
through a nutritional programme favouring vegetables and juice and dis-
couraging meat and alcohol. The canteen became a social laboratory for
creating healthy Swiss bodies.
Tanner approaches this laboratory via two principal avenues, the work of
the Schweizer Verband Volksdienst (SVV), founded in 1914, and the canteens
at the firms of Sandoz, Ciba and Geigy. The SVV became increasingly influen-
tial in the creation and management of Swiss canteens, running well over 100
canteens in the metal and chemical industries as well as the public sector. In
the 1930s, American ideas of industrial management were displaced by
German fascist associations between nutrition and eugenics. Tanner shows
how much the SVV’s programme was transformed at the workplace by acts of
resistance and stubborn cultural trends. The SVV was a pioneering advocate of
self-service, which synthesized ideas of rationalization in production and indi-
vidualization in demand. By 1929, 37 per cent of canteen meals were offered
à la carte through self-service. But how successful was this attempt to turn
workers into individual consumers with a clear sense of choice? According to
Tanner, no sharp break in food culture occurred. Many workers continued
to bring their food from home and found increasingly ingenious ways of
heating it up at the workplace. Rather than working against familial, domestic
settings, the factory canteen came to absorb family traditions, setting itself up

44 Cf. A. Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Rise of Modernity (Berkeley,
CA 1990).
390 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 3

as an ‘alcohol-free substitute home’,45 in which women provided men with

food. The SVV’s hopes of transforming Swiss nutrition had only limited suc-
cess. Canteen budgets reveal a slight but steady increase in expenditure on
vegetables and fruit in the late 1920s and 1930s, and only a marginal drop in
that for meat. Meal practices, too, proved resilient, as most workers were
unwilling to abandon the lengthy two-hour break in the middle of the day.
The overlap of labour and consumption, of factory culture and domestic
culture, poses a challenge for the picture of functional and spatial differentia-
tion between mass consumption and mass production in the age of Taylorism.
The dominant argument has been that, as capitalism switched to an intensive
regime of capital accumulation in the early twentieth century, a functional and
spatial separation emerged between the workplace with its task of rationaliz-
ing labour and the domestic sphere with its task of keeping workers fit and
healthy by managing consumption.46 Consumer culture, in this account,
followed the dictates of capitalist production — the private family used the
goods produced by mass production (cars, radios, washing machines, etc.).
Expanding the focus of consumption beyond private acts of purchase in the
market-place complicates this functionalist argument and cuts across a simple
divide of work-place versus private consumption. Even in advanced capitalist
societies, or perhaps especially there, collective consumption has played an
important role, from public services to energy consumption to canteens. Why
some forms of public consumption have proved less viable than others (such as
wartime government restaurants) is a challenging question. What is clear from
the role of new nutritional ideas is that consumption at the work-place shaped
as well as responded to the process of production. Thus, the practice of
workers taking several short breaks — a pathological sign of laziness and
inefficiency under the thermodynamic model — was promoted from the mid-
1930s for its contribution to superior health and productivity.47
Fabrikmahlzeit opens a successful dialogue between historical study and
sociological models of consumption, ranging from Simmel’s discussion of the
meal to Bourdieu’s work on habitus. In contrast to Bourdieu, Tanner shows
that eating practices are not only used for ‘distinction’, but also have a cultural
force of their own. At the same time, Tanner shows how right Bourdieu was to
see food as a retarding element in social transformations, preserving older
habits for which there may be little role in a changing society. Historians and
pundits hanging onto notions of ‘basic needs’ or economistic interpretations of
changing consumption patterns will find a lot to chew on in this study; those
proclaiming an automatic correlation between a rise in income and a rise in
meat consumption might want to note that Swiss people in 1952 still con-
sumed less meat than they did in 1922.48 What is debatable is the concluding

45 J. Tanner, Fabrikmahlzeit: Ernährungswissenschaft, Industriearbeit und Volksernährung in

der Schweiz 1890–1950 (Zürich 1999), 315.
46 M. Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience (London 1979).
47 Tanner, Fabrikmahlzeit, op. cit., 245ff.
48 Ibid., 160f.
Trentmann: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption 391

thesis of a sharp break around 1950, a conviction that unnecessarily prevents

Tanner from exploring continuities in Swiss consumer culture. Here the
argument relies heavily on shifts in nutritional science rather than the cultural
practices of eating in the work-place. As early as 1948 Tanner finds academic
commentary on ‘overfeeding’ displacing earlier concerns about how best to
manage scarcity. This conceptual shift, it is argued, had dramatic conse-
quences for the influence of nutritional science, which, after all, had acquired
its institutional power-base and social legitimation through its position at the
centre of the productivist project. But how many workers in how many
canteens were troubled by ‘overfeeding’ or ‘overeating’ in the 1950s and
1960s? When did state policies and consumer legislation shift priority from
nutrition to obesity? And are there not significant continuities in the expansion
of self-service into other areas of consumption in the second half of the
twentieth century? Studies of British diet and food cultures suggest it was only
in the late 1960s that significant changes took place.49 Histories of West
Germany in the 1950s suggest that memories of pre-war ‘scarcity’ continued
to inform working families’ understanding and evaluation of growing afflu-
ence after the war.50

What to do with politics in the study of consumption? This question has been
a long-standing headache for students of modern consumer societies. In con-
trast to the literature on early modern ‘moral economy’ and popular protests,
modern and contemporary historians have been slow to debate systematically
the changing interface between politics and consumption. This is ironic, given
the renewed importance of consumption for recent national and international
social movements, as well as for some Western governments and political
élites, most notably New Labour in Britain. Methodological assumptions,
based on an instinctive bias towards the individual as the core unit of modern
consumer society, may account for this historiographical lag. One assumption,
which some economic historians continue to fall back upon, is that consumers
are a messy agglomerate of utilitarian individuals with different interests and
desires: they might briefly be driven to protest because of specific material
grievances, but by definition any collective action is difficult to sustain. The
other, more culturalist and sometimes explicitly post-structuralist approach
has been to explore consumption in the construction of individual identity.
What matters here is the relationship between individual lifestyle and the com-
mercial and institutional preparation of a ‘self’ fit for consumer society. The
focus is on governmentality, the generation of self and choice — no doubt a

49 A. Murcott, ‘Food and Nutrition in Post-war Britain’ in J. Obelkevich and P. Caterall (eds),
Understanding Post-war British Society (London 1994), 155–64. Cf. D.J. Oddy, From Plain Fare
to Fusion Food: British Diet from the 1890s to the 1990s (Woodbridge, Suffolk 2003).
50 M. Wildt, Vom kleinen Wohlstand: Eine Konsumgeschichte der fünfziger Jahre (Frankfurt/
Main 1996).
392 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 3

process saturated with power, but nonetheless one in which the political
imaginary of consumers, their mobilization, and self-understanding as collec-
tive actors have featured rarely. Yet this focus on ‘individual’ and ‘choice’
presumes a shift from tradition/community to liberal modernity/individual
that is at odds with the many occasions in modern and contemporary history
when consumption has been a political site for collective mobilization con-
cerning civil society, democracy and global justice.
The last few years have witnessed a new convergence of interest in modern
consumer politics, driven partly by a broader academic and political re-
discovery of civil society, partly by historians’ turning away from an older
male, production and class-oriented vision of social democracy, partly by
attention to the politics of everyday life, family and gender.51 The study by Ina
Zweiniger-Bargielowska on Austerity in Britain and the collection edited by
Hartmut Berghoff on Konsumpolitik in twentieth-century Germany now take
us two steps forward in thinking about the politicization of consumption, and
one step back.52 The politics in which they are interested here is in the first
place the state and organized party politics: how do policies affect consump-
tion, and how do parties use consumer interest and grievances? Consumption
here is more or less taken as a given and of instrumental interest. Lizabeth
Cohen’s A Consumer’s Republic, by contrast, pursues the larger question of
how mass consumption became a dominant mode of political culture and
political economy in the USA after the second world war.53 Here the interest is
the changing meanings and functions of consumption and how these trans-
formed the politics of space, community and, eventually, the democratic
imagination itself. To a degree, the difference in these approaches reflects the
different paths taken by consumer politics in these societies — but only to a
degree. They also reflect the persisting force of national historiographical
traditions and debates. In spite of an advancing global system of provision and
debate about consumption, the primary focus of these studies is not consumer
politics as a subject in its own right but as a way of answering questions about
power and political culture in particular national settings.
Read next to each other, these books offer fundamentally contradictory

51 F. Mort, ‘The Politics of Consumption’ in S. Hall and M. Jacques (eds), New Times: The
Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s (London 1989), 160–72; de Grazia, Sex of Things, op. cit.;
Daunton and Hilton, Politics of Consumption, op. cit.; Strasser et al., Getting and Spending, op.
cit.; Bevir and Trentmann, Markets in Historical Contexts, op. cit.; M. Bevir and F. Trentmann
(eds), Critiques of Capital in Modern Britain and America (London 2002); M. Jacobs,
‘ “Democracy’s Third Estate”: New Deal Politics and the Construction of a “Consuming Public” ’,
International Labor and Working-Class History, 55 (1999), 27–51; see also the forthcoming
books by L. Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 1951–64 and M. Hilton,
Consumerism in Twentieth-century Britain.
52 I. Zweiniger-Bargieloswka, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption
1939–1955 (Oxford 2000); H. Berghoff (ed.), Konsumpolitik: die Regulierung des privaten
Verbrauchs im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen 1999).
53 L. Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Post-war America
(New York 2003).
Trentmann: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption 393

conclusions about the state’s impact on consumption. The essays in Konsum-

politik point to the limitations of state power and to long-term continuities in
twentieth-century consumer politics across the divide of the second world war.
Austerity in Britain, by contrast, presents the decade after 1945 as a sharp
break in policy and party allegiance, manifesting itself in a new Conservative
drive for markets and choice, away from wartime regulation. A Consumers’
Republic highlights the centrality of government resources and county and
state policies and regulations in sustaining and moulding a more consensual
project of mass consumption as an engine of material prosperity and demo-
cratic life in postwar America.
A good argument for continuity is Christoph Nonn’s discussion of agri-
cultural policies between Weimar and the Federal Republic — here the first
world war, rather than 1945, emerges as a decisive break, as the memories of
hunger create a new consensus of regulatory politics.54 Agricultural policies, he
emphasizes, cannot simply be understood in terms of élite lobbying but reflect
a shift in sentiment within popular parties, including the Social Democrats,
who by the 1920s were pressing for a politics of productivity. This fits in well
with a significant shift in opinion amongst organized labour and consumer
movements in Britain in the same period, away from free trade towards trade
regulation to reconcile producer and consumer interests.55 Speitkamp’s discus-
sion of censorship and youth culture in the first half of the twentieth century
finds a persistent gulf between the realities of expanding consumer culture and
the unwillingness of political and cultural élites to entrust taste and choice to
the market. Nineteen forty-five did not amount to a sharp break in popular
attitudes to advertising either, as Berghoff’s critical evaluation of the profes-
sion’s role in the nazi and postwar years makes clear. These chapters are
forceful reminders of the danger of positing some natural, essential consumer
society. Businessmen, politicians and bureaucrats turned to regulation with a
specific view of how consumer society worked and could be moulded. Yet they
often generated the very opposite consumption patterns from those intended;
nazi hopes to limit consumer demand by advertising about scarce resources
instead drew attention to these goods and exacerbated bottlenecks. How con-
tradictory consumer policies could be is illustrated in Schröter’s discussion of
the young Federal Republic in the 1950s. Here clothes and food retailing were
deregulated, but energy, housing and transport were not. For Ludwig Erhard,
markets and competition offered a substitute for a genuine consumer policy,
although even this was compromised by cartel legislation (1952) which
allowed some vertical price-fixing favouring producers and traders at the
expense of consumers. German competition policy was distinctly shaped by
ordo-liberal ideas, equipped with tough laws, and, arguably, more centrally

54 C. Nonn, ‘Vom Konsumentenprotest zum Konsens: Lebensmittelverbraucher und Agrar-

politik in Deutschland, 1900–1950’ in Berghoff (ed.), Konsumpolitik, op. cit., 23–46.
55 Trentmann, ‘Bread, Milk and Democracy’ in Daunton and Hilton, Politics of Consumption,
op. cit.
394 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 3

connected to debates about democracy than in postwar Britain where it was

more an administrative arm of the state seeking to advance efficiency.56
Austerity in Britain is more tightly drawn around a specific aspect of con-
sumer politics: the rationing of basic consumption in Britain during and after
the second world war, its administration, social consequences and growing
politicization. Zweiniger-Bargielowska takes on the myth of the ‘postwar con-
sensus’.57 As her detailed reconstruction of popular attitudes shows, far from
universally accepting continued rationing after the second world war with a
stiff upper lip, a growing number of British people turned against it. The
groundswell of rising frustration, especially pronounced amongst women,
favoured the Conservative revival in the late 1940s and 1950s.58 Put
differently, Labour’s fair shares policies, far from symbolizing the popularity
of the welfare state and shared sacrifice moulded in wartime, were deeply
unfair and, from an electoral point of view, suicidal, as voters turned to
Conservative candidates promising choice and free markets.
The question with these points is not whether they are separately true, but
what do they mean in a longer and comparative framework? There is little
engagement with the multidisciplinary field of consumer studies. Gender is
given argumentative privilege, although much of the evidence suggests equally
interesting divisions by generation, region, income and skill. Housewives were
worse off than their husbands under rationing, but this is hardly surprising.
It is well documented that food consumption in working-class families in pre-
vious free market situations was also highly gendered and hierarchical.59 The
question is: did rationing exacerbate this gendered inequity and was it experi-
enced as doing so? Labour’s fair share policies, likewise, might have been
removed in practice from ideals of egalitarianism, and not have been univer-
sally popular. Yet this does not necessarily mean that there was a general loss
of public faith in controls. In an ideal world, few people would voluntarily
choose rationing, so the question becomes by whose standards was British
rationing popular or unpopular?
Austerity in Britain is most impressive when using social surveys and opin-
ion polls to chart shifts in popular opinion. Here evidence does not always

56 See D. Gerber, Law and Competition in Twentieth-century Europe: Protecting Prometheus

(Oxford 2001); S. Wilks, In the Public Interest: Competition Policy and the Monopolies and
Mergers Commission (Manchester 1999).
57 See also H. Jones and M. Kandiah (eds), The Myth of Consensus: New Views on British
History, 1945–64 (Basingstoke 1996).
58 How much of this is a causal correlation? As Labour’s increase of the vote from 47.8 per cent
in 1945 to 48.8 per cent in 1951 suggests, rationing and controls did not hurt Labour; the
Conservatives did increase theirs from 39.8 per cent to 48 per cent, but this gain was made large-
ly by absorbing the Liberal vote. As Zweiniger-Bargielowska points out, the swing in 1951 to the
Conservatives was more pronounced amongst women than men. Yet, to what degree was this rel-
ative decline in female Labour preference since 1945 due to austerity, and to what degree was it a
return to pre-war patterns with 1945 being the aberrant outcome? As she acknowledges, it was
only in 1945 that Labour had ever obtained a small lead among female voters.
59 E. Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford 1993).
Trentmann: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption 395

provide conclusive answers, however. Some polls point to a remarkable degree

of continued popularity for controls. As late as 1953 a Gallup poll revealed 43
per cent opposed to the gradual disappearance of rationing, with 47 per cent
in favour60 — many democratic parties form governments with less support.
This was far from a dramatic sea-change from wartime opinion. In 1942, for
example, 49 per cent wanted a continuation of rationing.61 Women in the co-
operative and labour movements organized mass demonstrations and petitions
in support of controls in 1953–54. Observers from societies like Japan, also
keen to curb spending and promote saving, found the degree of acceptance of
rationing in Britain mind-boggling.62 How many politicians in other societies
have dared to implement austerity measures after a total war and managed to
win the next election?
In addition to the popularity of a particular consumer policy, it might be
useful, then, to ask about solidarity, compliance and legitimacy — that is, the
willingness of people to accept a political framework as legitimate and to live
by its rules without challenging the authority and social norms of the com-
munity. How do individual feelings translate into individual and collective
action? Opinion polls are poor guides for this process, as the frequent gulf
between consumer opinions and behaviour makes amply clear; most people
indicate a preference for organic food, but very few buy it. Postwar Britain
may not have generated a ‘consensus’ about policies but was perhaps nonethe-
less a society distinguished by a marked degree of cohesion and willingness to
accept sacrifices without opting for wide-spread protests, violence or criminal-
ization; even black markets in Britain were distinguished by a high sense of
morality and social conscience.63 This contrasts significantly, for example,
with the charged street politics and violent attacks on privileged consumers,
shopkeepers and Jews in Germany during and after the first world war.
To understand this, however, the study of consumer politics must connect
material patterns of everyday life to the ideas and values which provide them
with political meaning and direct their collective action.
From this perspective, how much of a break in consumer politics are the
immediate postwar years? Arguably, the debate about austerity resumed and
sharpened an earlier divide between proponents of regulation and choice,
institutional co-ordination and market, that had erupted during the first world
war and widened in the interwar years. Tories absorbed the remaining Liberal
free traders but made sure to complement their attack on rationing with trade

60 Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity, op. cit., 87. The evidence, largely taken from opinion
polls and social surveys, is ambivalent and inconclusive, with high instances of ‘don’t know’ or
‘unable to say’.
61 Ibid., 115.
62 See S. Garon, ‘Savings Promotion and the Dissemination of Economic Knowledge: Trans-
national Insights from the Japanese Experience’ in M. Daunton and F. Trentmann (eds), Worlds
of Political Economy (forthcoming).
63 See M. Roodhouse, ‘Black Market Activity in Britain, 1939–1955’, Cambridge PhD thesis
2003.
396 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 3

controls and subsidies in other spheres of the economy. Labour consolidated

its programme of controls, with sections of the party seeking to design a direct
consumer policy and supporting state agencies, like the Council of Industrial
Design, in their effort to ‘rationalize’ consumer habits.64 New arrivals, like the
Consumers’ Association, developed further the interwar interest in consumer
information and protection. In contrast to the late Victorian and Edwardian
free trade settlement, the consumer interest was now politically and culturally
fragmented, with different meanings and spokespeople, and no longer at the
centre of political economy and political culture.
The middle of the twentieth century, arguably, sees a role reversal in the
status of the consumer in the political imagination in Britain and America.
Whereas consumption (and the representation of consumers) came to play a
fragmented and subordinate role in the British political system,65 in America,
as Lizabeth Cohen shows, the opposite dynamic was at work: mass consump-
tion moved to the centre of American politics — and in due course trans-
formed the nature of politics. The creation of ‘A Consumer’s Republic’, in
Cohen’s words, became the consensual political project of the postwar years,
promising Americans greater prosperity, equality and freedom. This is less a
story of sharp breaks than one of a series of organic mutations between
different settlements of consumer politics. Citizenship and consumption are
omnipresent categories, rather than successive ideal-types, but the respective
weight and functional relationship between them change in these three settle-
ments. Cohen’s account takes us from the ideal of ‘citizen consumer’ of the
New Deal, where consumption was informed by collective interests, to ‘the
purchaser as citizen’ of the Consumers’ Republic, where the individual pursuit
of mass consumption would benefit the public interest, to that of the ‘con-
sumer/citizen/taxpayer/voter’ of the Consumerized Republic, where politics
itself is viewed as a market.
It would be too easy (politically and historically) to subsume this account
under a narrative of ‘economic imperialism’ in which the ideas and practice of
a liberal market increasingly colonize other spheres of politics and society.
Inevitably, this book is written within the context of a long-standing and
distinctive American debate about whether consumer culture undermines
democracy and community.66 Politicians’ appropriation of the language of
markets and the invasion of marketing knowledge and market sensibilities into

64 For this, see C. Beauchamp, ‘Getting Your Money’s Worth: American Models for the
Remaking of the Consumer Interest in Britain, 1930s–1960s’ in Bevir and Trentmann, Critiques
of Capital, op. cit., 127–50.
65 M. Hilton, ‘Consumer Politics in Post-war Britain’ in Daunton and Hilton, Politics of
Consumption, op. cit., 241–59; Hilton, Consumerism, op. cit.
66 J.K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (London 1969); J. Schor, The Overspent American:
Upscaling, Downshifting and the New Consumer (New York 1998); R. Frank, Luxury Fever:
Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess (Princeton, NJ 1999); M. Sandel, Democracy’s
Discontent (Cambridge, MA 1996); A. Schäfer, ‘German Historicism, Progressive Social Thought,
and the Interventionist State in the US Since the 1880s’ in Bevir and Trentmann, Markets in
Historical Contexts, op. cit., chap. 8.
Trentmann: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption 397

political culture form the end-point of this study. Its main historical contribu-
tion, however, is in unravelling the political dynamics behind the confluence of
consumption and citizenship at a micro and macro level of power and social
relations. The Consumer’s Republic created a broad consensual agreement in a
vision of society in which American citizens enjoyed greater affluence and free-
dom by participating in a mass consumption economy. This ‘consensus’, how-
ever, never amounted to political stasis. It was neither a natural, self-sustaining
economic arrangement, nor did it preclude contestation. Cohen shows master-
fully how the ideal of the ever-expanding American pie with growing slices for
all changed in shape and distribution as the realities of class, race and gender
came to structure mass consumption. Her discussion does for consumer poli-
tics what the ‘systems of provision’ approach has done for consumer goods:67
it follows consumer politics from early ideas to their contestation and imple-
mentation as policies, to what we might call the social and political externali-
ties of mass consumption. The spatial dimensions of mass consumer culture
are a crucial link in the chain of analysis. At the level of federal policies con-
cerning taxation and mortgage guarantees, she shows how the ideal of greater
equality in a dynamic mass consumption economy was compromised from the
beginning by inegalitarian, gendered social policies, such as the GI Bill. At the
level of local politics, suburbanization and localism made for class and racial
segregation. Public spaces became regulated or eliminated altogether. In turn,
the spatial reconfiguration of consumption fed back into a revised image of
‘the consumer’ in the 1950s. The previously dominant female representation
of the shopper was giving way to ‘Mr Consumer’, whose name is on the
mortgage, who drives with his wife to the mall, and who controls access to
credit. For Cohen, this regendering was symptomatic of the broader transmu-
tation of the public-minded female citizen-consumer into the male purchaser
as citizen.
Cohen’s emphasis on the negative social and political externalities of the
Consumer’s Republic, however, is balanced by her appreciation of how its
egalitarian ideals also legitimized grass roots struggles for civic rights and
social inclusion. Above all, African-Americans’ battle against discrimination
made effective use of the new convergence of citizenship and consumption
by demanding their share in a mass consumer society; here, too, there was a
political commodification of space as civil rights’ groups defined housing as
one of the most ‘ “basic consumer goods” ’.68 These campaigns’ achievements
became difficult to maintain, however, once public accommodations were
jeopardized by suburbanization.
Politics here stretches beyond a functional connection between material
interest and party-political preferences to an inquiry into the consequences of

67 Fine, World of Consumption, op. cit.

68 Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic, op. cit., 175. For the civil rights’ politics of the NCL in the
1930s, see Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism, op. cit.; for the 1960s, see F. Kornbluh, ‘To Fulfil their
“Rightly Needs”: Consumerism and the National Welfare Rights Movement’, Radical History
Review, 69 (1997), 76–113.
398 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 3

a system of mass consumption for the political deliberation of public questions

and for social inclusion and exclusion. For all its emancipatory potential, A
Consumers’ Republic leaves behind a negative balance sheet. It is a social-
democratic, historical pendant to communitarian analyses of the erosion of
American community and civil society.69 As a historian, Cohen places little
hope in the communitarian vision of disentangling the long-term intertwining
of citizenship and consumption. She is at pains to emphasize how mass politics
can generate common ideals, a theme of her earlier work.70 At the same time,
there is a good deal of shared diagnostics. The economic recession after 1973
exposed how skin-deep and fragmented the public interest had become under
the previous regime of mass consumption. Reaganism reaped the benefits of
the historical convergence of consumption and citizenship. The ‘consumer’
had become a dominant identity of self-interest and personal entitlement.
Americans have degenerated into a nation of shoppers, shopping for politics
just as they shopped for goods.
This approach to consumer politics opens up several vistas, but it also,
perhaps, shuts off others. Cohen introduces an important historical dimension
to the current debate about neo-liberal hegemony. Rather than presenting neo-
liberalism as a paradigmatic shift in political culture in the age of deregulation
and Reagan, she traces a long-term fragmentation of public politics to the
proliferation of suburban malls and the application of market segmentation by
politicians in the 1960s. The book’s second achievement is to contribute to
present work seeking to place consumer movements within political economy,
rather than following a social movement narrative casting consumer advocates
as opponents of a dominant regime. Naderism here emerges as much a symp-
tom of the Consumer’s Republic as its proffered cure, reinforcing both the
consensual ideal of mass consumption that marginalized alternative reform
projects and the fragmentation of entrepreneurial interest politics. For all its
strengths, this narrative obscures, perhaps unnecessarily, the growing contri-
bution of international developments to consumer politics. The debate about
GATT in the 1980s sparked a rediscovery of global issues for American
consumer advocates. There has been a vibrant debate about global trade,
environmental issues and civil society amongst consumer movements in
America as elsewhere. Consumers’ International has been an influential forum
for reintroducing questions of social justice. In Japan in the last two decades,
consumption has become an increasingly strong social and political movement
as well as a cultural formation.71 In China, the communist party state’s
endorsement of ‘the consumer’ as an essential agent in modernization in the

69 See here especially, R. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American
Community (New York 2000); cf. the debate in R. Kuttner (ed.), Ticking Time Bombs: The New
Conservative Assaults on Democracy (New York 1996).
70 L. Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge
1990).
71 J. Clammer, Contemporary Urban Japan: A Sociology of Consumption (Oxford 1997);
Maclachlan, Consumer Politics in Post-war Japan, op. cit.
Trentmann: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption 399

1990s has opened up new (and often unintended oppositional) spaces for
political action and association.72 These developments, and the way in which
consumption has become linked to questions of identity, fit poorly the con-
cluding image of the consumer’s having descended from being the voice of
collective interests to the pursuer of personal entitlement.
A Consumers’ Republic also raises a question about the causal correlation
between mass consumption and public political apathy, which calls for more
comparative work along the lines of Almond and Verba’s earlier project on
civic culture.73 Concern about selfishness replacing a commitment to collective
interests, and a decline in political engagement are as old as history.74 Yet why
necessarily presume a trade-off between a sense of personal entitlement and a
sense of social commitment? People might become more involved and assertive
consumers because they feel a sense of entitlement and because they want
to support their community.75 Finally, the anti-Whiggish account of the
fragmentation of the American republic raises questions about the public spirit
Americans lost. How collective, how public, how open, how shared was poli-
tics before the confluence of citizenship and consumption? There is sometimes
an asymmetry in historical method here. The sensitivity attached to the chang-
ing meanings of the consumer, the critical questioning who is imagined by
whom and who not, who had power in constructing which image and who did
not, is rarely extended to the meaning of ‘citizenship’ or ‘the public’, which are
left standing as if they possess some essential meaning that does not require
equal historicization. There is an implicit, debatable assumption that, prior to
the transmutation of consumer politics into consumerized politics, there was a
lot more of the shared public space and common stake on which a vibrant
democracy depends. Yet is this not somehow at odds with the growing appeal
of consumer politics for social movements in the first half of the twentieth
century as the very instruments for overcoming barriers to full democracy,
social justice and material well-being?

Consumer culture is at the centre of contemporary debates about freedom,

identity and social justice. These debates have been most advanced in

72 D. Davis (ed.), The Consumer Revolution in Urban China (Berkeley, CA 2000).

73 G.A. Almond and S. Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five
Nations (Princeton, NJ 1963).
74 J. Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens
(London 1997).
75 Since I wrote this article, a recent Mori survey for the National Consumer Council in Britain
found an almost even balance of motivations behind consumer activism: 24 per cent of responses
were ‘to support the community’, 23 per cent ‘to help other people’, 22 per cent ‘got very angry
about service provided’, and 20 per cent ‘to help support myself/my family’. NCC, Consumer
Activism Omnibus Survey (London 2002). Note, this research presented the people polled with a
ready definition of the consumer ‘whether this is as a shopper, a patient, a passenger, or someone
who uses water and energy services’, reflecting trends discussed above. It would be interesting to
know to what degree people themselves have incorporates this broadening of consumer identity.
400 Journal of Contemporary History Vol 39 No 3

geography, sociology and cultural studies. Historians’ early interest focused on

two phenomena: the birth of consumer society in early modern Western
Europe and the Atlantic world, and the spread of ‘modern’ consumerism in the
late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This article has argued for expanding
the focus of historical enquiry into consumption and for critically re-examining
the concepts and periodization underlying it. The task ahead is to write
histories of consumption, not consumerism. Consumerism, or the lure of
material goods for individuals, is only one point on a broad cultural spectrum
in which consumption operates in modern and contemporary societies. The
consumption of basic goods (water, grain, meat) continues to be a vital subject
of identity and politics in societies which do not lack the disposable income for
hedonism. Likewise ‘mass’ consumer society was only one particular social
formation, particularly prominent around the mode of production of certain
goods and not others. Two related problems have been highlighted: first, the
danger of writing a stage narrative of consumption through a supposed transi-
tion from need to desire; second, that of framing the analysis in terms of the
global expansion of a particular western type of consumption. Instead of work-
ing within a self-defined theory of mass consumer society or modern
consumer society, historians now need to contextualize the different forms
and functions of consumption, and the affiliated social visions and political
systems competing with each other at the same time. This requires a more
ambitious and ecumenical view of consumption, no longer limited to shopping
and the market but looking beyond to what sociologists have called ‘ordinary
consumption’, to social services and to systems of public provision.
A new generation of historical work is emerging, seeking to weave con-
sumption back into social and political processes. Yet there remains a notable
tension between what has remained a predominantly national frame of analy-
sis and what is after all a subject and process of transnational nature. There is,
then, a considerable gulf between the study of commodities through a global
system of provisions and historians’ preferred study of consumer societies in a
national setting. National studies can reveal the significance of particular
traditions in moulding consumption and weaving it into the social and politi-
cal fabric. Sticking too solidly to national frames of analysis, however, risks
reinforcing national historiographical subjects and debates, rather than lead-
ing to a new dialogue about consumer societies in different settings. What is
needed now is greater awareness of transnational and comparative processes,
so that historians of different consumer societies can discuss questions of con-
vergence and divergence, consumption and citizenship, and the changing
meanings and functions of consumption in the modern and contemporary
period.
There can be little doubt that the boundaries of ‘consumption’ and ‘the
consumer’, as a subject and identity, expanded enormously in the course of the
twentieth century, from goods to services, and from personal wants and social
justice to questions of political governance — and did so with different speed
and ambition in different societies. This inflation of ‘consumption’ and ‘con-
Trentmann: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption 401

sumer’ poses a challenge as well as an opportunity for historians. If everything

is now consumption — from a museum visit to a hospital stay — the subject
risks becoming too broad for any meaningful analysis. What historians can
contribute in wrestling with this eternal dilemma of consumer studies is to
show how we need to be more sensitive to the ways and contexts in which
historical actors have appropriated languages of consumption to make sense
of their actions and described themselves and others as ‘consumers’. There is
need for a greater and more subtle distinction between the processes that we,
as historians, want to describe as purchases, digestion or services (all con-
sumption now) and the activities and subjects which historical subjects them-
selves thought of as consumption, and the boundaries that distinguished these
from other spheres of life.

Frank Trentmann
is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Birkbeck College, University
of London, and director of the Cultures of Consumption research
programme. His most recent publications include the
interdisciplinary volume, co-edited with Mark Bevir, Markets in
Historical Contexts: Ideas and Politics in the Modern World
(Cambridge 2004). He is currently finishing a book on consumption,
citizenship and free trade, and co-editing with John Brewer an
international volume on consumer cultures.