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Cultures of Consumption

Working Paper Series

“The Modern Evolution of the Consumer:

Meanings, Knowledge, and Identities Before the Age of Affluence”

Dr Frank TrentmannBirkbeck College, London

Nothing in this paper may be cited, quoted or summarised or reproduced without permission of the author(s)

Cultures of Consumption, and ESRC-AHRB Research Programme Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HXTel: + 44 (0) 20 7079 0601Fax: + 44 (0) 20 7079 0602www.consume.bbk.ac.uk

http://www.consume.bbk.ac.uk/

Frank Trentmann “Evolution of the Consumer”

Working Paper No: 10 Date: May 2004

“The Modern Evolution of the Consumer:

Meanings, Knowledge, and Identities Before the Age of Affluence” *

© FRANK TRENTMANN

(History, Birkbeck College, London; Cultures of Consumption research programme, ESRC-AHRB)

For Consumer Cultures, Global Perspectives, eds. John Brewer and Frank Trentmann (Oxford and

New York: Berg, forthcoming).

Consumers have been elusive characters, for scholars as much as for producers and

advertisers. Some twenty years ago, the sociologist Claus Offe found that consumers did not

form a ‘clearly delimitable and organizable complex of individuals. Rather they do constitute

an abstract category which defines certain aspects of the social actions of almost all

individuals. Everyone and at the same time no one is a "consumer".'1 This essay takes this

general sociological observation one historical step further and asks how and when this

category evolved and why at certain historical moments (but not others) some groups (but

not others) managed to arrive at a distinct sense of themselves as consumers. What are the

historical processes that have promoted or retarded the formation of consumer identity, for

actors and their observers?

“Consumption” has become widely recognised as a central or even dominant

dimension in societies all over the globe.2 Daniel Miller has interpreted it as ‘the vanguard of

history.’3 Donald Quataert has gone so far to suggest that modernity is marked by the

‘ascendancy of the consumer over the producer.’4 But who is this consumer? Three

narratives and approaches dominate, which, for all their differences, have tended to minimise

the historically contingent and relatively autonomous process of identity and knowledge

* Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Cal Tech, the SSRC/Abe consumption workshop in New York and Tokyo, the Institute of Historical Research (London), and the Cambridge Historical Society. For additional comments I am also grateful to Mark Bevir, John Brewer, James Livesey, John Styles, Vanessa Taylor, and Donald Winch, as well as to colleagues in the Cultures of Consumption programme.1 Claus Offe, Contradictions of the Welfare State (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), p. 228.2 E.g., John Clammer, Contemporary Urban Japan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Beng-Huat, ; David Howes, ed., Cross-Cultural Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities (London, 1996).; Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003).; Hilton, Consumerism in Britain; Maclachlan, Consumer Politics in Post-war Japan; Stearns, Consumerism in World History; Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Konsum und Handel: Europa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Goettingen, 2002).. Cf. Trentmann, ‘Beyond Consumerism’, Journal of Contemporary History (2004, in press).3 Daniel Miller, ‘Consumption as the Vanguard of History’, in Daniel Miller (ed.), Acknowledging Consumption (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 1-57.4 D. Quataert (ed.), Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550-1922 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), p. 1.

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formation involved in the uneven evolution of the consumer. The first pictures the consumer

as a universal economistic category. The second presumes that consumers are the natural

product of an expanding commodity culture. A third, more recent approach sees the ‘active

consumer’ as the product of contemporary or post-modern social formation. The following

essay is an attempt to offer a new, more historicised narrative that treats the consumer less as

a dependent or readily-preformed variable and inquires more into the contingent processes

that created spaces for some groups in the social and ideological formation of this new

identity. Instead of a straight or automatic line from market and commodity to consumer, it

sketches the contested and comparatively uneven historical development of the consumer –

as an identity for actors as well as a category of knowledge – and the distinctive importance

of battles over basic needs, taxation, and property that energised the category in some

political traditions and contexts in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but not in others.

Most writers have invoked an essentialist consumer or used it as a descriptive short-

hand, blurring the historically specific processes of identity formation and political

contestation that helped develop the consumer as a distinct, reflexive category of knowledge,

ascription and self-understanding amongst actors. Neo-classical economics and the fields of

practice influenced by it within business and the state have favoured the abstract figure of

the consumer as a rational utility-maximising individual; the consumer here is little more

than a ‘noiseless servant named Demand …bled white of all personality and urgency’, as

Robert S. Lynd, the American consumer advocate, complained in 1936.5 Most commentators

in the social sciences and humanities have, of course, been critical of this individualist

utilitarian model, but their presentation of the consumer has been no less problematic. One

approach has been to presume that consumers emerge as the natural by-product of the

expanding world of consumption that swept across the transatlantic world from the late

seventeenth century. Attention to the distribution, display and handling of goods -- be it in

the marketplace, the home, or the ‘exhibitionary complex’ of exhibitions and stores– is

accompanied by liberal references to actors involved in these processes as simply

‘consumers’.6 As comparative ethnography has shown, such an instrumental view of identity

5 Robert S. Lynd, ‘Democracy’s Third Estate: The Consumer’, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 51, no. 4 (Dec. 1936), p.496. A recent critique is Ben Fine, The World of Consumption (London: Routledge, 2002), 2nd edn.6 T. H. Breen, "'Baubles in Britain': the American and consumer revolutions of the eighteenth century," Past and Present 119 (1988).; Thomas Richards, The commodity culture of Victorian Britain: advertising and spectacle, 1851-1914 (London: Verso, 1991); Peter H. Hoffenberg, An empire on display. English, Indian, and Australian exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), Colin Jones speaks of readers of local newspapers (Affiches) as consumers, ‘The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution’, American Historical Review, CI , 1 (Feb. 1996), 13-40.

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formation is problematic. Users of new technologies like the internet, for example,

incorporate their consumption practices into their identities in different ways in different

cultures.7 Because consumption in some societies to-day is intimately connected to the care

of the self and a sense of being consumers, does not mean that people engaged in

consumption in past or other societies shared a similar sense of identity. This is not to

suggest that commodification does not influence social relations and identities, merely that

consumption does not in and of itself tell us about the specific sense of self and collective

identities attached to goods and their use.

Another group of recent studies has suggested that the ‘active consumer’ of

contemporary consumer culture has replaced its passive predecessor,8 a thesis of an epochal

paradigm shift that tends to flatten the pre-history of postmodernity, easily obscuring earlier

moments in which people were activated as consumers. Consumption, as anthropologists

have reminded us, is not the preserve of modernity.9 At the same time, the consumer is a not

a universally present or even culturally wide-spread taxonomy through which people have

viewed themselves and others (on par with citizen, slave, public, etc.), but a historical

category of identification that, in addition to being bounded by time and space, arrives very

late in human history.10 To describe purchasers or users as consumers in different cultures at

different times might be convenient short-hand but does not interpret the changing self-

understanding of these actors.

The following discussion is an attempt to provide a historical framework for thinking

about these comparative questions.11 To do so, it will first problematise and loosen the rise of

7 As recent work by Miller and Slater suggests, for example, Trinidadians were more likely to use the internet as a ‘cool’ consumerist service that connected their Trinidadian identity to a sense of global culture, whereas Sri Lankans tended to view it more as an educational investment; Daniel Miller and Don Slater, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Don Slater, ‘Modernity under construction: building the Internet in Trinidad’, in P. Brey, T. Misa and A. Rip (eds.), Modernity and Technology: The Empirical Turn. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).8 E.g. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979); J. Fiske, Reading the popular (Boston MA, 1989); M. de Certeau, The practice of everyday life (Berkeley, 1984); Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 1996). Marina Bianchi, ed., The Active Consumer: Novelty and Surprise in Consumer Choice (London: Routledge, 1998).9 Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986)..10 Again, this does not mean that ancient or other societies did not also have rich cultures of consumption with strong views on pleasure, addiction, and their consequence for politics and society, merely that they did not generate a particular social formation and distinct discourse of consumers. See James Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes, The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. 11 To clarify, the critical line of inquiry here focuses on how the consumer emerged as a category of identity and knowledge, through what traditions actors mobilised and established this category, and with what claims. The aim is to trace the birth and development of this reflexivity amongst actors. It shares Colin Campbell’s plea to take actors’ consciousness and the meaning of consumption for them more seriously than do studies which read back from consequences to intentions. However, because ‘expressive goods’ were important to the romantic sensibility does not mean that these historical actors saw themselves as consumers; Colin Campbell,

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the consumer from the history of commodity culture. Here we will encounter the ‘dog that

did not bark’, for the early modern transformation of the world of goods did not coincide

with the creation of the new identity of ‘the consumer’. Conversely, the interest in and

generation of knowledge about ‘the consumer’ was not the automatic preserve or monopoly

of liberal political economy, with which it has often been associated, but, as we shall see,

was just as, if not more advanced in knowledge regimes sceptical of market society, such as

in German national or historical economics. The eventual configuration of consumers – as a

category of identity and action available for social mobilisation-- ultimately required

political synapses, that is, political traditions and languages that connected actors’ material

experiences to a sense of belonging, interests, and entitlements. These moments of synaptic

configuration form the second part of the paper. The consumer was first propelled forward in

the course of the 19th century in two conjunctures in which the political status of

‘necessaries’ became pivotal. The first was local, the battle over accountability, access and

representation in nineteenth-century Britain that turned groups of users into articulate,

organised, and increasingly demanding ‘water consumers’. The second was global: rising

economic nationalism, imperial tension, and a growing concern about the survival of

national culture in an age of advancing globalisation at the turn of the twentieth century.

Domestic consumption standards and behaviour became a canvass for these moral and geo-

political anxieties, and a political vehicle for redefining the relationship between individuals

and state. Again, it was the synapses of political traditions rather than just state power or

material interests that determined whether this mobilisation of consumption led to a stronger

vision of consumers (as in Free Trade Britain), was diluted by prior collective traditions of

producers (as in Imperial Germany) or became a means for fostering alternative identities,

such as the patriotic citizen (as in early twentieth-century China). The First World War and

inter-war years saw the firm establishment of different traditions of consumers, a process of

maturing that was interestingly shaped from within civil society (rather than state or

The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); Colin Campbell, ‘Understanding traditional and modern patterns of consumption in eighteenth-century England: a character-action approach’, in Brewer and Porter, Consumption, pp. 40-57. The impact of state policies or company policies on people’s consumption behaviour, or vice versa the political and economic consequences of people’s consumption are legitimate but different types of inquiry. From the large literature, good starting points areVictoria de Grazia, ed. , The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspecti ve (Berkeley CA, 1996). ; Martin Daunton; Matthew Hilton, ed. , The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and Ameri ca (New York, 2001). ; Erika D. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women and the Making of London's West End (Princeton NJ, 2000).; Susan Strasser; Charles McGovern; Matthias Judt, ed., Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1998). Just as consumption does not automatically create consumers, so the study of the politics of consumption needs to be differentiated from the study of consumer politics, where the historically contingent potential of actors to understand themselves and others as consumers is switched on.

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business) through discourses of ethics and citizenship (rather than neo-classical economics)

and that evolved around questions of the social and political values guiding consumption

(rather than utility maximisation or affluence. Together, a discussion of these early, pivotal

moments raises questions about the periodisation and focus of conventional narratives of

consumer society on modern mass marketed commodities, and an America-centred model of

convergence. The genealogy of the consumer unravelled here points to contingency and

diversity and to the centrality of political tradition, civil society, and ethics through which

agents discovered themselves as active consumers.

The Dog That Did Not Bark

The rich historiography on the ‘consumer revolution’ of the early modern transatlantic

world is a natural starting point in a search for the consumer. Whether the upsurge in

consumption in eighteenth-century Britain, Europe, and North America was a uniquely

‘Western’ phenomenon is debatable,12 but there can be little doubt that the commercial world

of goods expanded quantitatively and qualitatively in unprecedented fashion. By the mid-

eighteenth century there were forty-two people per shop in Britain.13 The working classes

bought virtually all their food through markets, and they worked longer hours to enable them

to buy more consumer goods.14 Exotic articles like tea, coffee, and tobacco had become

‘mass consumer’ goods reaching more than 25% of the population in Britain and the

American colonies. The consumption of cultural artefacts and services transformed the

subjectivity of the middling sort and its cult of civility and sensibility.15 In the very year that

Adam Smith laid down the famous dictum that ‘consumption is the sole end of all

production’ in the Wealth of Nations,16 American colonists declared their Independence after

12 Kenneth Pomeranz , The Great Divergence: China, Europe and theMaking of the Modern World Econo my (Princeton NJ, 2000). ; R. Bin Wong, ‘The Search for European Differences and Domination in the Early Modern World: a View from Asia,’ American Historical Review, Vol. 107 (2002); Prasannan Parthasarthi, ‘The Great Divergence,’ Past and Present, Vol. 176 (2002). Maxine Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century,’ (forthcoming).13 Carole Shamas, The pre-industrial consumer in England and America (Oxford, 1990), esp, 111,145ff., 224ff. See also Claire Walsh, ‘Social Meaning and Social Space in the Shopping Galleries of Early Modern London’, in John Benson and Laura Ugolini (eds.), A Nation of Shopkeepers: Five Centuries of British Retailing (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), pp. 52-7914 Hans-Joachim Voth . ‘Work and the Sirens of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century London’, in Marina Bianchi, ed., The Active Consumer: Novelty and Surprise in Consumer Choice (London: Routledge, 1998), 143-173, and his Time and work in England 1750-1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).15 Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination; Amanda Vickery, The gentleman's daughter: women's lives in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998); Michael North, Genuss und Glück des Lebens; Mary Catherine Moran, ‘”The Commerce of the Sexes”’, in Paradoxes of Civil Society (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2000/2003), pp. 61-84.16 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), BK. IV, VH. VIII, Edwin Cannan edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1904/1976), Vol II, p. 179.

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a struggle that had resorted to a series of non-consumption protests directed at the mother

country. In Britain and on the continent, the old century ended and the new began with a

series of bread and flour riots.

Against this background of an increasingly sophisticated world of consumption, with

its dialectical debates about luxury and the moral property of particular commodities, and its

explosive politics of taxation and food riots, the absence of an articulate ‘consumer’ is

startling. In a complete reversal of Karl Marx’s analysis of the dialectic of modernity in

splitting human identity into public citoyen and private bourgeois,17 many recent

commentators have presented consumption and the consumer as crucial forces in forging a

new link between social, political, and, indeed, national identities. T.H. Breen has made a

strong argument for the novelty of consumer awareness at this time and its role in the

creation of modernity. The American Revolution here becomes possible and thinkable

through the preceding consumer revolution. Consumer goods created a new ‘shared

framework of consumer experience’ among colonialists, he argues, allowing them to ‘situate

a universal political discourse about rights and liberties, virtue and power, within a familiar

material culture.’18 The boycotts of tea and other commodities were ‘rituals of non-

consumption’ through which political independence was discovered. ‘No previous rebellion

had organized itself so centrally around the consumer’.19

The problem with this argument is that it rests on Professor Breen’s essentialist

ascription of the consumer rather than on the colonists’ self-description and understanding.

Opponents of British taxes and organisers of boycotts rallied their fellow ‘countrymen’,

‘honest industrious patriot’, ‘freemen’ or ‘Americans’, not consumers, a term virtually never

used. A typical letter to the inhabitants of South Carolina complained in July 1774: ‘too long

has luxury reigned amongst us, enervating our constitutions and shrinking the human race

into pigmies’.20 John Dickinson, in his influential Late Regulations, distinguishes between

‘public’ and ‘private’ interests. Consumers appear once and then only in the simple sense of

‘purchasers’. ‘Thus the consumers break the shopkeepers; they break the merchants; and the

shock must be felt as far as London.’ The ‘consumer’ did not yet invoke generalisable social

or political identities, nor express a particular mentality or lifestyle of the self. The principal

group identity invoked was that of ‘the reputable freeholder’ while it was ‘our merchants and

17 Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’.18 Breen, ‘”Baubles in Britain”’, cit at p.76.19 T. H. Breen, "Narrative of commercial life: consumption, ideology, and community on the eve of the American Revolution," The William and Mary Quarterly 50 (1993). cit. at p.486; ‘‘misunderstood American consumers’ (p. 472.)20 American Archives, vol I (1837), p.511.

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the lower ranks of people’ who were immiserated by the stamp duty. For Dickinson,

America was turning into a nation of debtors who needed to learn ‘strict frugality and

industry, [so] we may render ourselves more independent of the merchants’ than ‘more

populous and wealthy states’.21 American colonists had two choices: they could supply more

manufactures of their own or they could practice what is today called ‘slow consumption’,

that is keep foreign manufactures longer in use.

Dickinson’s ability to envisage a declining velocity of consumption shows how far

his mental world was removed from hedonistic consumerism and how difficult it was for

eighteenth-century people to accord ‘the consumer’ a separate space and identity. Goods and

processes of consumption/non-consumption were mobilised in an expanding universe of

political action but they continued to be framed through an older taxonomy of collective

actors: patriots, freeholders, merchants, the people. Far from unleashing ‘the consumer’ on

the world of politics, the American revolution contained its arrival: it was a battle between

patriots and Empire. Republicanism advertised an organic nationhood in which the

imperative of home production and self-sufficiency muffled any sense of the independent

existence, rights or identities of consumers. A typical resolution in Virginia in 1774 against

the duty on tea called for the encouragement of manufactures and farming: ‘to be clothed in

manufacturers [sic] fabricated in the Colonies ought to be considered as a badge and

distinction of respect and true patriotism.’22

Whatever the particular flavour of republicanism in America, the striking ways in

which understanding and practices of consumption remained embedded in older social

identities were part of a general transatlantic story. Craft, land, trade, and production

remained dominant sources of social identity and political action in Europe and America.23

The consumer makes an occasional appearance as a synonym for purchaser, as in Defoe’s

writings at the beginning of the eighteenth century or Sieyes, Qu'est-ce que le Tiers Etat?

towards its end,24 but these rare references carry little weight in relation to collective interests

endowed with a recognised or legitimate social or constitutional meaning. Daniel Defoe,

21 [John Dickinson], The Late Regulations Respecting the British Colonies on the continent of America Considered, in a letter from a gentleman in Philadelphia to his Friend in London (London, 1766).22 American Archives, vol I (1837), p. 494. For republicanism, see Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (New York: Norton, 1980).23 Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eigtheenth-century French Trades (Cambridge: Camridge University Press, 1989); James A. Jaffe, ‘Commerce, Character and Civil Society’ in European Legacy, VI, 2 (April 2001), 251-64;Jamie Bronstein, ‘Land Reform and Political Traditions in Nineteenth-century Britain and the United States,’ in Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann (eds.) Critiques of Capital in Modern Britain and America: Transatlantic Exchanges (London: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 26-48.24 Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes, Qu'est-ce que le Tiers Etat? (1789).

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who in 1728 compares the ‘large, populous, rich, fruitful’ state of England and its ‘large,

luxurious, vain and expensive’ ‘way of living’ to the austere Dutch, limited his reference to

‘the consumer’ to discussions of the value paid to a retailer.25 Malachy Postlethwayt notes

that, to be satisfied, the ‘various humours and caprices of consumers’ need skilful workmen,

but in his Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, much cited not least by American

revolutionaries, he does not even reserve a category for these consumers, nor for

consumption.26 In Restoration France, deputies began to consider consumers’ interests in

discussions of commercial policy, but only to minimalise them as both insignificant next to

people’s social station and subordinate to larger national interests represented by land,

production, and trade.27

The many battles over basic provision and ‘just price’ in food riots or complaints

against corrupt traders in eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries Europe developed

without a sense of the consumer. The collective language describing food rioters is

revealing. In France, it was ‘the people’, ‘”the poor” and “workers”’, ‘petits laboureurs’, or

‘women of the people’.28 Britons complaining about fraudulent weight and measures invoked

the ‘”good of the public” or “the poor people”.29 As late as the 1840s, German references are

to the ‘lamentation of the people’, ‘the public’, or ‘rabble’. When groups differentiated their

identity further or were differentiated by observers, it was by their profession (e.g.,

clothmakers), or, significantly, by age and gender, the ‘young and senior’, ‘old people, boys,

apprentices, fellows, girls and old women’ – not to consumers.30

25 Daniel Defoe, A Plan of the English Commerce, Being a Compleat Prospect of the Trade of this Nation, as well the Home Trade as the Foreign (1728; Oxford: Blackwell, 1928), pp. 144, 154.26 Malachy Postlethwayt, Britain’s Commercial Interest Explained and Improved (London, 1757) vol 2, p. 411; The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce with Large Additions and Improvements, Adapting the same to the Present State of British Affairs in America, since the last Treaty of Peace made in the Year 1763. incl. Savary’s Dictionary. (London, 1766).27 David Todd, ‘Before Free Trade: Commercial Discourse and Politics in early 19th century France’, in Daunton and Trentmann, Worlds of Political Economy. As Todd notes, even J.B. Say, often seen as a liberal Free Trader, defended commercial regulations and the protection of the producer interest as a national interest.28 Cynthia A. Bouton, The Flour War: Gender, Class, and Community in Late Ancien Regime French Society (University Park: Pennsylavania State University Press, 1993), pp. 83-85, 109; for exceptions, see Steven L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 2 vols: Terray, the controller-general in the early 1770s, spoke of the needs of consumers, as did Joly de Fleury in the parlement in 1763, although references to “‘the people’”, ‘”the people and the lowest peple’”, ‘”famished people’”, or the ‘”poor’” and ‘”workers’” dominate, Vol I, pp. 172, 193-98, 323; Vol II, pp. 529f.29 Avril D. Leadley, ‘Some Villains of the Eighteenth-Century Market Place’, in John Rule (ed.), Outside the Law: Studies in Crime and Order, 1650-1850 (Exeter Papers in Economic History, 15), cit. at p.2730 ‘Klage des Volkes’, ‘Publikum’, ‘Poebel’; ‘Wir armen Arbeitsleute’; ‘Junge’, ‘Etablierte’, ‘Greise, Knaben, Gesellen, Burschen, Maedchen und alte Weiber’, from sources cit. in Manfred Gailus, Strasse und Brot: Sozialer Protest in den deutschen Staaten unter besonderer Beruecksichtigung Preussens, 1847-1849 (Goettingen: V&R, 1990), pp. 220, 242, 246, 255, 266ff., 271ff.

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Although industrial relations on the shopfloor were increasingly understood as

market exchanges in the late 18th and early 19th centuries,31 the primary social categories of

emancipation remained rooted in the independent farmer and the independent artisan (versus

the wage ‘slave’).32 In early socialist thought, consumption was a dependent function of the

primacy of productive welfare.33 Good consumption was collective consumption. There was

little room for a consumer as a separate identity either in this increasingly masculine

productivist language of independence and community,34 or in gendered notions of women’s

domestic sphere unsullied by market or production. Thus women’s boycotts against slave

goods stressed the corruptibility of goods. Instead of the consumer, they invoked a

sympathetic femininity with its ‘”purely human” sympathy unpolluted by commercial

desires”’.35

A Society of Merchants, not Consumers

The resilience of older social identities and categories, then, were one reason why the

material culture of consumption found it difficult to generate a more active sense of

‘consumer’ identities. Raymond Williams -- in a classic, short entry on the consumer – notes

how in the course of the 18th century, the consumer emerges as a less negative, more neutral

term in writings on political economy36 – a new science which has often been accorded a

crucial part in legitimating the spread of market society. Yet, why only ‘less negative’? Put

differently, why did the well-recorded appreciation of consumption as a source of wealth and

civilisation not trigger a more wide-reaching transvaluation and embrace of the ‘consumer’?

Instead of following a fluid transition from luxury (goods and sensations) to consumer

(identity) to consumer society (social formation) characteristic of much historical writing,

the virtual absence of the ‘consumer’ and ‘consumer society’ should give us pause to think

about the particular ways in which contemporaries situated luxury with respect to identities.

31 James A. Jaffe, Striking A Bargain. 32 Jamie Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800-62 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Bronstein, ‘Land Reform and Political Traditions’, in Bevir and Trentmann, Critiques of Capital, ch. 2.33 See Noel Thompson, ‘Social Opulence, Private Asceticism: Ideas of Consumption in Early Socialist Thought’, in Daunton and Hilton, Politics of Consumption, ch. 3.34 Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, ; Gregory Claeys, ‘The Origins of the Rights of Labor: Republicanism, Commerce, and the Construction of Modern Social Theory in Britain, 1796-1805, Journal of Modern History 67, 2 (1994), .Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches.35 Kate Davies, "A moral purchase: feminity, commerce and abolition, 1788-1792," in Women, writing and the public sphere: 1700-1830, ed. Elisabeth; Grant Eger, Charlotte (Cambridge, 2000). Cit at p. 150.36 Raymond Williams, ‘Consumer’, in Keywords (London: Fontana, 1976), pp. 78f. Cf. Roy Porter, ‘Consumption: disease of the consumer society?’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 58-81.

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Attitudes to luxury oscillated between new positive understandings of consumption

as an engine of wealth and civilisation (Barbon, Mandeville, Hume, Smith) and

condemnations of extravagance and greed leading to an enslaved self, dependent on

appearance and the opinion of others (Rousseau, Smollett).37 Most societies have competing

moral value systems, so the question remains why the positive strand of the transvaluation of

luxury did not do more to publicly elevate the consumer? One answer may lie in the internal

and domestic direction of the new culture of consumption. Consumption was an act of

discovering and cultivating the self. Dutch consumption patterns in the Golden Age, Jan de

Vries has argued, ‘brought into being a distinctive material culture in which the luxuries

were directed towards the home more than the body, and adorned the interior – of both home

and body – more than the exterior. They tended to achieve comfort more than refinement.’38

Instead of directly contesting an older moral discourse warning of the public decadence

stemming from personal vice and providing a new public language, the new lifestyle of

luxury turned inward.

If the Dutch Golden Age has been characterised as the first consumer society, it is

also a prime example of the contingent nature of transmission between material and political

cultures. As de Vries notes, ‘the Dutch did not fashion its bits and pieces of religious and

republican thought into a new discourse to describe and theorise the new reality.’39 This was

left to English and Scottish writers of the next three generations. The now leading

interpretations focus on the redescription of luxury as the pursuit of personal pleasure with

unintended public benefits as a decisive step in the positive and now conscious embrace of a

‘consumer society’.40 But what was the imagined role of the consumer in this society? It is

no accident that most academic discussions have seized on the material and discursive role

of ‘luxury’, rather than on the ‘consumer’.

David Hume’s Essays (1742) provide one entry-point to think about this failure to

connect the process of consumption with a consumer identity. It highlights how consumption

37 Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, eds., Consumers and luxury: Consumer culture in Europe 1650-1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (eds.), Luxury in the eighteenth century. debates, desires and delectable goods (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). For the continuing ambivalence towards commercial consumption, see Margot Finn, "Working-Class Women and the Contest for Consumer Control in Victorian County Courts," Past and Present 161.; Matthew Hilton, ‘Sheep’, Past and Present; Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, chs 2, 3; Maclachlan and Trentmann, ‘Civilizing markets’.38 Jan de Vries, ‘Luxury in the Dutch Golden Age in Theory and Practice’, in Berg and Eger, Luxury, p.51. For a different interpretation of the attitudes to luxury, stressing Calvinism, see Simon Schama, The Embarassment of Riches. See also Campbell, Romantic Imagination.39 De Vries, ‘Luxury’, p. 53.40 In addition to n. 36, see for the demoralisation of luxury, see Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A conceptual and historical investigation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 108ff.

11


needs to be situated within the overarching tradition through which actors make sense of

themselves and their society. Britain was a commercial society, not a consumer society. The

primary dynamic, the engine of wealth, civilisation, and national strength was commerce.

Commerce ‘rouses men from their indolence’ and present the richer members of society with

‘objects of luxury’ previously undreamed of.41 ‘The individuals reap the benefit of these

commodities, so far as they gratify the senses and appetites; and the public is also a gainer,

while a greater stock of labour is, by this means, stored up against any public exigency.’42

Luxury is defended for promoting industrious, creative dispositions and for refining the

mental capacities of the members of a commercial, law-based society.

Here, then, unlike the inward Dutch domestication of consumption, is an outward

justification for material culture as central to public life. But, significantly, the defence of

luxury as a public good operated in a vision of commercial society where the decisive actors

and identities that were legitimated were merchants. Other groups in society benefited from

the luxury circulating in commercial society, but, as recipients, there was no need for Hume

to elevate them to a shared category of consumers. ‘[W]here luxury nourishes commerce and

industry,’ Hume concludes, ‘the peasants, by a proper cultivation of the land, become rich

and independent: while the tradesmen and merchants acquire a share of the property, and

draw authority and consideration to that middling rank of men, who are the best and firmest

basis of public liberty.’43 Consumers did not need to be named separately because (as a

collective group) they did not yet play an active part in the imagined drama of an unfolding

civil society.

Will The Real Consumer Please Stand Up?

The conceptual evolution of ‘the consumer’ before the mid-nineteenth century, then, was

limited and points to its yet marginal or non-existent significance for social and political

identities. Isolated instances of the consumer as wasteful shopper can be traced to the

sixteenth century. 44 Well into the nineteenth century, however, the ‘consumer’ mainly

41 Ibid., p. 270.42 David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary (1742, OUP 1963 end), p. 269.43 Ibid., p. 284.44 E.g., Angell Daye, The English Secretorie. Wherein is contained a pefect Method, for the inditing of all manner of Epistles and familiar Letters (1586), p225: Warning to a young man that in a City ‘so ordinarilye frequented as is that City wherein you are, and being in fellowship with so many and diuers sorts of men as you now be, conuersing also with the innumberalbe multitudes of persons, of all estates, condictions and faculties, as you there doe , I t is no difficult thing for a young youth of your birth and qualitie to be led into lewdness, of a wanton to become dissolute, of a spender to be made a consumer, nor of a towardly Gentleman, to be framed to an untowarde companion.’

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appeared with reference to particular physical or metaphysical use, waste, and destruction.

Consumers were individuals who used up energy resources or basic utilities (water, gas,

coal, electricity) or who were affected by particular consumption taxes, such as excise

duties.45 German statutes for tobacco Consumptions-Factorien, for example, regulated the

prices traders and shopkeepers could charge ‘the consumer and common man.’46 Next to this,

an older use survived of referring to consumers in the metaphysical sense of devourers, such

as time and death, ‘the two consumers of the whole world.’47 Disraeli speculated in

Coningsby (1844) that ‘he is a sagacious statesman who may detect in what form and in

what quarter the great consumer will arise’ that may destroy Parliament just as Barons,

Church, and King ‘have in turn devoured each other’, a usage that shows the survival of the

early modern ‘the consumer of thy Dukedome’ or ‘kingdome’.48

A more wide-ranging use of the consumer as a category of social order emerged only

slowly in social and economic texts in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and then

with highly uneven influence on broader social and political discourse. In his essay on social

order (1772), Iselin, discussing Quesnay’s Tableau economique, wrote that all of society

consisted only of the following pairings: ‘purchasers and sellers, consumers and producers or

workers’49 In general, however, the status of the ‘consumer’ remained ambiguous, as the

precise relationship between consumption and production, between private and public

activities, and between material and non-material acts of consumption remained subjects of

on-going debate amongst economic writers in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century

Europe.50 J.B. Say, one of the few political economists to accord consumption a special

45 The coal traders and consumers case. S.J. (c. 1692);Lawrence Duckworth, The Consumer’s Handbook of the Law relating to Gas, Water, and Electric Lighting (London 1903).46 Preiss-Satzung, Nach welcher die aus denen Churfuerstl. Taback-Consumptions-Factorien zur Abnahm vorgelegte Sorten von denen Handels-Leuthen und craemeren hinwiderumben [sic] an den Consumenten und gemeinen Mann in Minuto abzugeben seynd.—[Verordnung vom 1. April 1745}. S.I., (1745), one of only two references to consumers in the half million titles of the Bavarian State Library for 1501-1840. Excise duties and consumptions-accise were often used synonymously in the eighteenth century, see Ulrich Wyrwa, ‘Consumption and Consumer Society’, in Strasser et al., Getting and Spending, pp. 432f., a discussion that unfortunately muddles the history of ‘consumption’ in Germany with that of ‘consumer society’. Cf. John Brewer, ‘The Error of our Ways: Historians and the Birth of Consumer Society’, Sept. 2003.47 Samuell Rowlands, A terrible battell betweene the two consumers of the whole world: time, and death (London, 1606). In ‘I am’, John Clare, the poet (1793-1864), wrote ‘I am the self-consumer of my woes’, and48 Disraeli, Coningsby (1844), p.174. Cf. Robert Greene, Gwydonius, (1584); John Hind, Eliosto Libidinoso (1606);49 Versuch ueber die gesellige Ordnung (Basel 1772), ‘aus Kauefern und Verkaeufern, aus Verbrauchern oder Verzehrern und Herrvorbringern oder Arbeitern.’50 The multiple and competing meanings of consumption in the economic literature continued to be a subject of complaint into the 1920s; Hans Mayer ‘Konsumtion’, 867-874, Handwoerterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, eds. Ludwig Elster, Adolf Weber and Friedrich Wieser, 4th ed. (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1923), vol V, 867-74.

13


section included the ‘reproductive consumption’ of goods in factories.51 This concern with

production in the analysis of consumption had implications for the analysis of individuals

who did the consuming. Malthus thus distinguished between ‘productive consumers’ and

‘non-productive consumers’, the latter being the worker, the former reserved for the

‘consumption or destruction of wealth by capitalists with a view to reproduction.’52 To avoid

his much-feared glut of commodities, Malthus believed it was necessary to increase the

‘unproductive consumption’ of landlords. Consumers, in other words, were not one

collective group but differentiated by their more or less productive functions.

Ricardo and J.S. Mill have been seen as marking ‘a retreat rather than advance in

conceptions of the role of consumption’ by focusing on cost rather than demand, making ‘the

role of the “unfortunate” consumer in classical economics… not markedly different from

that of the “servile” consumer in mercantilism.’53 Mill, famously, denied that consumption

was a worthy subject for the science of political economy: ‘We know not of any laws of the

consumption of wealth as the subject of a distinct science: they can be no other than the laws

of human enjoyment.’54 For Mill, an interest in consumption was associated with Malthus

and Sismondi and signalled (in his view) altogether erroneous and politically dangerous

diagnoses of under-consumption.55 Mill’s critic John Ruskin was someone who took

consumption very seriously, but he linked it to a concern about the welfare and happiness of

producers and community without requiring the development of a distinct category of

‘consumers’.56 As late as 1910, the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica only found it

necessary to have a short entry on ‘consumption’, defined as wasting away in a physical

sense or as a ‘technical term’ in economics about the destruction of utilities. There was no

entry on ‘the consumer’.

51 J. B. Say, Traite d’ économie (Paris, 1841), III, ch. 2.; an inclusion that had its supporters until the turn of the twentieth century, e.g. Wilhelm Lexis, ‘Gustav Schönberg, ed., Handbuch der politischen Oekonomie (Tubingen, 1890), Vol I, Part 2, ch. XII, p. 750; F.B. W. Herrmann, Staatswirtschaftliche Untersuchungen (Munich, 1870); Kurt Apelt, Die Konsumtion der wichtigsten Kulturlaender in den letzten Jahrzehnten: eine statistisch-volkswirtschaftliche Studie (Berlin, 1899). In the late nineteenth century, Charles Gide spoke out against the frequent fusing of consumption and production, as when Jevons saw eating as production for a worker, Charles Gide, Cours d’Economie Politique, 3rd edn engl. Transl. Political Economy, (London, 1914), p. 694. Nineteenth-century concepts derived from the analysis of production and land would also inform neo-classical concepts, such as consumers’ rent.52 Malthus, Principles, vol 8, p. 119. Cf. J.S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, section V, ch.3; and the discussion in Mark Blaug, Economic Theory in Retrospect, CUP, 5th edn. 1997), pp. 168-175.53 Mary Jean Bowman, "The consumer in the history of economic doctrine," American Economic Review 41 (1951). (1951).54 J. S. Mill, Essays on some unsettled questions of political economy (London, 1844), p. 132.55 See the discussion in Donald Winch, ‘The Problematic Status of the Consumer in Orthodox Economic Thinking from Smith to Marshall’, in Knowing Consumers (forthcoming).56 John Ruskin, “Unto This Last:” Four Essays on the first principles of Political Economy (Orpington, Kent, 1877), esp. p. 153, 170ff.

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If it is problematic to draw a straight line from commodity culture to the consumer, it

is similarly debatable to presume a correlation between developments in a particular realm of

liberal knowledge premised on markets, exchange, and rational utility-maximising

individuals and the growing significance of ‘the consumer’. In contrast to ‘advanced

liberalism’, where the emphasis on consumer choice is central to the formation of individual

autonomy and selfhood,57 early and mature liberal culture lacked an essentialist individualist

consumer. From the 1870s-80s, the marginal revolution and its individualist theory of

consumer behaviour would introduce key categories like consumers’ rent and consumer

surplus. These would come to dominate twentieth-century economics and marketing,58 but it

did little to shape the discursive, social and political category of the consumer at the time.

Jevons famously argued that ‘the theory of economics must begin with a correct theory of

consumption’.59 Yet, neoclassical writers continued to treat the satisfaction of human needs

more as a ‘fundamental datum or premises of the science’ than as the starting point for an

exploration of consumption and consumers on par with the laws of production, distribution,

and exchange, as J.N. Keynes pointed out in 1891 in a rare English discussion of whether

consumption should receive a more distinct treatment.60 Significantly, the technical,

measurable apparatus introduced by the marginal revolution which in the last few decades

has been applied to all sorts of activities and goods, was defined along a narrow group of

subjects, namely food and clothing.61 Indeed, when the intellectual pursuit of the consumer

took off in the 1890s, it was driven by a dialogue between intellectuals outside or at the

margins of liberal economics: national economists in Germany, the radical liberal Hobson in

England, the progressive Patten in the United States, and the cooperator Charles Gide in

France. Hobson invoked a ‘citizen-consumer’ whose material acts and desires would

increasingly be informed by civic values.62 Likewise, Gide, who devoted an entire book in 57 Miller and Rose, ‘Mobilising the Consumer’.58 For a survey of work on consumption in micro- and macro-economic work, see Angus Deaton’s entry on consumers’ expenditure, New Palgrage, pp. 592-607. In contrast to standard modern consumer theory, Marshall had a distinct sense of the consumer as a dynamic individual whose activities created new wants (not vice versa) and as a social actor whose pursuit of distinction was in part shaped by peer groups (Principles of Economics, book III, ch.2; see G.M. Peter Swann, ‘Marshall’s Consumer as an Innovator’ in Sheila C. Dow and Peter E. Earl, eds., Economic Organization and Economic Knowledge, I (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1999), 98-118.59 Jevons, Theory of Political Economy (1879), p. 43.60 John Neville Keynes, The Scope and Method of Political Economy (London: Macmillan, 1904 3rd rev. edition. 1st1891.), p. 111. Note, professional economics was still divided on this question in the inter-war years, see Paul T. Homan, ‘Consumption, ‘ in Encyclopaediea of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1930; 1949 repr.), p. 295, an entry that shows how far utility theory was yet from hegemony.61 R. H. Inglis Palgrave, ed., Dictionary of Political Economy (London: Macmillan and Co., 1894), Vol I, entry on consumers’ goods; there is no separate entry for consumer.62 Michael Freeden (ed.), Reappraising J. A. Hobson (London, 1990); Frank Trentmann, ‘Commerce, Civil Society, and the “Citizen-Consumer”, in Paradoxes of Civil Society, pp. 312-15;

15


his Cours d’Economie Politique to consumption, focused on collective action amongst

consumers to advance the interests of society. Patten saw selfish individuals as atavistic

survivors of a past age of scarcity who would give way to the socialised generosity of an age

of abundance.63

Let us therefore follow an unexpected, and less teleological path and view the subject

from the less conventional Anglo-centred perspective of liberal economics, like historical or

national economics. Interestingly, the Encyclopaedia refers English readers to Roscher’s

Nationaloekonomie (1874), not to Jevons and Marshall.64 Interest in the consumer in this

tradition of economic knowledge was driven by concern with national power and resources,

and with social welfare and mores. Consumption reflected national character, and was thus

integral to an understanding of the historical evolution of national economies. Von Prittwitz

had already added a whole section on consumption in his Die Kunst reich zu werden of

1840. Here consumption concerned individuals using up commodities, art, holidays, and

personal services, but also extended to the consumption of associations and the state itself.65

Roscher, writing a generation later, distinguished between Erwerbsgebrauch (acquisition-

consumption) and Genussgebrauch (enjoyment consumption). Interest went deeper than the

act of purchase – for Roscher, a person who bought a coat had only consumed it and the

capital spent on it when the coat was finally worn out. If national economics did not produce

a theory of consumption, it certainly widened the range of discussion. One connection was

between consumption, waste, national character, and civilisation. Discussion of the waste of

national resources was now decoupled from an earlier critique of luxury. The more civilised

a nation, Prittwitz and Roscher believed, the less would it tend to destroy value – advanced

nations would reuse more of their old linen and food remains.66 With the advance of

civilization, luxury was directed towards ‘the real, healthy and tasteful enjoyment of life,

rather than inconvenient display.’ Modern England and Holland proved the possibility of

63 Simon N. Patten, The Consumption of Wealth (Philadelphia 1889) and The Theory of Prosperity (New York, 1902). For Patten, as for German historical economists, the state had an obligation to discourage the waste of national resources, a position that led him to support tariffs to reduce “inefficient consumption”. For all his attention to consumption, the consumer is not yet a master category for Patten, who prefers to speak of ‘the people’ or ‘society’. See also Daniel M. Fox, The Discovery of Abundance: Simon N. Patten and the Transformation of Social Theory (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1967); Susan Strasser, ;Axel R. Schäfer, ‘German Historicism, Progressive Social Thought, and the Interventionist State in the US Since the 1880s,’ in Markets in Historical Contexts, eds. M. Bevir and F. Trentmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch. 8.64 John Neville Keynes had read Roscher.65 M. v. Prittwitz, Die Kunst reich zu werden, oder gemeinfassliche Darstellung der Volkswirtschaft (Mannheim, 1840), pp. 471-552. Significantly, he speaks for the first time of ‘Consumenten’ in the context of state expenditure and taxes.66 Wilhelm Roscher, Principles of Political Economy , vol II, transl. John J. Lalor (new York: Henry Holt, 1878), translof 13th edn German edn of 1877, pp. 185f., 230 ff.; Prittwitz, Kunst, pp. 488f.

16


combining ‘salutary luxury’ with frugality and an appreciation of nature (the country house).

Only in declining nations did luxury assume an ‘impudent and immoral character.’67 Here

was an appreciation of advancing middle classes creating more conscientious consumers.

‘To enjoy more meant to live more, to be more human’, Prittwitz concluded.68 At the same

time, the normative place of consumers in the social order depended not on the individuals as

such but on the collective purpose and consequence of their actions. The danger lay not with

consumption but with excessive, thoughtless or repetitive consumption that made consumers

forget about their family, neighbours, and community. Consumption made national strength

and civilisation possible, the family made an escalation of personal wants or desire bearable. ‘Without the demands of family life regarding sacrifice and commitment that distract us from our personal

consumption purposes, consumption would be as unbearable for us as it was for single young men’, Karl

Oldenberg argued in 1910, whose views highlight the dialectical role of consumption in social

evolution.69 Consumption was nature’s cunning: even where an increase in desire did not

produce enhanced satisfaction, it nonetheless forced people to exert their energies, thus

bringing the ‘lazy mass’ into the realm of civilization. Unlike for Adam Smith, where these

social benefits had been seen as a process of individual deception, German national

economists now tied a growing demand for more and more consumption to a growing sense

of other-regarding actions and collective national virtues: ‘the consumer appreciated the

value of his [sic] consumption not only differently in different ages but at different levels of

his ethical education [sittliche Erziehung]. Whether he places consumption in the services of

transcendental obligations, or personal education or social considerations: his satisfaction of

his wants is only an end in itself only at the most primitive, non-reflexive stage of culture.’

Above all, it cultivated ‘strong people and strong nations, which can rule over others and

imprint their characteristics on them.’

67 Roscher, Principles, pp. 191, 230, 24168 Prittwitz, Kunst, p. 485. See also Roscher, ‘The act of saving, if the consumption omitted was a productive one, is detrimental to the common good’. Yet, to let consumers rule everything would mean ‘utmost cheapness … universal superfluity’., Principles, section CCXVIII.69 Karl Oldenberg, ‘Die Konsumtion’, ch III, in Grundriss der Sozialökonomie, II : Die natuerlichen und technischen Beziehungen der Wirtschaft, eds Fr. Von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, H. Herkner, A. Hettner, R. Michels, P. Mombert, K. Oldenberg (Tubingen, 1914). Pp103-164, cit. at p. 123 and below at pp. 119, 124.; my translation. Oldenberg took Brentano to task for not adequately highlighting the significance of patriotism and religion in shaping people’s needs. Significantly, Brentano, the leading liberal Anglophile economist, wrote his Versuch einer Theorie der Beduerfnisse, (Munich, 1908) without an analytical category of the consumer. While he shared Gossen and Marshall’s emphasis on the unlimited nature of human needs, his discussion of the hierarchy of needs ends in a warning of the dangerous consequences from affluence and passive enjoyment which lead to numbing of soul and character in contrast to self-fulfillment and social advance which comes from sacrifice and an act of will that cannot be purchased.

17


The mobilisation of the consumer in economic knowledge, social action, and politics in the

nineteenth century was slow – and while there were points of contact between popular

mobilisation and economic authorities and their critics, it also had a logic of its own. In

fiction, politics, and public discussion, the consumer remained associated with particular

goods, especially water, energy resources and certain perishable foodstuffs. As with so much

in Victorian society, it was the politics of taxation that were the catalyst that mobilised tax-

paying users as consumers. In his work on local taxation, Sidgwick spoke of the ‘consumer’

as the ‘occupier’ who bore the tax on the value of the house.70 In nineteenth-century Britain,

the principal site of this transformation, debates about free trade and empire inserted ‘the

consumer’ into an expanding range of political relationships and material goods. Thus The

Consumers of West India Sugar made their case against slavery and duties in 1828. The

‘fiscal debate’ began to extend the use of the term to all individuals affected by duties, a

trend that can be traced in literature as well as politics. James Fenimore Cooper, in The

Crater, or , Vulcan’s Peak (1847) referred to ‘true free trade’ as meaning no taxation or

restrictions whatsoever, not even free ports, since ‘the consumer’ would still have to pay

‘customary impositions.’71

Debates about who paid import duties helped solidify the consumer as a social group

against its enemies, and this could result in an antinomy between social groups -- ‘the

producer and the consumer’.72 Yet this was not the inevitable or only binary outcome.

Meanings had not yet narrowed to that of the private end-user. Gladstone, who early on in

his career in 1842 urged to ‘consider the consumer’ when discussing the corn laws, had no

problem in identifying intermediary socio-economic groups as the consumer. In 1883 he

hoped to conclude the negotiations about canals ‘with a fair regard to the views and interests

of the mercantile community, who in this case represent the consumer, that is to say the

70 Sidgwick, Essays.71 James Fenimore Cooper, The Crater, or , Vulcan’s Peak (1847), 123. In Homeward Bound (1838), he speaks of ‘factors’ as regular agents between ‘common producer and the common consumer’, p.54; Cooper is still employing the older usage in The Monikins (1835), where Miss Poke is a ‘desperate consumer of snuff and religion’ p.115. Anthony Trollope’s novels show the expanding social canvass on which the consumer is projected in the mid-Victorian period, moving from basic provision of bread and corn to goods more widely. In The Warden (1855), the protagonist’s worry that he might be seen as that ‘unjust griping priest’ articulated itself as the fear of being pointed at ‘as the consumer of the bread of the poor’. In the Eustace Diamonds (1873), we find Greystock thinking of himself as a ‘spender of much money and a consumer of many good things’; Anthony Trollope, The Warden, p. 140; The Eustace Diamonds, p. 115.72 Justitia, The Queen and the constitution, the producer and the consumer, or Protection , what is it, and where to put it (London, 1851). James Fenimore Cooper, The Crater, or , Vulcan’s Peak (1847), 123. Brockhaus (1852), although note that Grimm’s Woerterbuch still did not have an entry on either Verbraucher or Konsument, Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Woerterbuch, vol 12 (1886 ; 1956 reprint Leipzig: S. Hirzel Verlag).

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world’.73 By 1913 accounts of the London taxi-cab drivers’ strike in 1913, still referred to

‘consumers’ not as the passengers but the users of petrol.74 The feminist activist Teresa

Billington Greig’s concern for the consumer as the victim of a competitive system expressed

her belief in an inescapable union between consumption and production.75 In the popular

Free Trade campaign at that time ‘the consumer’ could still serve as an organic category of

the nation uniting the interests of shoppers with those of industrial consumers of imported

raw materials alike.76

Water Wars: From User to Consumer in the Victorian Battle Over Water

The growing attention to the consumer in different political traditions and knowledge

systems in the 1890s and 1900s did not occur in a vacuum but followed on from a discursive

and socio-political strengthening of the consumer as a category of identity, social praxis, and

persona with legal and political rights. Consumer cooperatives spread from the 1840s across

Europe, though membership of societies did not automatically create a collective identity of

consumers and was mediated by different traditions. Significantly, German co-operatives did

not call themselves Konsumentenvereine but Konsumvereine; here consumption was object,

not identity, which remained centred in production or class categories, as in the big Konsum,

Bau- und Sparverein ‘Produktion’ in Hamburg Altona.77 In France the centrality of labour in

political discourse, and the emphasis on the mutual dependence between consumption and

production hampered the coming of a distinct consumer identity until the 1880s. As with the

Rochdale pioneers in England, cooperation here was firstly concerned with emancipating

workers form the control of middlemen and producers. Consumption was a medium for

strengthening a brotherhood of workers.78 It was in Victorian England more than anywhere

else that the ideological barriers to collective identity and action would be overcome and the

political synapses of the consumer politics sprang into action. Commercial traditions did not

73 The Gladstone Diaries, ed. H.C.G. Matthew, vol X, 30 June 1883, p.467.74 The Times, 2 January 1913, p.8.75 Teresa Billington Greig, The Consumer in Revolt (London, 1912), 76 See, Trentmann, ‘National Identity and Consumer Politics,’ p. 236. Similarly, in the mining strike of 1912, there were references to the consuming interests of the public ‘” from the poor slum dweller … to the gigantic iron and steel works’”, Daily Chronicle 24 Feb. 1912, cit. in James Thompson, “The idea of ‘public opinion’ in Britain, 1870-1914” (Cambridge unpubl PhD Thesis 1999), p. 60. 77 Similarly, miners’ cooperatives, e.g. the Konsumverein rheinisch-westfaelischer Bergleute Glueckauf; M. Prinz, Brot und Dividende. Konsumvereine in Deutschland und England vor 1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), esp. pp. 235ff. See also Peter Gurney, Co-operative culture and the politics of consumption in England, 1870-1930 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Ellen Furlough and Carl Strikwerda, (eds.), Consumers Against Capitalism? (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).78 See Ellen Furlough, Consumer cooperation in France. the politics of consumption, 1834-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), esp. for the long influence of Fourier.

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in and of themselves create consumers, but they left more discursive openings for the

formation of collective consumer identities than traditions that privileged production or the

land. Let us now focus on two conjunctures through which the consumer emerged as a more

distinct social actor and public voice – first, at a local level, the politicisation of access to

basic goods, especially water, in the battle between propertied users, water companies, and

municipal authorities that reached a peak in London in the 1870s-1890s, and second a more

global-local conjuncture in which cultural and political anxieties over international trade

energised consumption as a question of national identity and citizenship in the decade before

the First World War.

The conflict between users and natural monopolies in Victorian Britain produced a

seminal link between material needs and collective consciousness and action. This early

synapse of consumer politics that was initially fused by propertied and commercial users

through notions of access, public accountability and representative government, rather than

choice or universal democratic inclusion. In a utility like gas, those who defended their

interests as consumers were almost exclusively commercial users, merchants, shopkeepers

and industrialists.79 When a ‘Gas Consumer’ asked in a pamphlet of 1849 Are the Citizens of

London to have better Gas, and more of it, for Less Money? the writer presented himself as a

‘plain tradesman’. The consumer was mobilised in a battle against monopoly for cheaper and

safer service, and to make companies accountable to their consumers in a way analogous to

the Westminster model of parliamentary representation. Liberal thinkers and commercial

users alike feared that utility companies were evolving into a new breed of private

monopolies like the East India Company and corrupt the public spirit.80 When asked how

monopoly would be avoided by ‘forming a Company comprised of consumers for the supply

of the City [of London]’, the gas consumer’s answer is revealing. ‘The citizens [of the City]

will have a double security; in the first place the consumers will elect their own Directors’.81

Secondly, they will have a fixed maximum price, with dividends on profits reducing the

price further. The consumer had become dependent on the citizen: accountability via

79 In Wolverhampton in 1847, over eighty per cent of gas consumption was for commercial use, with an additional 13% used by streetlights, and only 2% used in (wealthier) households; percentages based on cubic feet cited in Martin Daunton ‘The Material Politics of Natural Monopoy’, in Politics of Consumption, p.76.80 See, Daunton, ‘Natural Monopoly’, esp. pp. 70ff; Martin Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1799-1914 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 266ff. David Owen, The Government of Victorian London, 1855-1889 : The Metropolitan Board of Works, the Vestries, and the City Corporation, eds. Roy MacLeod et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1982), pp. 140 ff.81 Anon., Are the Citizens of London to have better Gas, and more of it, for Less Money? A Dialogue between (C.P.) Mr, Charles Pearson and (G.C.) a Gas Consumer of the City, (February 16, 1849) (London, 1849), p. 5. See also Joseph F. B. Firth, The Gas Supply of London (London, 1874).

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representation went hand in hand with consumer protection in the form of lower and stable

prices.

It was water that was the single most fiercely contested good in nineteenth-century

London politics.82 Water users became articulate consumers whose growing self-confidence

sparked an infrastructure of voluntary consumer advice centres and legal and political

challenges to water companies. By the 1880s-1890s the social category of consumers had

widened from propertied rate-paying private and commercial users to include the public

more generally. The politicisation of water was driven by the widening gulf between the

rising cultural and political status of the article and it being a natural resource with

diminishing returns and hence escalating costs of supply. Water carried a high symbolic

capital as “the first necessary of life”, a significance reinforced by the politics of public

health in the early Victorian period.83 It was ‘an article, as necessary to existence as light and

air’ which, in the words of early reformers could not be left safely in the hands of

‘monopolists’ and ‘these jobbers in one of God’s choicest blessings’ who were treating

‘customers…like so many Negroes’.84 The 1875 Public Health Act required local councils to

ensure adequate and clean water supply. Some commercial users paid for a metered amount

of water consumed, but unlike in cities like Berlin, water to private users was not metered in

London before the introduction of continuous supply in the 1880s-90s. Instead, water was

paid for through rates, a local tax on the rateable value of property. In the eye of local

government, water companies, and tax-payers, consumers were owner-occupiers and tenants

above a certain rent who paid their rates directly – not anyone drinking water (women,

children, travelling salesmen, poorer tenants who paid compounded rates, etc.).

Cholera outbreaks in 1848-9 turned the problem of intermittent supply of poor

quality water into a more fundamental question of public versus private and central versus

local control and the legitimate relationship between state and markets. On the one end, the

MP Francis Mowatt called for a ‘water parliament’ representing rate-payers,85 on the other

The Economist warned that municipalisation of water would open the floodgates for

82 For a larger, in-depth discussion of water consumer politics and the changing construction of needs, see Vanessa Taylor and Frank Trentmann, ‘Liquid Politics: Needs, Rights, Waste and the Formation of the Consumer in Nineteenth-Century Water Politics in England’.83 Christopher Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800-54 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). For the diverse patterns of private provision and municipalisation, see Robert Millward, ‘The political economy of urban utilities’, in Martin Daunton, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, III: 1840-1950, (CUP, 2000).84 [John Wright], The Dolphin (1827), pp .6f. The complaint here was directed at the ways in which companies at the time of monopolistic consolidation in 1817 handed over customers to each other..85 In Pedro Schwartz, ‘John Stuart Mill and Laissez Faire: London Water’,Economica 33 (Feb. 1966), p. 79.

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socialism by legitimising the public provision of all necessaries of life publicly and land

nationalisation. It was now that political economy was drawn in to the controversy speaking

on behalf of the consumer. Mobilised by the Metropolitan Sanitary Association, J.S. Mill

pronounced in 1851 that the argument for private competition failed since water was a

natural monopoly and concerned a necessity. ‘[T]he arrangement between the companies and

the consumer is as much compulsory as if the rate were imposed by Government.’ The only

effective guarantee for efficiency was ‘public opinion, a check which would operate much

more efficiently on a public board’, ideally at the municipal level – ‘the possession of the

monopoly by individuals constitutes not freedom but slavery’. Yet, this also meant that the

consumer politics of necessity would be kept distinct from the broader arena of markets

through which most other consumption goods circulated.

In most vestries (units of local government) it was ratepayers, that is the more

privileged section of commercial and propertied private users who paid for water use

through their direct local taxes (not water users in general), who now agitated as consumers

to take the water supply and distribution into their own representative hands.86 Complaints

about supply, access, quality, and price escalated as water companies’ costs rose and

consumers became more vocal about companies raising water rates at a time of falling

commodity prices. In Britain in the last quarter of the 19th century, population rose by 37%,

rateable value by 61%, and rates by 141%.87 It was in this pressure cooker that the consumer

first consolidated its propertied existence and then spilled over into a more assertive and

universal category of social entitlement.88 In 1882-83, the barrister Archibald Dobbs

successfully challenged the water companies’ rating policy in court. He became the hero of

the ‘rate-paying public’ and promised to continue his personal battle to secure the same

advantage for ‘every water consumer in London.’89 A network of Water Consumers’

Defence Leagues sprang up all over London, in Islington and Nottinghall, Battersea,

Clapham and elsewhere. They set up advice bureaus to members, circulating posters with

‘Instructions to Consumers’, organising boycotts, and providing legal support for aggrieved

consumers.90

86 E.g. the propertied and commercial users in the vestry of St. Lukes; The Times, 10 July 1851, 6 c.87 Cit., Millward, ‘Political economy’, p.329.88 Dobbs v. Grand Junction Waterworks Company; Nov. 1883; excerpts of the case and ruling are in Francis Bolton and P. A. Scratchley (eds.), The London Water Supply (London, 1884; 2nd edn 1888), pp. 182-88. Torrens’ Act confirmed the basis of valuation.89 The Times, 20 December 1883, 6 e, meeting at Hollway-hall in Islington.90 PRO, MH 29/6, Clapham, Stockwell & South Lambeth Water Consumers Defence Association, Jan. 1884. E.g, in Hackney, Mr. Andrews, the solicitor to the Water Consumers’ Defence League represented an owner who did not want to pay full rates because his seven small houses in Hackney contained several frequently unlet tenements, The Times, 24 Nov. 1884, 4 e.

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Consumer rights, at first, remained tied to property rights as the basis of

citizenship and representation. Dobbs charged that the water companies had led an ‘invasion

of the property of water consumers…a confiscation of the statutory rights of ratepayers.’91

When a subsequent prominent lawsuit by commercial users in the City sought to define the

‘consumer’, entitled by statue to demand water supply, Dobbs still limited this consumer

right to propertied persons who were able to enter into contractual arrangements with water

companies, not to users in general, including women, children, travellers or the poor.92 Water

companies sought to drive a wedge through a consolidating consumer interest, but in the

process gave the ‘consumer’ even greater currency through a massive counter-campaign that

targeted wasteful consumers as responsible for water shortages, waste, dirt, and increased

prices. Contamination was the result of those consumers who kept their cisterns and tanks in

a ‘disgusting and filthy state’.93 The discovery of the propertied consumer with rights went

hand in hand with the discovery of the ‘apathetic consumer’.94

Ratepayer mobilisation expanded the social universe and public imagery of the

consumer. Mobilisation could be spontaneous, triggered by the experience of scarcity against

a backdrop of rising norms and consumption practices assisted by better and more constant

supply, and fuelled by a distrust of monopoly communicated through a broadly liberal

tradition of freedom. For all its ebbs and flows, consumer activism was not the matter of an

instant – a bubble that would burst when pricked because of the amorphous nature of

consumers’ interests. For the contestation of water left behind an enriched sense and

symbolism of the consumer as representing the public interest as such. The liberal narrative

of an advancing ‘public opinion’ provided a favourable language.95 In the early nineteenth

century, the debate between supporters and critics of the private water companies could

invoke the ‘rate-paying public’ or the ‘health of the public’.96 By the late nineteenth century,

the language of the consumer began to be invoked by householders as well as users more

91 The Times, 7 May 1884, 5 e. The water companies and some engineers argued that a municipal take-over was, in fact, a confiscation of property since it would cost the rate-payers more in the end, The London Water Supply Being an Examination of the Alleged Advantages of the Schemes of the Metropolitan Board of Works and of the inevitable Increase of Rates which would be required thereby, by a civil engineer (London, 1878). 92 Dobbs, humanity quote.93 PRO, MH 29/5, ‘Notice to Consumers and Sanitary Authorities’, East London Waterworks Company, 2 Aug. 1883. The water examiner was appointed under the Metropolis water Act of 1871. Many waste pipes were still in direct communication with the sewers, and allowed gases to flow back into the water.94 PRO, MH 29/5, Monthly Report by Frank Bolton upon the Water supplied by several Metropolitan Water Companies during July 1883: company investment of over £ 2,5 million for water improvement he found to be have been ‘rendered nearly abortive, and of little value by the continued apathy and carelessness of a great number of the consumers’, pp. 1 f. 95 See the notes in Thompson, ‘Public Opinion’, esp. pp. 44 ff.96 The Dolphin, p.8; Hydraulia, pp. 332f pitching the public interest against the anti-water monopoly association. See also Anne Hardy; John Graham-Leigh.

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generally, from affluent property owners in Belgravia to mechanics in rental accommodation

in the East End, and female tenants.97 The mobilisation of the consumer reached its peak

during the so-called ‘water famines’ of the mid-1890s, in which, after a cycle of droughts

and frost, the East London Water Company reintroduced intermittent supply. The East

London Water Consumer’s Defence Association pressed for municipal control of the water

monopoly and called on consumers to boycott local taxes for water not supplied. Radical

imagery showed the water monopoly as a rocky skull propped up by ‘capitalism’ and

‘government acts’, with helpless men, women, and children squashed by cholera and

typhoid, waiting for Moses to lead them from private monopoly to municipal control. Moses

the 2nd is cheered on by a worker whose side-pocket holds a telling paper: ‘Public Opinion’.98

97 W.F.B. Massey Mainwaring, letter. One part of the overall weak regulatory setting was a complaints’ procedure (established in 1852) that required a minimum of twenty signatures from inhabitant householders complaining against charges or insufficient supply to enable the Local Government Board (LGB) to act. Water famines in 1881 produced memorials to the Local Government Board from Kensington and Regent Street to the East End, and increasingly included people other than male householders, including women. Attempts by the water companies to exploit such technicalities became more and more questionable, as officials warned against raising this point. PRO, MH 29/4, Park Lane memorial, 20 July 1881; Regent Street residents’ complaint to Dodson, pres. Of LGB, 22 July 1881; W.W.G (LGB) advice to John Lambert, 22 July 1881; Grand Junction Water Works Company to LGB, 3 Aug. 1881; Medical Officer of Health in Paddington to LGB 4 Aug. 1881. See the discussion in Taylor and Trentmann, ‘Liquid Politics’.98 ‘The Eastern Question Must be Settled’ (1898), East London Water Consumers’ Defence Association, poster in PRO, COPY 1, 143 folio 165. The battle over water eventually led to the establishment of the Metropolitan Water Board in 1902, a Conservative triumph that included representatives from outer and inner London on the board, with favourable terms of arbitration for the companies, defeating the hopes of liberal reformers hoping for a municipal management of the water supply in the hands of the London County Council; see Mukhopoadhyay, Water Supply, chs. 3, 4. For ratepayers’ associations’ growing rebelliousness, see Avner Offer, Property and Politics, 1870-1914: Landownership, Law, Ideology and Urban Development in England (CUP, 1981), pp. 295 ff.

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Consumption, International Trade, and National Power

The early genealogy of the consumer in local water politics in Britain was marked by

distinctive features. It concerned a basic good and natural monopoly. It was a scarce, finite

good that raised questions of waste, not abundance. There were no individual market

transactions, nor (before the introduction of meters) was the price determined by the volume

of consumption. Users turned into consumers protesting as much about conditions of supply

as price, and called for entitlements and accountability, not choice. Consumers wanted

regulation and public control, not competition. Consumers, in short, acquired their voice in

an area of consumption that was not only different but outside the widening universe of

commodity culture – and it was this special status that gave Victorian reformers the

ideological ammunition to call for consumer protection and representation at a time of

dominant confidence in the superior workings of the market. The turn of the century added a

very different dynamic. Amidst trade and imperial rivalries and anxieties of racial and

national survival, consumption was now politicised via the international circulation of food

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and commodities in the domestic market. Consumption became a contested site in debates

about agricultural and trade policy and the relationship between citizenship and nationhood.

The politico-economic and cultural debates about Free Trade in Britain, protectionism in

Germany, and alien commodities in China can be seen as part of a global conjuncture. The

degree to which this conjuncture mobilised consumer identities, however, differed markedly

according to traditions of citizenship and rival social and national solidarities. Whereas the

consumer became a firmly established political and social voice in Britain before the First

World War, it remained underdeveloped and subordinate in imperial Germany, and was

stillborn in the Chinese case of commodity nationalism.

More than anything, it was the politics of Free Trade that established the consumer as

an identity and actor in Britain, especially through the popular campaigns of the Edwardian

years (1903-1910).99 References to the consumer were not altogether absent from the earlier

anti-corn law movement or debates about the public exhibition of commodities.100 The

dominant tropes, however, were still “the people” and the “douceur” of commerce, with the

merchant as the carrier of peace, prosperity, and civilisation. Liberals’ posthumous

popularisation of Bastiat’s Sophismes went some way to advance an image of consumers as

that of humanity.101 Edwardian politics made ‘the consumer’ an altogether more active,

ubiquitious character. Between the January and December 1910 elections one Free Trade

body alone organised 6,000 public meetings, magic-lantern lectures, and travelling exhibits,

offering lessons on how an import duty adversely affected consumers through the display

and representation of more expensive goods from protectionist countries. Women’s groups,

like the Women’s Cooperative Guild, which spoke on behalf of ‘the women with the basket’,

raised the status of consumers by invoking their civic dimension.

Consumption was a gendered subject, but this did not mean that consumption was the

preserve of women and production that of men. The two spheres were more open and fluid

99 For further discussion and references, see Frank Trentmann, ‘National Identity and Consumer Politics: Free Trade and Tariff Reform’in The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688-1914, eds. Patrick O’Brien and Donald Winch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 187-214.100 The inventor Charles Baggage argued (in vain) for the display of prices at the Great Exhibition, noting that ‘all men are consumers, and as such their common bond of interest is to purchase every thing in the cheapest market’, The Exposition of 1851 or, Views of the Industry, The Science, and the Government of England (London, 1851), p. 44. Contemporaries sometimes talked of ‘consuming nations’, not individuals or social groups.101 Sophismes Economiques (Paris, 1846), esp. p. 49. Bastiat’s What is Seen and What is not Seen: or, Political Economy in one lesson.appeared in newspapers and book form in 1859; Selections of his Sophisms and Essays on Political Economy went through several people’s editions in the 1870s-80s. Famously, Bastiat’s last recorded words on his deathbed in 1850 were ‘”We must learn to look at everything from the point of view of the consumer’”. As Charles Gide noted, such statements were politically stillborn since, after all, it was presumed that free competition would automatically make for consumers’ greatest satisfaction: ‘The consumer, like a king, has only to let himself be served.’ Gide, Political Economy (Cours d’Economie Politique) p. 700.

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than a model of a sexual division of labour would suggest.102 The cultural debate extended

from women in department stores to male shoppers and their changing sensibilities and

tastes. The political debate, too, remained open for national and male representations. In a

depiction of the vulnerable position of the consumer under protectionism, the Free Trade

Union depicted a troubled middle-class shopper standing in front of a shopwindow with

leathergoods at higher prices under tariff reform.103

Illustration 2: Bristol University Archive, DM 669 Free Trade Union, Leaflet no. 328, 24 Nov. 1909:

The strength of Free Trade rested partly on its ability to incorporate older and newer images

of the consumer. By the end of the campaign, Free Traders had moved beyond a fixation on 102 Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon. People, streets and images in nineteenth century London (New Haven & London, 2000).. Chris Breward, The Hidden Consumer; Mark Swiencicki, in Journal of Social History, 1998. Cohen, Consumer’s Republic, pp. . Cf. Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p.21. and pp. 277f. See also Lisa Tiersten, ‘Marrianne in the Department Store: Gender and the Politics of Consumption in turn-of-the-century Paris, ‘ in Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain (eds.), Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850-1939 (Aldershot, 1999); Sheryl Kroen, ‘Der Aufstieg des Kundenbürgers? Eine politische Allegorie für unsere Zeit’, in Prinz, Überfluss, esp. pp. 540-51.103 Bristol University Archive, DM 669 Free Trade Union, Leaflet no. 328, 24 Nov. 1909. See also ibid., leaflet no. 310. Note, again the consumer here is not necessarily the end user, as some of the gloves and shoes on display are ladies’ articles. It is debatable whether, because of the language of separate spheres, the consumer became fixed on women, as Furlough has argued, Consumer Cooperation, pp. 20 ff., 219 ff; note, e.g., the 1893 cooperative illustration of the male ‘pauvre consommateur’ crushed by the weight of overcharging retailers and wholesalers, ibid., p87. In France, Hubertine Auclert, argued in 1908 (Le vote des femmes) that women as producers and consumers should have the vote because they were taxed, see Auslander, p. 296; Similarly in the United States, J. W. Sullivan, Markets for the People: The Consumer’s Part (New York; Macmillan 1913), addresses male and female consumers. See also the photos of the man examining a shirt, representing the ‘American consumer’, in Building America, II, 6 (March 1937), p.3.

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necessities (the cheap loaf) to a broader display of goods, ranging from basic foodstuffs to

branded goods and clothing for different social groups. At the same time, discussions on how

duties were paid by the ‘home consumer’ rather than the foreigner grouped all Britons

together. Free Trade businessmen, like Alfred Mond, the chemical industrialist, emphasised

how industries were consumers just as ordinary Britons and equally threatened by

protectionist duties. In contrast to the earlier tradition of the consumer, with its persona of

the propertied rate-payer and its emphasis on finite utilities, the consumer now had become

an integral part of society and politics, whose interests were tied to Free Trade in virtually all

spheres of the economy and whose civic consciousness was considered integral to Britain as

a civil society.

There was nothing inevitable about the coming together of this synapse of consumer

politics. Mass politics and debates about the standard of living and the costs and benefits of

trade regulation were features of many societies at the turn of the twentieth century without

producing a strong identity of the consumer. Across Europe, the consumption and saving

habits of different social groups became a central topic of social investigation.104 In Imperial

Germany, a public agitation about inflated prices (Teuerung) led to growing opposition to

agricultural protection. The milk wars, butter boycotts, and protests against dear meat

between 1905-12 articulated a new sense of entitlement to an improving standard of living

amongst blue and white-collar workers and parts of the middle classes. Social democrats and

women’s groups began to mobilise against price increases in 1905. By 1912 the Christian

trades unions had swung from earlier support to oppose the protectionist regime. Yet social

groups and political parties were slow to develop a unifying language of the consumer and,

instead, were concerned mainly with the ‘Konsumkraft’ of their respective social

constituencies. Contemporaries bemoaned the ‘”pure consumer point of view”’ of the lower

middle classes (neuer Mittelstand). Even national-liberal advocates for this group separated

salaried employees as ‘”first of all consumers”’ from the rest of the middle classes rather

than stressing shared, public interests.105 The consumer was still far from representing the

104 Rowntree; Pound; Erhebung von Wirtschaftsrechnungen minderbemittelter Familien im Deutschen Reiche. Bearb. Im Kaiserlichen Statistischen Amte, Berlin 1909 (Reichs-Arbeitsblatt, 2. Sonderheft); Maurice Halbwachs, La classe ouvriere et les niveaux de vie (Paris, 1912). Reinhard Spree, ‘Knappheit und differentieller Konsum wahrend des ersten Drittels des 20. Jahrhunderts in Deutshcland’, in Hansjorg Siegenthaler, ed., Ressourcenverknappung als Problem der Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Schriften des Vereins fur Socialpolitik, Vol. 192 (Berlin: Duncker & Humboldt, 1990), 171-221105 ‘”Nurkonsumentenstandpunkt”’, ‘”erster Linie Konsumenten’”, Patzig, 1905, cit. in Nonn, Verbraucherprotest, pp. 76, 78. As late as 1934 Arthur Feiler noted that ‘[f]or a long time, in Germany at least, the best means of discrediting some measure of economic policy in the opinion of the public was to argue that it was “consumer’s policy” only. Such an argument is still effective to a great extent’, ‘The Consumer in Economic Policy’, in Social Research 1:1/4 (1934), p.287.

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nation. Women’s shopper or consumer leagues also spread to Imperial Germany from

Britain, France and America, but here too, a more universal, inclusive identity of the

consumer was underdeveloped and the emphasis was on socially responsible consumption as

an instrument for improved work relations between employer and employee. 106 The

Hausfrauenverein remained sceptical of the language and identity of the consumer and,

instead, presented itself as a corporate organisation of women in charge of managing and

preparing goods as much as purchasing them.107

In China consumption moved to the centre of popular politics in the context of weak

state power and militant patriotism. From 1900 until 1931, there was a steady series of

campaigns for the recovery of sovereign rights, directed first against Russia and the United

States, then against Japan, that involved anti-imperialist boycotts and exhibits promoting the

use of national products. In a state which had lost the power to control imports, cultural

politics came to substitute state sovereignty and trade policy. Material culture became central

to the project of reinvigorating the Chinese nation.108 For bodies like the National Products

Preservation Association, Gerth has shown, ‘material culture such as fabrics and clothing

styles played a direct role in connecting individuals to the nation: individual bodies were key

sites of a national symbology and hence for the construction of modern Chinese nationalism

as such.’109 The use of goods as national symbols was an integral part of consumption

debates elsewhere, such as the patriotic iconography of the British white loaf of freedom.

Yet while the British consumer’s interest was in the cheapness and purity of the article

rather than its origin (foreign wheat), the Chinese campaign after the 1911 Revolution

focused on product-nationality (not style or price). Reforming consumption styles, by

organised resistance to foreign goods and by promoting national products, was seen as

essential to overcoming national humiliation and building strong Chinese citizens. In Groups

of Ten for National Salvation members pledged their lives to forego the consumption of all

106 Elisabeth von Knebel-Doeberitz, “Die Aufgabe und Pflicht der Frau als Konsument”, in Hefte der Freien Kirchlich-Sozialen Konferenz, Heft 40 (Berlin, 1907), p. 41. For the large consumer leagues in the US, see Kathryn K. Sklar, ‘The Consumers’ White Label Campaign of the National Consumers’ League, 1898-1918,’, in Strasser, Judt, McGovern, Getting and Spending, pp. 17-35; for the smaller French Catholic league, Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel, ‘Aux Origines De La Consommation Engagée: La Ligue Sociale d’Acheteurs (1902-1914), Vingtieme Siecle. Revue D’Histoire, 77 (Jan-March 2003), 95-108.107 Beatrice Strauß, Die Konsumtionswirtschaft: Ihre Parallelentwicklung mit der Frauenberufsfrage (Leipzig, 1929), pp. 59-62; , the association of housewives had been formed in 1873,108 This is against a backdrop of comparatively high level of 18th and 19th century consumption patterns in several regions in China, see Pomeranz, Great Divergence, esp. ch. 3. 109 This paragraph draws on Karl Gerth’s important China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), quoted at p118, albeit with a different conclusion on consumer identity. Thanks to Karl Gerth for additional discussion of this material. I have not had time to contextualise this more within Chinese history, e.g. Sherman Cochran, Wakeman; Elizabeth Perry and others.

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imports. This economic nationalism was promoted by students, producers, and shopkeepers.

Millions of Chinese people passed through a network of nationalist commodity exhibits; the

largest complex, Hangzhous’s West Lake Exhibition, had eighteen million visitors in 1929.

The wise consumption of national products was seen as a duty of all citizens fighting for

national survival, but especially for women. The “‘determined use of national products’”

raised her status in the household to the equivalent of a commanding officer on the

battlefield ‘”kill[ing] the enemy for the country’”, as the Women’s National Products Year

of 1934 put it.110 Building a strong Chinese nation required more conscious habits of

consumption amongst the Chinese people, but the desired actor and identity was that of

‘citizen’, ‘compatriot’, or ‘Chinese People’ and ‘masses’. Accordingly, the groups promoting

commodity nationalism formed Citizens Associations, not consumer associations.111 The

consumer was stillborn.

The contrasting forms in which consumption was politicised in these countries and

the different space it created for an articulate consumer identity are suggestive about the

contingent and diverse trajectories of the consumer in modernity. Commodity culture played

an increasingly important part in all three societies in this earlier period of globalisation, but

it was negotiated and contested through different social and political traditions that mapped

consumption practices onto different social identities. One favourable condition for the

creation of a consumer identity, these cases suggest, is a comparatively early erosion of rival

social identities based on estates, work, or corporation. By the late nineteenth century,

workers in Britain and America had largely accepted the reality of wage labour and given up

earlier ideals of artisanal, corporate, or republican independence.112 It is in this indirect way

that an early commercialisation of society, as in Britain, created room for the consumer.

Whereas in water politics consumers still remained tied to property, in Free Trade people

more generally had become recognised as consumers with a stake in society and polity.

Where corporate and landed identities remained stronger and were seen as commensurate

with the national interest, by contrast, the place for the consumer was more limited. In

Germany, it was not until after the defeat of Nazism, in the context of social markets, that a

more inclusive, positive consumer became an attractive cultural vehicle of national

refashioning.113 Early twentieth-century Japan, Korea, and India are different variations on 110 Cit., in Gerth, p. 296.111 See the references in Gerth, pp. 103, 105, 139, 175, 239, 253. ‘Consumer’ (xiaofeiren) was rarely used. 112 Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997).113 Erica Carter, How German is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (USA, 1997).. The new cultural ascendancy of the consumer in the 1950s, however, did not create any

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this theme. In Japan, consumption remained culturally and politically suspect: individuals

were expected to contribute to the economic and military strength of the nation through

saving, not spending.114 In India, the campaign to promote khadi turned to indigenous craft

and consumption practices for moral and sexual cleansing to create conscious nationals in a

more self-sufficient community.115 Unlike in China, the consumption of swadeshi goods was

a pronounced turn against a modernity defined by commodity culture, requiring less

consumption altogether. The scope for consumer solidarity remained correspondingly

limited. Whereas Free Traders and international cooperators upgraded the consumer to an

internationalist identity, as a unifying human link between societies, the politicisation of

consumption in nationalist traditions favoured identities of citizens in territorially-bounded

interdependence.

Attention to social and political traditions also suggests that the degree of

commodification might account less for the strength of the consumer in the modern period

than conventionally thought. The early campaigns over water and gas provision indicate that

the identity formation of consumers need not take place in proper commercial market

settings. Paradoxically, moreover, it was Free Traders’ ambivalence towards modern

commodity culture rather than their consumerist embrace of it that provided the consumer

with the necessary cultural and political legitimacy to enter public debate as a confident

social group – without either being subordinated to “larger” interests or marginalized as yet

another separate interest. The initial focus on necessaries and taxed goods – not preferences

or purchasing power in general – was crucial because it allowed the construction of an

organic public interest around taxpayers (propertied ratepayers and private and commercial

consumers threatened with indirect protectionist taxes). In politics (high and low), the

consumer could thus emerge as a moral citizen, kept largely distinct from the increasingly

commercialised world of goods and services, department stores and leisure, as well as from

the faceless utilitarian abstraction emerging in economic theory. Politics was not immune

from this expanding world of consumption, which through new commercial spaces, like the

department store and tea-rooms, for example, facilitated middle class women’s entry into

institutionalised recognition of the consumer as political actor, as Ludwig Erhard relied on markets and competition policy; Harm Schröter…. in Hartmut Berghoff, ed., Konsumpolitik: Die Regulierung des Privaten Verbrauchs im 20. Jahrhundert (Goettingen, 1999)., pp.114 Sheldon Garon, "Luruxy is the Enemy: Mobilizing Savings and Popularizing Thrift in Wartime Japan," Journal of Japanese Studies 26 (2000). See also the notes in Patricia Maclachlan and Frank Trentmann, ‘Civilising Markets: Traditions of Consumer Politics in Twentieth-Century Britain, Japan, and the United States’in Markets in Historical Contexts, chapter 9; Laura Nelson, Measured Excess; Garon and Maclachlan, forthcoming.115 Lisa Trivedi, "Visually Mapping the "Nation": Swadishi Politics in Nationalist India, 1920-1930," The Journal of Asian Studies 62 (2003)..

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public spaces. 116 At the same time, it is noticeable how different the identity of the consumer

favoured in political culture and social movements remained. Consumers here were citizens

with a social conscience and with limited needs, not the flâneur or flâneuse exploring the

infinite desires and phantasies of their selves; political debate remained largely fixed on

basic goods which were exhibited in old-fashioned retail shop windows. In political

discourse and social mobilisation, the consumer in Britain was thus able to contain and

withstand the charge of being a selfish, apatriotic individual whose obsessions with universal

cheapness eroded the collective good, a powerful charge on the continent.117 Materialism and

the social polarisation that came with it were viewed as the products of protectionism, as in

the United States and Germany. In the context of British political culture, then, invoking the

consumer did not lead to anxieties of social and moral disintegration of the same order as

those well-documented in continental debates about consumption’s softening or effeminising

dangers or by contemporaries worried about mass consumption’s threat to social hierarchies

and cultural order.118 Lord James of Hereford told the annual demonstration of the Free

Trade Union in 1910 that ‘[h]e would willingly, under all circumstances, range himself on

the side of the consumers. First, because they were the more numerous; but also because the

producers, or one class of producers, represented wealth, to which he did not care to add,

while the consumers for the most part could not afford to pay more than they did.’119 Clearly,

Lord James bracketed a wide range of consumption practices, such as music halls, fashion,

visits to the seaside, motorcars etc. The consumer, then, was inclusive and exclusive at the

same time. The consumer now referred to the majority of people but it also limited attention

to a still fairly narrow scope of provision (rather than a much larger world of commodified

practices).

The second distinctive feature of Free Trade was that it eschewed any claim for a

direct representation of the consumer interest. In Britain the argument for public controls and

consumer representation developed over water co-existed with an underdeveloped view of

116 Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure.117 Attacks on the consumer from this direction were confined to smaller socialist groups, see Frank Trentmann, ‘Wealth versus Welfare’, pp. 118 Auslander, book; Note, a national economist like Oldenberg argued that an advancing increase in consumer needs tended to diminish social inequalities over time because it would disproportinally harm the richer classes most heavily engulfed in a wasteful pursuit of distinction, p.119. More generally, this fear of consumption as a solvent of moral and social hierarchies may account for conservatives’ suspicion of the consumer, a fear much more pronounced on the continent than in Britain. Note, for example, the neo-conservative Hans Freyer who in his Theorie des gegenwaertigen Zeitalters (1955) observed how the consumer (Verbraucher) was being proletarianisied as needs were no longer tied to rank or role in society, a recognition that suggest just how late the consumer acquired more universal characteristics in Germany. 119 The Free Trader, p. 135, my emphasis.

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the state and consumer representation in Free Trade politics more generally. Both mobilised

consumers around ‘necessity’. But whereas ideas of a ‘water parliament’ emerged in

response to market failure and weak regulation in the case of a natural monopoly, the

consumer interest in Free Trade was premised on it working effectively as a substitute

competition policy preventing monopoly and trusts from emerging in the economy at large.

Consumers were thus able to avoid the charge of being just another vested interest seeking

institutional power. A strong view of liberal representation and civil society was the other

side of the coin of this soft view of the state. Liberals saw the House of Commons as a kind

of virtual representation for all consumers – representing the interests of all taxpayers

whether enfranchised or not -- that preserved the contemporary ideal of the ‘purity of

politics’, in which reasoned deliberation of common interests kept sectional interests out of

the political process. Organised consumers, like the cooperatives, were willing partners in

this self-denying view of the state. Cooperative women, who yet had to gain the national

vote, saw Free Trade as a favourable environment in which they, as consumers in their own

organisations, acquired the knowledge and ethics of responsible citizens. By instilling a

sense of social conscience amongst consumers, these self-governing societies would

ultimately also moralise the market by putting social need before profit-motive.120 Civil

society, then, was not merely a favourable infrastructure for consumer politics but part of the

belief and tradition that made it thinkable, creating a synapse between consumer and citizen.

Instead of picturing a natural synergy between the consumer, individualism, and

neoclassical economics, as has become frequent since the mid-twentieth century, it is vital to

retrieve this earlier moment of civil society, and, more generally, to appreciate the collective

social and political dimensions of the consumer. Next to the citizen-consumer in Free Trade,

we can also think here of the consumer leagues that sprang up in America and continental

Europe in the 1890s, with their emphasis on the social responsibility of consumers to shop

wisely and with a view to the greater welfare of workers and small traders, by refraining

from shopping after 8pm, by paying in cash, by planning ahead, and by taming the impulse

(especially among young girls!) of buying shoddy, fashionable goods made by sweated

labour.121 We are here in a very different mental world of consumers from the much-debated

universe of hedonism, individualism, unlimited choice, or the city as 24-hour mall.

120 See Frank Trentmann, ‘Commerce, civil society, and the “citizen-consumer”, pp. 307-19.121 Von Knebel-Doeberitz, “Frau als Konsument”, 39-44. Cf., for America, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley.

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Social Ethics and Political Empowerment: Consumers Between State and Civil Society

The full populist consummation of the consumer happened in the First World War. The war

created an unprecedented consolidation of the consumer, from organised consumer boycotts

to state-sponsored institutionalisation and mobilisation, like the war committees of consumer

interests set up in Germany in December 1914.122 Scarcities were followed by more assertive

demands and mobilisation. Debates about economic controls and rationing set in motion a

process that would provide states and consumers with a much more transparent view of the

economy and businesses, all the way down to detailed accounts of prices, profits, supplies

and distribution of particular commodities. Subjects graduated from the war with an

elementary education of themselves as consumers and citizens. Rationalisation and

campaigns for thrift during wartime focused on the vital economic role of consumers in

national survival. From the perspective of economic planners, this placed a new ethical

responsibility on consumers: it was only through a cultural revolution of their habits and

values that society as a whole could break out of a system of economic and environmental

waste to advance to higher, more just and efficient level of civilisation.

The wartime imperative of economic planning now turned to consumers as vital if

compliant partners in the state’s project of a more rational, efficient, and equitable

reallocation of scarce resources. ‘Consumption’, Rathenau thus argued in 1916, ‘was not a

private affair but an affair of the community, the state, ethics and humanity’. 123 Modern

citizens needed to overcome their ‘crazy hunger for commodities’ that was responsible for a

misallocation of natural resources. Overcoming waste -- through a mixture of consumption

taxes and import controls that would create more conscious consumer behaviour and by

eliminating middlemen -- would result in a more productive nation and a social saving that,

in turn, would increase the consumption share of the population as a whole and finance a

strong state capable of releasing collective resources for higher forms of cultural

consumption. For organised consumers across Europe, the suffering and responsibilities

placed on them during wartime, focused new attention on state institutions. The demand for

consumer councils and an attack on profiteering corporations and middlemen was its

political articulation.124 The demand for state controls to provide consumers with a stable

122 On the Kriegsausschuesse fuer Konsumenteninteressen, see Robert Schloesser’s Denkschrift, Konsumentenkammern (Cologne, 1916). Note here, for him the consumer was not yet everyone but now referred to people who had an overwhelming interest in consumption. The privatisation of the consumer was not yet complete in Weimar Germany, where industrial users and coal dealers, for example, posed as a consumer interest in the Coal Council; Feiler, ‘Consumer in Economic Policy,’ 296.123 Walther Rathenau, Von Kommenden Dingen (Berlin, 1917), pp. 39, 90, 131ff; written in summer of 1916.124 An advisory council was introduced in Britain in the latter stages of the war, and consumers were represented in the National Economic Council in post-war Germany; while consumer organisations also gained

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supply of commodities was its policy implication.125 It left its imprint on inter-war consumer

politics, with consumers now using ‘rights’ talk – advocating mechanisms of secure

provision and regulation, instead of cheapness and freedom of trade.

The maturing of the consumer during and after the First World War was inextricably

tied to the development of the state and welfare policies, and first the redefinition and then

displacement of civil society by the development of ‘social citizenship.’ As nineteenth-

century battles over the public control of basic goods suggest, this twentieth century story

had historical antecedents. But the consumer politics of war and welfare were more than just

gas and water socialism writ large. For one, the consumer was now increasingly only a

private individual citizen or end user – the earlier inclusion of commercial or collective users

becomes rare (though still traceable in some national politics like in Weimar corporatism).

Investing the consumer with socio-economic rights was the other side of the coin of the

state’s demands on its citizens as soldiers and patriotic mothers. State planning opened up

new social and economic tasks and identities for the consumer. In his ‘middle way’ between

fascism and communism, Harold Macmillan advocated a programme of economic

reconstruction that would guarantee a minimum standard of life to all households ‘whether

the consumer is in or out of work.’126 When design materials were exhibited for use in

elementary schools in London’s County Hall in 1936, the Council for Art and Industry urged

local education authorities to remember, ‘even where it conflicts with a strict economy…that

they are educating the future consumer; and may be setting a standard for industry in the

next generation.’127 For the world as a whole, internationalists in the 1930s expected

consumers to play a key role in the programme of ‘economic appeasement’ and international

peace by reducing excess production.128 To some consumers were the last defence against

totalitarianism. In the United States, Horace Kallen, who had sat at the feet of William

James, argued in the Decline and Rise of the Consumer (1936) that human beings were born

consumers and only became producers under coercion. ‘[T]he consumer in them’ could be

repressed but was indestructible and ‘will push toward the open day of plenty and freedom

which have been the privilege of a few.’ To preserve humanity it was necessary to develop

representation at the state level, as in Hamburg in 1923. For the anti-semitic attack on profiteers in Germany, see M. Geyer, ‘ ‘. The anti-corporate bias of consumer groups in the United States in the 1930s also fed on war and post-war grievances against profiteering.125 See, Frank Trentmann, ‘‘Bread, Milk, and Democracy’, in Politics of Consumption, pp. 129-63; Christoph Nonn, in Berghoff.126 Harold Macmillan, The Middle Way (1938). 127 The Times, 24 Dec. 1936, p. 9. See also Marie J. Dollard, ‘Developing the Intelligent Consumer of Art,’ Design, 37:7 (Jan. 1936), 28.128 E.g., MacDougall and Lloyd. League of Nations.

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the full personality of consumers, for their ‘cultural spirit, their personal disposition, their

social attack, their economic method must oppose themselves in unmistakable contrast to

those of the duces, Fuehrers and commissars of the Facsist, Nazi and Communist cults as

well as those of the captains of industry and finance of the capitalist economy.’129 Here was a

pre-consumerist conception of the trinity between consumption, freedom, and American

leadership that would mutate into more materialist features and become an export staple

during the cold war.130

Yet the state could be the consumer’s rival, as well as an ally. As a new state

apparatus and new centralism displaced agencies of civil society and localist accountability,

the citizen-consumer stood in danger of being reduced into a passive recipient of social and

industrial policy. Consumer movements and thinkers responded in different ways to these

challenges, but two dimensions deserve attention: the revision of the consumer-citizen and

the connection between a new social ethics with considerations of price, quality, and values.

As the relationship between civil society and state shifted, the fairly organic and

uncomplicated equation of the consumer as citizen of pre-war years was called into question.

Beatrice Webb’s The Discovery of the Consumer (1928) offers one window on how

contemporaries sought to resolve this implicit tension between consumers in civil society

and state. ‘There may be significance’, she observes, ‘in the fact that during the same century

in which these voluntary organisations of consumers have taken so great and so widespread a

development, the compulsory organisation of citizens that we know as government has

largely changed in form and in function, so as to approximate, more or less, to an

Association of Consumers’. Old states had been based on vocational castes and tended

towards military aggression requiring ‘arbitrary taxation’. In the course of democratisation,

by contrast, ‘the nation comes very near to becoming ….an Association of consumers’, as

‘the central government, carrying out the common will of the citizens, conveys their letters

and parcels; transports their goods and themselves by railway, canal or steamship; provides

for them news and entertainment by “wireless”; supplies for them a thousand and one

129 Horace M. Kallen, The Decline and Rise of the Consumer: A Philosophy of Consumer Coöperation (London and New York, 1936), pp. 14f., 94. In Germany, neo-liberals’ reaction to totalitarianism also upgraded the positive contribution of the ‘consuming desires of consumers’ – Like Kallen, Roepke in 1942 saw the danger of totalitarian states in their attempt to emancipate themselves from consumers; Die Gesellschaftskrise der Gegenwart (1942).130 See Cohen, Consumer’s Republic; for its uneven insertion in competing models in Europe, see Kroen, ‘Der Aufstieg des Kundenbürgers?’, in Prinz, Überfluss, esp. pp. 554-64; Hilton, Consumerism; Beauchamp, “American Models”, in Bevir and Trentmann, Critiques of Capital, pp. 127-150.

36


common requirements, from medical attendance at birth to burial at death, together with

museums, libraries, picture galleries, music, and dramatic performances during life.’131

The question was, how close was the state to resemble an association of consumers,

like the cooperatives, before undermining a community of citizens? Webb had long

appreciated the flow of civic awareness and citizenship coming out of the cooperatives,

nursing a practice of ‘democratic self-government’.132 Yet would there be a similar flow of

strengthened democratic sentiment and practice if consumer representation was placed at the

centre of the state? Partly this was a problem of size: it was wishful thinking that millions of

people sending letters ‘could be marshalled into effective democracy for controlling the

management of the post’.133 Partly, most social services consumed carried a problem of

asymmetry between the minority that used them and the community that paid for them.134

She argued that ‘[t]he suppression of nuisances, the enforcement of universal schooling, and

the general convenience of making some services free (which involves payment by

compulsory levies irrespective of the use of such services) seem to require an association not

of consumers, but of citizens, adhesion to which cannot be left merely optional.’135 There had

to be an enforceable standard of a ‘national minimum of civilised life’ for the community as

a whole. Municipal government was ‘advantageous for the election of representatives and

the levying of taxation’, as well as providing citizens with a fixed sense of belonging. She

could not see how it would be possible to ‘endow obligatory associations of citizens with the

freedom and elasticity of co-operative societies without leading either to injustice and

oppression or to endless litigation.’136

The unprecedented attention to the consumer in questions of citizenship also

reflected the increasingly ambitious and diversified field of practices that was absorbed into

the identity of the consumer – a process of expansion that began in the late nineteenth

century. Charles Gide in fin de siecle France expanded its scope to include ‘houses, gardens,

money, furniture, curios’. 137 The consumer’s interest moved beyond necessity, though this

did not mean it necessarily pointed to affluence or consumerism. Gide noted possibilities for

131 Beatrice Webb, The Discovery of the Consumer, (London: Ernest Benn, 1928), pp. 4f.132 Ibid., p. 22.133 Ibid., p.23.134 Webb’s example, it may be interesting to note, was healthcare, a subject that under New Labour is now moving fast in the direction of markets, consumers, and choice.135 Ibid., p.25.136 Ibid., p.26.137 Gide, Political Economy(Cours d’Economie Politique), pp. 700f. In French, the older meaning of consumption had a less destructive meaning and there are early 19th century references to the ‘consommateur’ as someone who perfects things, see Furlough, Consumer Cooperation, p. 200.

37


recycling and imagined an ideal state of consumption where goods never wore out; in the

United States, Patten looked towards a wiser use of natural resources. The consumer interest

expanded to health, housing, leisure, and collective forms of consumption. Cooperatives

spoke of being ‘”consumers of health’” in France in the 1920s and amongst consumer

activities la cooperation nouvelle covered free holidays for children and families. Consumers

were now bourgeois and petit bourgeois as well as workers and farmers.138 By 1936, the

British Institute of Adult Education was investigating ‘The Consumer’s View of Adult

Education.’139 In the United States, college and secondary school courses in consumption

included medical care and the purchases of services as well as food and clothing,

automobiles and electrical appliances.140 In federal government, the Consumers’ Division

identified housing as a critical issue for ‘John Public – the consumer.’141 The enrichment of

the social body and practice of the consumer, then, was well under way in the 1920s and

early 1930s and a precursor as much as a response to economists’ and government’s

discovery of the consumer as the crucial engine of wealth and full employment. In 1934, two

years before J.M. Keynes’ General Theory, Punch (only slightly) caricatured the new public

status of the consumer that put the consumer on par with the worker, indeed associated its

function with work. When asked by a ‘kind old Bishop’ how he intended to ‘help Society’s

plan’, the ‘bright-haired lad replied’: ‘I want to be a Consumer…I’ve never had aims of a

selfish sort, For that, as I know, is wrong. I want to be a Consumer, Sir. And help the world

along…. I want to be a Consumer/And work both night and day… There are too many

people working/And too many things are made. I want to be a Consumer, Sir, and help to

further Trade.’142

The New Deal created a very different political synapse of the citizen-consumers

from earlier traditions, combining an economic model of growth through increased

purchasing power with a democratic model of mobilising consumers as citizens in and

through the state. Consumer advisers in federal government solicited and energised the

consumer voice in the localities, as in the spread of local consumer committees.143 Whereas 138 Furlough, Consumer Cooperation, pp. 275 ff. See also Gary Cross, Time and Money.139 W. E. Williams and A. E. Heath, Learn to Live: The Consumer’s View of Adult Education (London: Methuen, 1936), a study of students at Ruskin College and the W.E.A., co-funded by the Carnegie Corporation.140 Though with slightly lesser frequency, see Henry Harap, ‘Survey of Twenty-Eight Courses in Consumption’, in The School Review (Sept. 1937), pp. 497-507; James E. Mendenhall and C. Maurice Wieting, ‘Consumer Education Through the Curriculum’, Journal of Educational Sociology, XI, 7 (March 1938), 398-404.141 The Consumer, no. 3, 15 November 1935, p. 11; 1/5 to ¼ of ‘everyman’s income’ went on housing. This broader public definition of the consumer went alongside an explicit rejection of an older tradition in women’s movements to present the consumer as the women with the basket. 142 Punch, or the London Charivari, 25 April 1934, p. 467.143 Meg Jacobs, "'How about some meat': the Office of Price Administration, consumption politics, and state building from the bottom up, 1941-1946," The Journal of American History 84 (1997).

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in Free Trade, the public identity of the consumer was anchored in a basic range of goods,

the New Deal now expanded it to cover everything from food quality to inefficient machines

and corporate structure, since all of these affected the quantity, quality, and cost of goods.

Recent work has explored how after the Depression the economic power of consumers

became a vehicle for a public project of safeguarding the general good, in competition with

what Liz Cohen has called the more individualist commercial project of the ‘purchaser

consumer’ that came to dominate after World War Two.144 Attention has been on consumer

rights and activism and the embrace of the ‘citizen consumer’ within parts of the state. A

second strand has traced the more technocratic concept of the rational consumer through

organisations like Consumers’ Research and their strategy of countervailing power.145 Here I

want to briefly tease out an ethical dimension of normative practice that formed part of the

background knowledge to this public accreditation of individual purchasing.

The development of the rational consumer had as much to do with an ethical

conception of how individual consumers made their decisions as with material interest or an

institutional critique of corporations. For the burgeoning home economics and consumer

education movement, ethics and choice were symbiotic. By the 1930s the American Home

Economics Association (1899) had 12,000 members. By 1928 there were already 322 four-

year degree granting programmes producing 37,619 majors. Secondary schools and women’s

clubs carried an ever-increasing number of courses and study guides. One author of key texts

was Hazel Kyrk, the influential home economist at the University of Chicago.146 For Kyrk

the goal was to teach the consumer to ‘consult his individual need, to form his own

judgements, to desire for himself and to respect in others a creative, experimental attitude

toward the various means that are offered him for the enhancement of his health and

comfort, or the enrichment of his experience.’ Fostering ‘wise consumption choices’ did not

144 Cohen, Consumer’s Republic.145 Lawrence Glickman, "The strike in the temple of consumption: consumer activism and twentieth-century American political culture," The Journal of American History 88 (2001).; Hayagreeva Rao, "Caveat Emptor: the construction of nonprofit consumer watchdog organizations," American Journal of Sociology 103 (1998).; C. Beauchamp, “Getting Your Money’s Worth: American Models for the Remaking of the Consumer Interest in Britain, 1930s-1960s”, in M. Bevir and F. Trentmann, eds., Critiques of Capital in Modern Britain and America: Transatlantic Exchanges 1800 to the Present Day (Basingstoke and New York, 2002), pp. 127-150; M. Hilton, ‘The Fable of the Sheep’, Past and Present, 174 (2002), esp. pp. 229ff., and Hilton, Consumerism.146 Numbers in Marjorie East, Home Economics: Past, Present, and Future (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1980), p.48; Harap, ‘Courses in Consumption’; Bader and Wernette ‘Consumer Movements and Business,’, The Journal of Marketing, III 1 (July 1938), p. 10. Kyrk’s was one of three books singled out by Frances W. Inenfeldt in ‘Teaching Consumer Buying in the Secondary School’, Journal of Home Economics, XXVI, 5 (1934), 280, and regularly on the recommended list of educational literature on the subject. Another standard college text was Benjamin Andrews’ Economics of the Household, first published in 1923 – Andrews became ‘chairman of thrift in the department of agriculture and saw the family as a spiritual consuming unit as much as a material one.

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concern only goods necessary for personal comfort, health, and education but also hobbies,

culture, and beauty and the fostering of social intercourse ‘for the sake of friendliness and

affection, or for the sake of mental stimulation and experience.’ Kyrk’s distinguished

between a ‘consumer’ and a ‘buyer’. The first was concerned with the evaluation of choices

and the setting of standards, the latter with efficient purchasing decisions. Importantly, these

were not rival social models but stages in the individual practice of consumption. The

‘buyer’ was about the ‘technology of consumption’: exercising choice, saving money and

time, and securing a fair price necessary to keep labour and capital fully employed. The

consumer was about cultivating tastes and forming new concepts of need. It concerned

‘questions of motives, of values, of ends.’147

Kyrk’s work reflects how broad and interdisciplinary the intellectual sources behind

the consumer remained in the inter-war years. The main intellectual inspiration for Kyrk and

many consumer advocates was John Dewey’s philosophy of studying and teaching

knowledge through practice. In her prize-winning Theory of Consumption (1923), Kyrk

demolished Jevons’ theory of economics as a mere theory of exchange value that failed to

offer any understanding of the attitudes that lay behind choice. Individuals did not have free

choice nor were they rational maximisers, but neither were they passive minds. Kyrk drew

on philosophy, social and functional psychology, and, in particular, Dewey’s critique of the

utilitarian model in developing a notion of an active consumer. All psychical life was ‘in

some sense a choosing’. Values and actions determined each other. Value was not a question

of the magnitude of feelings, as in neo-classical economics, nor was it located in the object.

It was about individual will and the social organisation of values. Empowering consumers,

therefore, needed to begin with reflections on higher values and new ideals and purposes.

Freedom of choice would let individuals develop the personal and social ethics of the

community through their own wise choices. It is no coincidence that Dewey became one of

the co-founders of the League for Independent Political Action in 1929 which stressed the

affinities between consumer and citizen. By the 1930s, questions of value, the position of the

consumer in society, and educational theory were as familiar in consumer education as

technical subjects of labelling, quality, and price. A culture of thrift was being eroded, but

instead of being swamped by a culture of abundance or consumerism, it was also being

channelled into a social ethics of consumption.

147 Hazel Kyrk, Economic Problems of the Family (New York and London, 1933 1st ed 1929), p. 396., esp. chs xix, xxii, xxiii, cit. at 393, 396.

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Conclusion: Consumers Before and After Neo-Liberalism

This essay has presented a new genealogy of the consumer before the periods of mass

consumption and consumerism. The elusive consumer, with which we began our exploration

reading against the grain of the dominant narratives of modern consumption and consumer

societies, also provides a concluding point of reflection. Significantly, consumer advocates

like Hazel Kyrk and subsequent generations set out with a self-critical awareness of the

contingent and elusive nature of the consumer as subject and object. Unlike many academic

commentators, who have used the consumer as a fixed or given category, most consumer

movements have worked to create, mould, and reflect on the changing modes social and self-

identification. Consumers, Kyrk emphasized, were no easily identifiable separate group:

‘consumers are simply the general public’. ‘Try to lay your hands upon the general public

and it has disappeared or is non-existent. The consumer from being every one seems to be no

one.’148 Taking the consumer seriously as a historical actor and category in this sense, with a

changing sense of consciousness, identity, social body and political orientation raises larger

questions for standard interpretations of modernity and consumption as well as for the

treatment of consumers in the public debate to-day. These questions concern chronology,

causation, and convergence. There can be little doubt of the growing importance of

consumption in human relations and people’s understanding of their selves and the world

around them in the modern period. Yet, the increased amount and velocity of consumption

did not automatically create consumers either as an identity or social category of ascription.

This transformation was a historical not a natural process and it required actors working

through traditions and adapting their beliefs in changing circumstances to a set of new

categories and identities. Most interpreters of ‘consumer revolutions’ and commodity culture

have instinctively relied on an essentialist category of the consumer, but while this procedure

may yield insights into goods, symbols, their distribution and economic consequences, it is

less revealing for the self-identification of the actors themselves. To follow the historical

consumer requires the mental leap of leaving behind the instinctive assumption that any user

of commercial commodities and services naturally is a consumer, an assumption that says

more about us than about past actors, and, indeed, can be said to be a result of the historical

evolution of the consumer (not its explanation). Commodity consumption and the consumer

need to be decoupled – it is only then that we can identify particular moments and

148 Hazel Kyrk, A Theory of Consumption (London, 1923), pp. 1f. which won the first prize, $1000, offered by Messr Hart, Schaffner & Marx, of Chicago.

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conjunctures where connections between the two histories were established, and where they

were bent or dissolved altogether.

Importantly, the birth of the consumer is a nineteenth-century story. It is marked by a

series of developments that sit uneasily between the early modern consumer revolutions –

with their emphasis on exotic goods, luxury, and a cult of sensibility – and the mid-twentieth

century stories of mass consumption or consumer society – with their fixation on affluence,

advertising, mass produced durables, and visions and dystopias of consumerism. The

material culture of consumption and the political culture of the consumer did not map onto

each other naturally or neatly. In Britain, basic utilities, like water, and basic taxed

necessaries were the consumer’s domain -- not the growing number of commercially traded

goods and services. Taxpayers, especially propertied male householders and commercial

users of utilities, were the first to speak up as consumers. Property was a vital ingredient in

the consumer’s self-definition. The mobilisation of the consumer as an image and social

movement in mid- and late-Victorian water politics reveals the liberal political traditions put

to work by aggrieved users starting grass-root consumer leagues. Consumer cooperation

adds a popular dimension to the expanding social universe of consumers, but the continued

importance of commercial consumers suggests that this story was not a simple linear

democratisation. Most importantly, however, it was actors in civil society who defined

themselves and others as consumers, like the consumer defence leagues, the shopping

leagues, Free Trade groups, and consumer education movements. There has been a long-

standing tendency in the social sciences to turn first to business, liberal economics,

advertising, and states to account for the dissemination of the consumer.149 Sociologists of

consumption are correct that people do not naturally view themselves as consumers when

using objects or services, 150 but this does not mean that actors did not develop distinct

consumer identities around particular forms of consumption until a recent discursive

popularisation of the term. Understanding consumption as practice, that is, the doings and

sayings that come when individuals consume, would be enriched by a more historicized

exploration of how and why certain actors crystallise certain forms of their dispersed

practice of consumption in an identity of consumers at particular moments but not at others.

Modernity created different openings for consumers in different political and cultural

spaces, depending on the role of nation, state, traditions of citizenship and social identities.

149 Williams, Keywords, pp. 78 f.; Adorno and Horkheimer; Galbraith; Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness.150 Alan Warde, ‘Theory of Practice’, p. 9. Consumption Theory Workshop, Oct. 2003, London, www.consume.bbk.ac.uk/publications.html.

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There is no universal history of the consumer, just as there is no essentialist consumer. The

prominence of the consumer as citizen in Edwardian Britain was a particular developmental

stage in the genealogy of the consumer in a liberal radical tradition. In societies with

corporate traditions and nation --or producer-oriented discourses of citizenship, like Imperial

Germany, the consumer was more marginal and more easily seen as a special interest. In

societies where the control of consumption became a means of overcoming weak statehood,

like China, the creation of the consumer as actor and identity was by-passed as national

consumption became the responsibility of patriotic citizens. Modern liberal traditions (not

republicanism though) allow for an easier development of consumer identity because of a

less territorially or corporately bounded sense of citizenship. The difficulty of users or

purchasers to think of themselves and agitate as consumers in societies like Japan for much

of this period has as much to do with the rigidity of pre-existing traditions, such as a concern

for the national polity (kokumin) and an organic identity of producer and patriot, as with the

negative cultural connotations of consumption (shôhi referring to extinction and waste) –

after all, it was around the waste of finite resources that consumers found a voice in

nineteenth century Britain, and have continued to do so amongst twentieth century green

consumers.

The genealogy of the consumer is not a linear story, nor does it converge. There is a

general observable expansion of the social body and set of practices (including social

services) appropriated by consumers in the early twentieth century – a trend long

foreshadowing the controversial inflation of the consumer in recent neo-liberal public policy.

Much of this expansion comes from within civil society – not markets, state, or corporations

– and hinges on notions of social ethics and civic empowerment. Citizenship and

consumption become more frequently linked, but actors in different settings created different

configurations working within different social and political traditions. In some, consumers

remained the distinct minority for whom consuming interests outweighed producing interests

(Germany). In others, like the United States during the New Deal, the consumer became the

public, including workers, and looked to the state to promote more efficient markets and

justice. As the transnational success of consumer leagues and cooperatives as well as the

dialogue between intellectuals, like Hobson, Veblen, Patten, and others suggest, these

societies were not self-sufficient, closed islands. Transnational exchange and reception

nonetheless works its way through largely national traditions.

Viewing the historical evolution of the consumer from these multiple positions may

open up some constructive perspectives in the current debate over the place of consumers.

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Much of the political and cultural debate in Europe, America, and Asia has become stuck in

a dichotomy defined in terms of the civic costs or benefits of neo-liberal consumerism.

Supporters present the introduction of market-style rational consumers in public services as a

way of empowering citizens and democratising public institutions as well as of creating

choice and efficiency. Critics warn that the sources and solidarities of citizenship themselves

will be unravelled by consumerism. It is tempting to see the history of the twentieth century

as a fall from grace of an earlier more civic-minded age of consumers, eroded by the power

of profit, markets, and individualism. The modern genealogy of the consumer suggests a

more cyclical and contingent story. There is no zero-sum game between market and politics.

Starting the comparison between past and present in the mid-nineteenth century, for

example, would reveal the importance of a small group of propertied men whose self-interest

fused with a sense of public accountability in very limited spheres of consumption in

contrast to a much larger spectrum of social movements speaking out on a vast range of

consumer interests to-day, including the interests of children, nutrition, the environment,

disadvantaged consumers and social exclusion as well as choice, regulation, and active

democracy. Starting the story in Britain in the decade before the First World War would

highlight a dominant consumer interest much more committed to freedom of trade than the

current landscape of consumer movements. Similarly in inter-war United States, freedom of

choice could be part of a social ethics of civic consumption – not necessarily its reverse.

Starting the story in alternative settings of commodified modernity, like early twentieth

century China and Japan, might suggest the rise rather than fall of more autonomous active

consumers not afraid to speak their name. It is fallacious to presume, as many

communitarian thinkers do, that because markets may have adverse civic consequences, the

praxis of consumption cannot also be utilised as a resource for strengthening a community of

citizens.

The problem faced by consumer movements and advocacy groups to-day may not

only concern the presumed implosion of the consumer into a generic rational economic actor

but the long-term explosion of an increasingly diverse set of consumers recognised to have

different interests and identities – from patients to shoppers, parents to children, credit card

and media consumers. Historically, consumer movements have been a driving force behind

this proliferation of constituents and referents. The ability to speak on behalf of the

consumer and articulate a public interest may stand in inverse relation to the ambition of

empowering a range of different consumer interests. With the decline of totalising

ideologies, civil society has expanded, but the shared political traditions that provided much

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of the glue for earlier consumer formation also has become diluted. The plurality of voices

disguises fundamental conflicts of interests and beliefs among and between these different

consumers. There is a risk that after earlier antinomies between consumer and monopoly,

consumer and producer, consumer and state, it may come to a clash of consumer versus

consumer.

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Pomeranz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and theMaking of the Modern World Economy (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Rao, Hayagreeva, 'Caveat Emptor: the construction of nonprofit consumer watchdog organizations', American Journal of Sociology 103, No. 4 (1998), 912-961.

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