¹ Douglas, Mary and Isherwood, Baron, The World of Goods (New York, 1979), 5Google Scholar.

² Brewer, John, ed., Consumption and Culture in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: A Bibliography (Los Angeles, 1991)Google Scholar. Although this is touted by the UCLA Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies as a bibliography of works on consumption in early modern Europe, the eager researcher should be warned that most of its entries are standard works of English social history that have little bearing on consumption or material culture. Caveat emptor!

³ McKendrick, Neil, Brewer, John, and Plumb, J. H., The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, 1982)Google Scholar.

⁴ This question of timing is still open. There is much evidence to support the thesis of an early and gradual evolution in consumption patterns; see for example, Hoskins, W. G., “The Rebuilding of Rural England, 1570–1640,” Past and Present, 4 (11 1953), 44–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Spufford, Margaret, The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty Chapmen and their Wares in the 17th Century (London, 1984)Google Scholar; and Thirsk, Joan, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar. But it is primarily evidence from inventories, and this renders it doubtful, for English inventories decrease sharply in quantity and quality after 1720. Therefore, few studies using them go beyond that date. On the Continent, where inventories extend into the nineteenth century, the late eighteenth century was a period of great change. This may be true in England as well.

⁵ Weatherill, , Consumer Behaviour, 167–83; 195–6Google Scholar; and Weatherill, Lorna, “Consumer Behaviour and Social Status in England, 1660–1750,” Continuity and Change, 1:2 (1986), 199–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Earle, Peter finds the same pattern in his magisterial study of London's middle classes, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (Berkeley, 1989), 299Google Scholar.

⁶ Historians largely rely on what inventories reveal about middle class homes to attack the social emulation thesis. Weatherill distinguishes between “frontstage” and “backstage” activities within households, frontstage being those open to public view and designed to impress, while backstage are those seen only by the family and contributing only to domestic comfort. She finds that the new household goods contributed to both. Clocks, for example, were frontstage, while the abundant cheap pottery that replaced scarce, expensive tinware in kitchens was backstage (Weatherill, , Consumer Behaviour, 9, 28–38Google Scholar; “Consumer Behaviour,” 204–7.) Stana Nenadic finds a similar mixture of motives behind the domestic interiors of the middle classes in eighteenth-century Edinburgh and Glasgow: A desire to impress inspired some of the decorations, but Nenadic also sees in them an attempt by the middle classes to impose order and rationality in their domestic as in their business lives, and (through family portraits, souvenirs, and gifts) an affirmation and strengthening of the ties of family and friendship (Stana Nenadic, “Material Consumption and Urban Domestic Culture: Edinburgh and Glasgow in the Eighteenth Century,” paper presented at the Clark Library for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1989.) As for gender roles, Shammas was the first to point out that more comfortable domestic interiors benefited women and may have resulted from their efforts (Shammas, Carole, “The Domestic Environment in England and America,” Journal of Social History, 14:1 (Fall, 1980), 3–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar). This is a major theme of Davidoff, Leonore and Hall, Catherine's study of gender roles among the middle classes: Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago, 1987), 357–88Google Scholar.

⁷ Shammas deals with consumer demand in colonial America as well as England; she is one of the few historians of consumption to attempt a comparative approach. But due to lack of space and my ignorance of colonial American historiography, I will limit my comments to her treatment of England.

⁸ Shammas is too good a social historian to neglect this entirely. She has wonderful passages showing how the elite enhanced its social dominance by controlling the consumption of the lower classes. Poor consumers often could not choose what they consumed because they received part of their wages in kind, and therefore they ate and wore what their masters chose for them. This helps explain why the sans-culottes pushed for freedom of dress during the French Revolution.

⁹ Historians of England tend to assume that it had the first, if not the only, consumer revolution. In fact that honor probably goes to the Dutch Republic, which experienced one in the midseventeenth century. See de Vries, Jan, “Peasant Demand Patterns and Economic Development: Friesland 1550–1750,” in Parker, W. N. and Jones, E. L., eds., European Peasants and their Markets (Princeton, 1975), 205–38Google Scholar; de Vries, Jan, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age, 1500–1700 (New Haven, 1976), 214–23Google Scholar; and Schama, Simon, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987), especially 289–372Google Scholar. France and other areas of western Europe also experienced consumer revolutions in the early modern period, although these differed from those of England and the Netherlands first in being later (late eighteenth century) and, second, in probably being confined to urban areas. For France, see Roche, Daniel, The People of Paris (Berkeley, 1987)Google Scholar; Pardailhé-Galabrun, Annik, La Naissance de l’intime: 3000 foyers parisiens, XVII^e–XVIII^e siècles (Paris, 1988)Google Scholar, and the scattered comments in volume 3 of Histoire de la France urbaine, La Ville classique de la Renaissance aux Revolutions, by Chartier, Roger et al. (Paris, 1981)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ The shift from the Medieval to the Renaissance style of elite consumption is charted in Goldthwaite, Richard A., “The Economic and Social World of Italian Renaissance Majolica,” Renaissance Quarterly, 42:1 (Spring 1989), 1–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The later period is covered by Burke, Peter, “Conspicuous Consumption in Seventeenth-Century Italy,” in his The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge, 1987), 132–49Google Scholar.

¹¹ See for example Hughes, Diane Owen, “Sumptuary Law and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy,” in Bossy, John, ed. Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West (Cambridge, 1986), 69–99Google Scholar.

¹² A pioneering attempt to define the difference between Protestant and Catholic attitudes toward consumption is Benedict, Philip, “Towards the Comparative Study of the Popular Market for Art: The Ownership of Paintings in Seventeenth-Century Metz,” Past and Present, 109 (11 1985), 100–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar, while Campbell, Colin's The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit ofModern Consumerism (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar is an extremely ingenious, although not entirely convincing, attempt to connect eighteenth-century English Protestantism to the rise of modern consumerism and hedonism.

Much work needs to be done on the Counter-Reformation, a crucial period of change in attitudes toward material objects and their ownership. The Counter-Reformation softened traditional warnings about the dangers of accumulation and encouraged the use of material objects like holy pictures and rosaries to stimulate devotion, but it also fostered a more interiorized, intellectual style of piety which discouraged attachment to material objects. French historians have begun to sort through these contradictions. See Pardailhé-Galabrun, , Naissance de l’intime, 437–49Google Scholar; and Bourgeon, Jean-Louis, “Les marchands parisiens et leur religion vers 1710,” in La France de l’ancien regime (Toulouse, 1984), 1:91–101Google Scholar.

¹³ This book is definitely economic history written by a social historian, anecdotal rather than statistical. Roche's numerous tables (all in simple percents) seem to be there to amuse rather than edify the reader. See for example Table 37, recording the occurrences of the themes of dress (and undress) in Casanova's Memoirs!

¹⁴ Elias, Norbert, The Court Society, Jephcott, Edmund, trans. (New York, 1983)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Roche points out that women played important roles in the fashion industry and the fashion press and that in the eighteenth century, for the first time, men's dress ceased to be ruled by fashion, leaving it the sole concern of women. He pictures this as a sort of compensation for women's declining legal and economic status.

Clearly by the nineteenth century, women were central to consumption, whether as makers of the middle-class home or makers and consumers of fashion. Was this also true in earlier periods? Certainly they, with their petty commerce, were major distributors of goods, as Shammas shows, but were they also major consumers? The language of consumption debates suggests that they were: Female vanity and extravagance are always blamed for the excesses of fashion. But was this true? Shammas argues that with their relatively restricted control over money and property, women probably had little influence over most consumption decisions; and Lorna Weatherill, in comparing the goods owned by men and women, finds that there was little that was distinctive about the possessions of female consumers, except that they tended to own more mirrors and fewer clocks than men (Weatherill, Lorna, “A Possession of One's Own: Women and Consumer Behavior in England, 1660–1740,” Journal of British Studies, 25 [04 1986], 131–56)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ The centrality of the themes of increased consumption and “luxury” to eighteenth-century English political discourse has been a commonplace since Pocock, J.G.A.'s seminal The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975)Google Scholar. These themes are thoroughly treated in Sekora, John, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, 1977)Google Scholar. Debates over luxury were central to political discourse in eighteenth-century France as well. See Morize, André, L’Apologie du luxe au XVIII^e siècle: “Le Mondain” et ses sources (Paris, 1909)Google Scholar, and Ross, Ellen, “The Debate on Luxury in Eighteenth-Century France: A Study in the Language of Opposition to Change” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1975)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ That the modernization of consumption liberated peasants from traditional folk culture was pointed out by Breen, T. H. in “‘Baubles of Britain’: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, 119 (06, 1988), 87CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Furlough, Ellen's Consumer Cooperation in France: The Politics of Consumption, 1834–1930 (Ithaca, 1991)Google Scholar is a model study of a distinctive working-class style of consumption and the politics it promoted in nineteenth-and twentieth-century France. We need such studies for the early modern period as well.

¹⁸ Goldthwaite, , “Economic and Social World of Italian Renaissance Majolica.” Mukeiji, Chandra's From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York, 1983)Google Scholar is another fine study that begins with the goods themselves. She argues that the spread of printing and increased availability of printed images like maps helped people accept the new printed textiles of the seventeenth century.