For those that view consumption through the continuity lens, there is rarely such a thing as a new problem. For every perceived disaster seen by analysts focused on current trends, the continuity researcher can point to a historical precedent. For example, the concern that globalization creates problems for local producers and sacrifices local tastes and culture is hardly new. Long-distance trade has been practiced throughout much of the sweep of recorded history. As early as the tenth and eleventh century, a long-distance trade in commodities was well established, with cotton, textiles, spices, silks and curtains being shipped across the Indian Ocean (Trentmann, 2009: 191). The worry that new, low-cost retailers such as Walmart, or, even worse, online sellers such as Amazon, will destroy their competitors also has a historical precedent. The same debates, with the same alarmist tones, occurred in the 1800s, when early department stores used low prices, one-stop shopping and innovative advertising techniques to pioneer purchasing as a recreational activity (Haupt, 2012: 272). Yet small-scale retail survived. Department stores took only 3 percent of total retail by 1914 in Western Europe (Trentmann, 2016: 205). The concern that consumption represents a social failure, in which people vainly attempt to show off and emulate, has been repeated in many different times in many different contexts (ibid.: 677). Centuries ago, in Italy, critics lamented the vanity of the market for beauty products, including fake hair, which was demanded not only by the predictably preening nobility but also by more humble artisans and innkeepers (ibid.: 30).
In contrast, transformationists see sharper breaks in consumption. This does not mean that there are no historical precedents for trends or that there are no antecedents for revolutions in consumption, but that certain periods can be identified as notably different from the past. In one particularly bold example of this, McKendrick et al. (1982) claim that the “birth” of the consumer society could be pinpointed to the third quarter of the 1700s in England, which was the richest country at the time – alternative birthplaces include the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, Renaissance Italy and seventeenth-century France (McCabe, 2015: 2–3). These authors justified their sharp period break with some impressive statistics. Sales of non-necessities such as soap, candles and beer increased at more than twice the rate of population growth over the last fifteen years of the eighteenth century (McKendrick et al., 1982: 29).
For McKendrick et al., it was not that people’s desires for consumption changed, but incomes and prices certainly did. Starting in the 1600s, the expansion of trade and the establishment of agricultural plantations reduced the price of many little pleasures, such as tobacco, tea, coffee and sugar (Pennell, 2012: 75). Coffee gained popularity as a puritanical alternative to alcohol, which improved performance rather than hindering it (Sassatelli, 2007). The use of tobacco also spread widely, famed for its positive medical properties and ability to calm the nerves (McCabe, 2015: 73). The price of sugar dropped so much during the seventeenth century that the consumption of candies was possible for more than just the nobility, and the dessert course was introduced (ibid.: 57–8). According to McKendrick et al., this represented the “democratization” of consumption, in which spending habits that were once the exclusive purview of the very rich spread to the wider masses of the population, creating a consumer society, as opposed to a society that had some consumers (1982: 14). “All other classes imitated as best they could – which was much better than in the past” (ibid.: 11).
Transformationists argue that consumption should not be analyzed through “presentism,” which is looking at the past through the lens of, and in preparation for, the present by ascribing motives and values where they might not belong (McCracken, 1987: 142). For McKendrick et al., the revolution of the late 1700s provided people with the income to pursue the consumption that they had always wanted, but for other transformationists the break between the pre- and post-consumer society is also about culture and values in very different political, economic and social contexts. For example, many value systems before the 1700s, often based on religious doctrines from Christianity, to Islam, to Confucianism, were highly critical of worldly affluence and the excessive consumption that it spawned (although this did not prevent the upper levels of the religious and aristocratic hierarchy from living in ostentatious luxury). The earlier evidence on the continuity of consumption from Ming China, for example, needs to be tempered with the fact that most people did not think of themselves as consumers or even greatly value certain types of consumption that were associated with luxury or excess (Clunas, 2012; McCabe, 2015: 1). Different authors point to different periods in which these attitudes started to change. McCracken (1988), for example, points to Queen Elizabeth’s ostentatious consumption as a crucial feature of courtly behaviour in sixteenth-century England as one turning point. Generally, for these transformationists, the consumer society was created by a change in society’s cultural attitudes around consumption (Stillerman, 2015).
Consumerism was also often at odds with the strong influence of tradition, often reinforced by legal constraints on consumption (Stearns, 2001: 4–9). Sumptuary laws that restricted what people were allowed to own were placed on a shockingly wide range of goods: in fourteenth-century Venice, tapestries could not measure more than 1.5 meters and gilded fireplace furnishings were outlawed; in the late 1500s in England, “gentlemen entering London had their swords measured and broken if they were too long for their status” (McCabe, 2015: 24). Depending on your interpretation, these laws were in place either to protect people from overspending on fads or to ensure that consumption was a visible marker of the existing social hierarchy (Shammas, 2012: 212). The justification for sumptuary laws often used the anti-consumption language of the “sin of luxury” and the economic dangers of “extravagance” (Hunt, 2003: 64). By the seventeenth century these laws gradually began to disappear. Although some types of consumption (for example, drugs and prostitution in many countries) are still outlawed, these restrictions are rarely designed to reinforce social hierarchies. A consumer society was not present before the 1700s for three reasons: consumers were a small minority, new items were not consistently generated, and consumerism was criticized as a moral failing because it ran counter to tradition (Stearns, 2001: 8–9).
Transformationists can make similar claims about the changes surrounding consumer credit. While credit has a very long history, the social attitudes about both lending and borrowing have changed drastically. Charging interest on loans – called usury – was frowned on by most religions. It was punishable by excommunication in the Catholic Church and is still forbidden in Islam. Judaism permitted charging interest to those from other religions, and so some Jews (who were often banned from other occupations) earned their income by lending money, a practice that was often viewed by Christians with considerable distaste. Christianity gradually relaxed its strict prohibitions so that usury came to mean charging unreasonably or immorally high interest rates (Wiedenhoft-Murphy, 2016). On the borrower side, although aristocrats would frequently go into debt using the collateral of their good name and the poor were often forced into debt to purchase staples, in the nineteenth century being a debtor was seen as a bit shameful (Stillerman, 2015). As we will discuss in chapter 3, the negative stigma of borrowing began to wane in the twentieth century, so that one might argue that, currently, it is completely acceptable never to be free of debt.
Others argue that the eighteenth-century transformation to the consumer society was driven not just by growing incomes and changed attitudes but also by a massive social and economic project. E. P. Thompson’s classic “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (1967) argues that, during the transition to industrialized, capitalist wage labour, employers and governments constantly complained