Cultures of Consumption

Cultures of Consumption
Working Paper Series
The Modern Evolution of the Consumer:

Meanings, Knowledge, and Identities Before the Age of
Affluence
Dr Frank Trentmann
Birkbeck 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 7HX
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Working Paper No: 10
Date: May 2004
Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer
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
formation involved in the uneven evolution of the consumer. The first pictures the consumer
*
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.
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 shorthand, 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
formation is problematic. Users of new technologies like the internet, for example,
5
Robert S. Lynd, Democracys 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.
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 selfunderstanding 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 Campbells 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, 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-
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 geopolitical 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
business) through discourses of ethics and citizenship (rather than neo-classical economics)
action approach, in Brewer and Porter, Consumption, pp. 40-57. The impact of state policies or company
policies on peoples consumption behaviour, or vice versa the political and economic consequences of peoples
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 Perspective (Berkeley
CA, 1996).; Martin Daunton; Matthew Hilton, ed., The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and
Citizenship in Europe and America (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.
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 mideighteenth 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
a struggle that had resorted to a series of non-consumption protests directed at the mother
12
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and theMaking of the Modern World Economy
(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. 52-79
14
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 Glck 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.
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 Marxs 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 nonconsumption 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 Breens 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
the lower ranks of people who were immiserated by the stamp duty. For Dickinson, America
17
Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question.

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.
18
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.
Dickinsons 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 Defoes
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,
who in 1728 compares the large, populous, rich, fruitful state of England and its large,
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).
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
peoples 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
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
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, Britains 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.
Savarys 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.27
30
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.
31
James A. Jaffe, Striking A Bargain.
10
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 womens
domestic sphere unsullied by market or production. Thus womens 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.
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
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.
11
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 Humes 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
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.
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.
12
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
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,
41
Ibid., p. 270.
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.
42
13
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 Quesnays Tableau economique, wrote that all of society
consisted only of the following pairings: purchasers and sellers, consumers and producers or
workers49 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
section included the reproductive consumption of goods in factories.51 This concern with
45
The coal traders and consumers case. S.J. (c. 1692);Lawrence Duckworth, The Consumers 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, and
48
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.
51
J. B. Say, Traite d conomie (Paris, 1841), III, ch. 2.; an inclusion that had its supporters until the turn of the
twentieth century, e.g. Wilhelm Lexis, Gustav Schnberg, 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
14
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 Mills 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.
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
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 dEconomie 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 neoclassical 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.
15
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
his Cours dEconomie Politique to consumption, focused on collective action amongst
consumers to advance the interests of society. Patten saw selfish individuals as atavistic
57
Miller and Rose, Mobilising the Consumer.

For a survey of work on consumption in micro- and macro-economic work, see Angus Deatons 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, Marshalls 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;
58
16
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 Roschers
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 (acquisitionconsumption) 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
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
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. Schfer, 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.
67
Roscher, Principles, pp. 191, 230, 241
17
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 natures 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.
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
68
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 Sozialkonomie, 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 peoples 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 Marshalls 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.
18
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 taxpaying 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 , Vulcans 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
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 Greigs concern for the consumer as the victim of a competitive system expressed
70
Sidgwick, Essays.
James Fenimore Cooper, The Crater, or , Vulcans 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 Trollopes 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 protagonists 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 , Vulcans Peak (1847), 123. Brockhaus
(1852), although note that Grimms 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).
73
The Gladstone Diaries, ed. H.C.G. Matthew, vol X, 30 June 1883, p.467.
74
The Times, 2 January 1913, p.8.
71
19
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
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
75
Teresa Billington Greig, The Consumer in Revolt (London, 1912),

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 (Gttingen: 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.
76
20
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 consumers 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
representation went hand in hand with consumer protection in the form of lower and stable
prices.
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).
21
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 Gods choicest blessings who were treating
customerslike 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
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
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.
22
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
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
86
E.g. the propertied and commercial users in the vestry of St. Lukes; The Times, 10 July 1851, 6 c.
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.
87
23
of the property of water consumersa 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
generally, from affluent property owners in Belgravia to mechanics in rental accommodation
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.
24
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 Consumers 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.
25
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 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
26
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 Bastiats 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. Womens groups,
like the Womens 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
than a model of a sexual division of labour would suggest.102 The cultural debate extended
99
For further discussion and references, see Frank Trentmann, National Identity and Consumer Politics: Free
Trade and Tariff Reformin The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688-1914, eds. Patrick
OBrien 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. Bastiats 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 peoples editions in the 1870s-80s. Famously, Bastiats 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 dEconomie Politique) p. 700.
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, Consumers Republic, pp. . Cf. Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France
27
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
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
(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 Kundenbrgers? Eine politische Allegorie fr unsere Zeit, in Prinz,
berfluss, 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 Consumers 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.
28
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
womens 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
nation. Womens shopper or consumer leagues also spread to Imperial Germany from
Britain, France and America, but here too, a more universal, inclusive identity of 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), 171-221
105
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 consumers 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.
29
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 consumers 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 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
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, MarieEmmanuelle Chessel, Aux Origines De La Consommation Engage: La Ligue Sociale dAcheteurs (19021914), Vingtieme Siecle. Revue DHistoire, 77 (Jan-March 2003), 95-108.
107
Beatrice Strau, 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 Gerths 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.
30
complex, Hangzhouss 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 Womens 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.

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 institutionalised
recognition of the consumer as political actor, as Ludwig Erhard relied on markets and competition policy;
Harm Schrter. in Hartmut Berghoff, ed., Konsumpolitik: Die Regulierung des Privaten Verbrauchs im 20.
Jahrhundert (Goettingen, 1999)., pp.
111
31
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 womens entry into
public spaces. 116 At the same time, it is noticeable how different the identity of the consumer
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
Statesin 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)..
116
Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure.
32
favoured in political culture and social movements remained. Consumers here were citizens
with a social conscience and with limited needs, not the flneur or flneuse 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 consumptions softening or effeminising
dangers or by contemporaries worried about mass consumptions 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
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
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.
33
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.
Von Knebel-Doeberitz, Frau als Konsument, 39-44. Cf., for America, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence
Kelley.
121
34
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 states 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 Schloessers 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
35
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 nineteenthcentury 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
states 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 Londons County Hall in 1936, the Council for Art and Industry urged
local education authorities to remember, even where it conflicts with a strict economythat
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.
36
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 consumers 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 Webbs 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 Coperation (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, Consumers Republic; for its uneven insertion in competing models in Europe, see Kroen, Der
Aufstieg des Kundenbrgers?, in Prinz, berfluss, esp. pp. 554-64; Hilton, Consumerism; Beauchamp,
American Models, in Bevir and Trentmann, Critiques of Capital, pp. 127-150.
37
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 consumers 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.
Ibid., p. 22.
133
Ibid., p.23.
134
Webbs 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 dEconomie 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.
132
38
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 Consumers 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 governments
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 Societys
plan, the bright-haired lad replied: I want to be a ConsumerIve 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.
W. E. Williams and A. E. Heath, Learn to Live: The Consumers 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 of everymans income went on housing. This
broader public definition of the consumer went alongside an explicit rejection of an older tradition in womens
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).
139
39
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 fouryear degree granting programmes producing 37,619 majors. Secondary schools and womens
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, Consumers Republic.

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 Moneys 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. Kyrks 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.
145
40
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. Kyrks 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
Kyrks 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 Deweys 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, Deweys 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.
41
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 selfidentification. 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 peoples 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.
42
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 consumers 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 consumers 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 longstanding 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.
There is no universal history of the consumer, just as there is no essentialist consumer. The
149
Williams, Keywords, pp. 78 f.; Adorno and Horkheimer; Galbraith; Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness.
Alan Warde, Theory of Practice, p. 9. Consumption Theory Workshop, Oct. 2003, London,
www.consume.bbk.ac.uk/publications.html.
150
43
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 (shhi 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.
Much of the political and cultural debate in Europe, America, and Asia has become stuck in a
44
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
of the glue for earlier consumer formation also has become diluted. The plurality of voices
45
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.
Appadurai, Arjun (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Berghoff, Hartmut (ed.), Konsumpolitik: Die Regulierung des Privaten Verbrauchs im 20.
Jahrhundert (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999).
Bowman, Mary Jean, 'The consumer in the history of economic doctrine', American
Economic Review 41, No. 2 (1951), 1-18.
Breen, T. H., ''Baubles in Britain': the American and consumer revolutions of the eighteenth
century', Past and Present 119 (1988), 73-104.
, 'Narrative of commercial life: consumption, ideology, and community on the eve of
the American Revolution', The William and Mary Quarterly 50, No. No. 3 (1993),
471-501.
Carter, Erica, How German is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the
Consuming Woman (USA: University of Michigan, 1997).
Cohen, Lizabeth, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar
America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).
Davies, Kate, 'A moral purchase: feminity, commerce and abolition, 1788-1792' in Eger,
Elisabeth; Grant, Charlotte (ed.), Women, writing and the public sphere: 1700-1830,
(Cambridge, 2000), 133-159.
Finn, Margot, 'Working-Class Women and the Contest for Consumer Control in Victorian
County Courts', Past and Present 161, 116-154.
Garon, Sheldon, 'Luruxy is the Enemy: Mobilizing Savings and Popularizing Thrift in
Wartime Japan', Journal of Japanese Studies 26, No. 1 (2000), 41-78.
Glickman, Lawrence, 'The strike in the temple of consumption: consumer activism and
twentieth-century American political culture', The Journal of American History 88,
No. June 2001 (2001), 99-128.
Grazia, Victoria de (ed.), The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical
Perspective (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1996).
Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard, Konsum und Handel: Europa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert
(Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002).
Hilton, Martin Daunton; Matthew (ed.), The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and
Citizenship in Europe and America (New York: Berg, 2001).
Howes, David (ed.), Cross-Cultural Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities (London:
Routledge, 1996).
Jacobs, Meg, ''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, No. 3 (1997), 910-941.
Judt, Susan Strasser; Charles McGovern; Matthias (ed.), Getting and Spending: European
and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
Nead, Lynda, Victorian Babylon. People, streets and images in nineteenth century London
(New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000).
Pomeranz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and theMaking of the Modern
World Economy (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
46
Rao, Hayagreeva, 'Caveat Emptor: the construction of nonprofit consumer watchdog

organizations', American Journal of Sociology 103, No. 4 (1998), 912-961.
Rappaport, Erika D., Shopping for Pleasure: Women and the Making of London's West End
(Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Trivedi, Lisa, 'Visually Mapping the "Nation": Swadishi Politics in Nationalist India, 19201930', The Journal of Asian Studies 62, No. 1 (2003), 11-41.

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Working Paper Series

The Modern Evolution of the Consumer:

Cultures of Consumption, and ESRC-AHRB Research Programme

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

The Modern Evolution of the Consumer:

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question.

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

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

Miller and Rose, Mobilising the Consumer.

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

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

role of consumption in social

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Teresa Billington Greig, The Consumer in Revolt (London, 1912),

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

of the property of water consumersa confiscation of the statutory rights of ratepayers.91

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Rowntree; Pound; Erhebung von Wirtschaftsrechnungen minderbemittelter Familien im Deutschen Reiche.

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Cit., in Gerth, p. 296.

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

On the Kriegsausschuesse fuer Konsumenteninteressen, see Robert Schloessers Denkschrift,

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Cohen, Consumers Republic.

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Conclusion: Consumers Before and After Neo-Liberalism

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

prominence of the consumer as citizen in Edwardian Britain was a particular developmental

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

dichotomy defined in terms of the civic costs or benefits of neo-liberal consumerism.

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer

Frank Trentmann Evolution of the Consumer