Consumer Goods and Foreign Society

Paper Summary:

This paper considers the why the 'consumer revolution' occurred in the eighteenth century. It looks at what exactly a consumer society was and then how it occurred. The writer focuses on how the factors of taxation and the imitation of foreign goods affected both the British economy and society.

From the Paper:

"Neil Mckendrick made reference to a consumer revolution in 'The Birth of a consumer Society' first published in 1986. He noted that there had been a consumer revolution in the late seventieth and early eighteenth century which accompanied the industrial revolution, with new and increasingly more diverse commodities becoming available to a broader spectrum of society, with more men and women than ever before enjoying the experience of acquiring consumer goods. This consumer revolution gave birth to a consumer society in Britain in which privileged possessions of the rich now became legitimate aspirations of a large part of society. In the third quarter of the 17th century the consumer boom reached revolutionary proportions in which an unprecedented amount of people were able to indulge in getting and spending coupled with never before seen levels of prosperity and production. The desire to consume was by no means an eighteenth century phenomenon, with it roots running back many centuries, it was the ability to do so that was."

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