Consumers and Luxury : Consumer Culture in Europe 1650-1850

by Edited by Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford

• ISBN13: 9780719052743
• ISBN10: 0719052742
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 1999-07-02
• Publisher: Manchester University Press

Summary

From tulips to jewels, gastronomy to silver, coffee to colors, the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth century saw an explosion of consumer and luxury objects and a growing demand for their consumption by a widening section of the population. This highly entertaining and interdisciplinary volume brings together an outstanding group of scholars to chart the rise of consumer culture in Europe during this period. The volume includes essays on France and Holland, but the focus is primarily on Britain.

Author Biography

Maxine Berg is Reader in the Department of History at the University of Warwick.

Helen Clifford is a member of the Research Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. vii
List of contributors	p. x
Preface	p. xii
Introduction	p. 1
Luxury and necessity
Adam Smith's accommodation of 'altogether endless' desires	p. 18
Sans-culottes, sans cafe, sans tabac: shifting realms of necessity and luxury in eighteenth-century France	p. 37
New commodities, luxuries and their consumers in eighteenth-century England	p. 63
Novelty and imitation
In the name of the tulip. Why speculation?	p. 88
Colours and colour making in the eighteenth century	p. 103
Public and private
Jewellery in eighteenth-century England	p. 120
A commerce with things: the value of precious metalwork in early modern England	p. 147
Excess, taste and fashion
Making a science of taste: the Revolution, the learned life and the invention of 'gastronomie'	p. 170
'Quality always distinguishes itself': Louis Hippolyte LeRoy and the luxury clothing industry in early nineteenth-century Paris	p. 183
Identity and display
Romanticism and the urge to consume in the first half of the nineteenth century	p. 208
The National Gallery in London and its public	p. 228
Index	p. 251
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