eBook

Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Berg, Maxine

2005,2007

Overview

This book explores the invention, making, and buying of new, semi-luxury, and fashionable consumer goods during the 18th century. It follows these goods, from china tea ware to all sorts of metal ornaments such as candlesticks, cutlery, buckles, and buttons, as they were made and shopped for, then displayed in the private domestic settings of Britain's urban middling classes. It tells the stories and analyses the developments that led from a global trade in Eastern luxuries beginning in the sixteenth century to the new global trade in British-made consumer goods by the end of the 18th century. These new products, regarded as luxuries by the rapidly growing urban and middling-class people of the 18th century, played an important part in helping to proclaim personal identities and guide social interaction. Customers enjoyed shopping for them; they took pleasure in their beauty, ingenuity or convenience. All manner of new products appeared in shop windows; sophisticated mixed-media advertising seduced customers and created new desires. This unparalleled ‘product revolution’ provoked philosophers and pundits to proclaim a ‘new luxury’, one that reached out to the middling and trading classes, unlike the elite and corrupt luxury of old. This book is built on a fresh empirical base drawn directly from customs accounts, advertising material, company papers, and contemporary correspondence. The book traces how this new consumer society of the 18th century and the products first traded, then invented to satisfy it, stimulated industrialisation itself.

• Publisher: Oxford University Press,Oxford University Press, Incorporated
• Subject: 1700-1800 / 18th century / Affluent consumers / Affluent consumers -- Great Britain -- History -- 18th century / British History / Consumer goods / Consumer goods -- Great Britain -- History -- 18th century / Consumerism / Consumption / Consumption (Economics) / Consumption (Economics) -- Great Britain -- History -- 18th century / General history of Europe England & Wales / Great Britain / Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 18th century / Großbritannien / History / Konsumgüter / Konsumgüterindustrie / Life styles / Luxury / Luxury goods industry / Luxury goods industry -- Great Britain -- History -- 18th century / Luxusgüter / Middle class / Middle class -- Great Britain -- History -- 18th century / Mittelschicht / Modern History (1700 to 1945) / Social and Cultural History / Social conditions / Social history / United Kingdom
• ISBN: 019153403X, 9780191534034, 0199272085, 9780199272082, 0199215286, 9780199215287