- [UNTITLED]
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Citizen Consumers: The Athenian Democracy and The Origins of Western Consumption
- Things in Between: Splendour and Excess in Ming China
- Material Culture in Seventeenth-Century ‘Britain’: The Matter of Domestic Consumption
- Africa and The Global Lives of Things
- Transatlantic Consumption
- The Global Exchange of Food and Drugs
- From India to the World: Cotton and Fashionability
- Luxury, the Luxury Trades, and the Roots of Industrial Growth: A Global Perspective
- City and Country: Home, Possessions, and Diet, Western Europe 1600–1800
- Standard of Living, Consumption, and Political Economy Over the Past 500 Years
- Sites of Consumption in Early Modern Europe
- Public Spaces, Knowledge, and Sociability
- Small Shops and Department Stores
- Comfort and Convenience: Temporality and Practice
- Consumption of Energy
- Waste
- Saving and Spending
- Eating
- Consumer Activism, Consumer Regimes, and the Consumer Movement: Rethinking the History of Consumer Politics in the United States
- Consumption and Nationalism: China
- National Socialism and Consumption
- Things Under Socialism: The Soviet Experience
- Unexpected Subversions: Modern Colonialism, Globalization, and Commodity Culture
- Consumption, Consumerism, and Japanese Modernity
- Consumer Movements
- The Politics of Everyday Life
- Status, Lifestyle, and Taste
- Domesticity and Beyond: Gender, Family, and Consumption in Modern Europe
- Children's Consumption in History
- Youth and Consumption
- Fashion
- Self and Body
- Consumption and Well-Being
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
Luxury and its discontents have become key areas of debate on our social condition in the late twentieth and early years of the twenty-first century. Luxury has become the common parlance of advertising and branding. It is part of the upscaling of consumer aspirations, and a turning away from the mass consumerism that underpinned consumer society from the 1960s to the 1980s. Aspirations are associated with luxury and designer goods, with lifestyle choices of affluence and distinction. Manufacturers give nearly every category of good they produce a premium brand; their products signal distinction and the pursuit of status. This phenomenon of upscaling, branding, and status-seeking through consumer goods has intensified dramatically since the 1980s, but it has also been with us a very long time. This article presents a global perspective on luxury, the luxury trades, and the roots of industrial growth. It examines luxury and consumption in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, social science theory and luxury, luxury's historical context, the debates over luxury goods, luxury and the global economy, and global export ware.
Keywords: luxury, luxury trades, luxury goods, industrial growth, consumption, social science theory, global economy, export ware, branding, status
Maxine Berg is Professor of History, University of Warwick. Her publications include Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2005) and ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global Origins of British Consumer Goods’, Past and Present, 182 (2004).
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- [UNTITLED]
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Citizen Consumers: The Athenian Democracy and The Origins of Western Consumption
- Things in Between: Splendour and Excess in Ming China
- Material Culture in Seventeenth-Century ‘Britain’: The Matter of Domestic Consumption
- Africa and The Global Lives of Things
- Transatlantic Consumption
- The Global Exchange of Food and Drugs
- From India to the World: Cotton and Fashionability
- Luxury, the Luxury Trades, and the Roots of Industrial Growth: A Global Perspective
- City and Country: Home, Possessions, and Diet, Western Europe 1600–1800
- Standard of Living, Consumption, and Political Economy Over the Past 500 Years
- Sites of Consumption in Early Modern Europe
- Public Spaces, Knowledge, and Sociability
- Small Shops and Department Stores
- Comfort and Convenience: Temporality and Practice
- Consumption of Energy
- Waste
- Saving and Spending
- Eating
- Consumer Activism, Consumer Regimes, and the Consumer Movement: Rethinking the History of Consumer Politics in the United States
- Consumption and Nationalism: China
- National Socialism and Consumption
- Things Under Socialism: The Soviet Experience
- Unexpected Subversions: Modern Colonialism, Globalization, and Commodity Culture
- Consumption, Consumerism, and Japanese Modernity
- Consumer Movements
- The Politics of Everyday Life
- Status, Lifestyle, and Taste
- Domesticity and Beyond: Gender, Family, and Consumption in Modern Europe
- Children's Consumption in History
- Youth and Consumption
- Fashion
- Self and Body
- Consumption and Well-Being
- Index
