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Consumers in Modern and Contemporary History
Spring 2012, Mondays 6-8pm
Prof. Frank Trentmann
In the last decade “the consumer” has returned to the centre stage of popular politics and
academic interest. Do consumers make good citizens? What happens to our sense of taste
and style in consumer societies? How does consumption affect individual and collective
identities? Far from being new, these questions have important longer histories. This
course provides a historically informed perspective on the changing meanings and roles of
consumption in modern society.
In this class we shall explore key moments in the birth and transformation of consumer
identities in modern societies, beginning with the rise of consumer co-operatives and
shopping malls, and ending with the recent reassessment of famines and the return of
consumer activism. We shall encounter consumers in different social and cultural settings,
at times of plenty and at times of want, negotiating the worlds of citizenship and
aesthetics. The course readings will include developments in Europe, the United States,
and Asia. Themes include consumer politics, the emergence of window shopping,
organised women consumers, food and hunger, American consumer society, and the rise
of new Asian consumers. The readings focus on the period from the middle of the
nineteenth to the late twentieth century with an introductory unit on different narratives
and theories of consumption and a final week on contemporary debates.
Students will give short (15 min.) presentations on additional readings of interest.
* Books for purchase / required reading (all books available from Waterstones, Gower
Street except Frank Mort – see note below)
John Brewer and Frank Trentmann (eds), Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives:
Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (Oxford and New York: Berg)
Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic (New York: Knopf, 2003)
Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)
Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Commerce, Masculinities and Social Space
(London: Routledge, 1996) (Book available direct from publisher, on secondhand
sites and in Birkbeck library)
1) The Making of Modern Consumer Society: Approaches and Perspectivces
Thorstein Veblen, Conspicuous Consumption, selection from Martyn J. Lee, The
Consumer Society Reader, pp. 31-47. (306.3 CON – 1 x 1wk & 1 x s/l)
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “ The Culture Industry”, selection from Juliet
Schor and Douglas Holt, eds., The Consumer Society Reader, pp. 3-19. (658.8342 – 1 x
1wk & 1 x s/l)
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Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods, selection from Martyn J. Lee,
The Consumer Society Reader, pp. 73-83. (306.3 CON – 1 x 1wk & 1 x s/l)
* Frank Trentmann, ‘The Modern Genealogy of the Consumer: Meanings, Knowledge,
and Identities’, in Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories,
Transnational Exchanges, edited with John Brewer, (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006),
pp. 19-69.
Further Reading:
Brewer and Porter, eds. Consumption and the World of Goods, ch.2 (Agnew:
‘Coming up for Air’)
Daniel Miller, ed., Acknowledging Consumption, 1995
M. Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. Short loan
Don Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity.
Breen, T. H. (2004) The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped
American Independence, New York: Oxford University Press.
Brewer, J. (1997) The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth
Century, London: Harper Collins.
Berg, M. and H. Clifford, (eds.) (1999) Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in
Europe 1650-1850, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Berg, M. and E. Eger, (eds.) (2003) Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires
and Delectable Goods, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
2) Pleasure and Plenty: Shopping and Gender
* Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, chs.1., 3.,6. (658.834200942 – 1 x 1wk & 1 x
s/l)
Presentations:
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (944.361081 BEN – 1 x 3wk & 1 x s/l)
Leora Auslander, “The Gendering of Consumer Practices in Nineteenth-century
France,” in The Sex of Things, ed. Victoria deGrazia (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1996), ch.3. (658.8348 SEX – 1 x s/l)
Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, ch.2. (364.153094212 – 1 x 3wk, 1 x 1wk and
QORBED8 (Wal) – 1 x s/l)
Further Reading:
Williams, R.H. (1982) Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century
France, (Berkeley, University of California Press).
Miller, D. (2001) The Dialectics of Shopping, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
introd., and chapters two and three.
Chaney, D. (1983) ‘Department Stores as Cultural Form’, Theory, Culture and Society 3.
Crossick, G. and S. Jaumain, (eds.) (1999) Cathedrals of Consumption: The European
Department Store, 1850-1939, Aldershot: Ashgate.
Laermans, R. (1993) ‘Learning to Consume: Early Department Stores and the Shaping of
the Modern Consumer Culture (1860-1914)’, Theory, Culture and Society 10 (4): 79-102.
Miller, M. (1981) The Bon Marche: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store,
London: Allen & Unwin.
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Benson, S. P. (1986) Counter Culture: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in
American Department Stores, 1890-1940, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
3) Want and Empowerment: Radical Consumer Politics
Select Primary Sources on the early co-operative movement in England after 1835, in
G. D.H. Cole and A. W. Filson eds., British Working Class Movements
(London: Macmillan, repr. 1967), pp. 422-433 (MVR5 (Col) – 1 x 3wk & 1 x s/l)
Miss Layton, “ Memories of Seventy Years”, in Life As We Have Known It By Cooperative Working Women, ed. Margaret Llewelyn Davies (London, 1931) (331.4 Lif – 2
x 1wk / P/C 7367 x 1 s/l)
Meg Jacob, chapter on New Deal politics, in The Politics of Consumption,
eds. Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (Berg, 2001) (306.3 pol – 1 x s/l)
Presentations:
Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World
War One Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), chs. 3, 4,
5, 8. (943.155084 Dav – 1 x s/l)
Further Reading:
Peter Gurney, Co-operative Culture and the Politics of Consumption (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1996).
Frank Trentmann, “Bread, Milk, and Democracy”, in The Politics of Consumption,
eds. Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2001)
Furlough and Strikwerda, eds., Consumers Against Capitalism? (Lanham and Oxford:
Rowman and Littlefield, 1999)
Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain (Oxford, 2000)
Gillian Scott, Feminism and the Politics of Working Women, (London: UCL Press, 1998
M. MacAuley, Bread and Justice (Oxford, 1991)
Beatrice Webb, The Discovery of the Consumer (Ernest Benn: London, 1928) – out of
print. Copy in British Library.
4) Nutrition:
John Boyd Orr, Food, Health, and Income (1936). Ordered with Inter-library loan.
(On Orr, see the Noble Laureate presentation speech in 1949 at
http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1949/press.html (613.2 Boy - 1 x s/l)
Final report of the Mixed committee of the League of Nations on the Relation of
Nutrition to Health, Agriculture, and Economic Policy (League of Nations
Document No. A. 13. 1937. II. A.). (P/C 7393 – 1 x s/l)
Screening of Film: John Boyd Orr, World of Plenty (Ministry of Information, 1944, 46
min; Paul Rotha, producer; Eric Knight, script). (641.3 Wor – 1 x 3 wk)
Presentation:
Charles Webster, “Health, Welfare and Unemployment During the Depression”,
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Past and Present, 109, November 1985 (Journals)
David F. Smith, Nutrition in Britain (1996) (613.20941 Nut – 1 x s/l)
Kamminga and Cunningham, eds., The Science and Culture of Nutrition
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995) (363.809 SCI – 1 x s/l)
Further Reading
Lang, T. and M Heasman (2004) Food Wars: The Global Battle for Mouths, Minds and
Markets, London and Sterling, VA: Earthscan.
D. Oddy, Making of the modern British diet (1976).
D. Oddy, From Plain Fare to Fusion Food (2002)
5) Style and Taste:
* Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late
Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 1996), part one and two. (306.3
Mor – 1 x 3wk & 2 x s/l)
Presentations:
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (engl: London: Routledge, 1984) (KCN (Bou)- 1 x s/l)
Further Reading:
Dick Hebdige, ‘Object as Image: The Italian Scooter Cycle’ in Consumer Society Reader,
eds. D. Holt and J. Schor, (New York: New Press, 2000)
Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise
of Hip Consumerism (Chicago, 1997)
6) Famine:
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (2000), esp. parts one and two. (363.8091724 Dav
– 1 x s/l)
Presentations:
Cormac O’Grada, Ireland Before and After the Famine (1988) (330.9415081 Ogr – 1 x 3
wk / MYA/E (Ogr) x 2 s/l)
Further Reading:
Christine Kinealy, This Great Calamity (1994)
Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines (1981).
Michael Watts, Silent Violence: Food, Famine, and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria
Hunger and Public Action, A. Sen and J. Dreze, chs. 1-4, 13.
Also available in hypertext at http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/guidelinks.html
(this web-site also has further links to sites with information on world hunger but is not
always functional)
7) Mass Consumption and Democracy:
* Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic (Knopf: 2003), esp. chs 1, 3, 5, 8. (339.470973
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COH – 1 x s/l)
* S. Kroen ‘Renegotiating the Social Contract in Post-War Europe: The American
Marshall Plan and Consumer Democracy’, in John Brewer and Frank Trentmann
(eds), Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories,
Transnational Exchanges (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), chapter 9.
Further reading:
Jacobs, M. (1997) ‘'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 (3): 910-41.
Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics (Princeton NJ, 2005).
McGovern, C. (1998) ‘Consumption and Citizenship in the United States, 1900-1940’, in
S. Strasser, C. McGovern and M. Judt (eds.), Getting and Spending: European and
American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Storrs, L. R. Y. (2000) Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumer's League, Women's
Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era, Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press.
8) Global Consumerism? Transnational perspectives
Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women, chs. 1, 4, 6. (303.4826891 (Bur) – 1 x s/l)
* Richard Wilk ‘Consumer Culture and Extractive Industry on the Margins of the World
System’, in John Brewer and Frank Trentmann (eds), Consuming Cultures, Global
Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (Oxford and New
York: Berg, 2006), chapter 4.
* Sheldon Garon, ‘Japan's Post-war 'Consumer Revolution,' or Striking a
'Balance' between Consumption and Saving’, in John Brewer and Frank
Trentmann (eds), Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical
Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006).
Chapter 7.
Further reading:
Cross-Cultural Consumption, ed. David Howes, ch. 1 (Comaroff) (339.47 How – 1 x 1wk
& 1 x s/l)
J. Carrier, ‘The Limits of Culture: Political Economy and the Anthropology of
Consumption’, in F. Trentmann (ed.), The Making of the Consumer, chapter twelve.
Redclift, M. (2004) Chewing Gum: The Fortunes of Taste, London: Routledge.
* David Anderson and Neil Carrier, 'Flowers of Paradise' or 'Polluting of the Nation'?
Contested Narratives of Khat Consumption, in John Brewer and Frank
Trentmann (eds), Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical
Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006),
chapter 5.
* Michael Redclift, ‘Chewing Gum: American Taste and the 'Shadowlands' of the
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Yukatan’, in John Brewer and Frank Trentmann (eds), Consuming Cultures,
Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (Oxford
and New York: Berg, 2006), chapter 6.
Davis, D. ‘Chinese Homeowners as Citizen-Consumers’ in P. Maclachlan and S. Garon,
eds., The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the
West, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
J. Gamble, ‘Consumers with Chinese characteristics? Local Customers in British and
Japanese Multinational Stores in Contemporary China’, in F. Trentmann, The
Making of the Consumer, chapter eight.
Nelson, L. C. (2000) Measured Excess: Status, Gender, and Consumer Nationalism in
South Korea, New York: Columbia University Press.
Robison, R. and D. S. G. Goodman, (eds.) (1996) The New Rich in Asia: Mobile Phones,
McDonald's and Middle-Class Revolution. London: Routledge.
Watson, J. L., (ed.) (1997) Golden Arches East: McDonald's in East Asia, Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Chua, B. H., (ed.) (2000) Consumption in Asia: Lifestyles and Identities, London:
Routledge.
P. Maclachlan and S. Garon, eds., The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption
in East Asia and the West (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006).
9) Beyond Spectacular consumption: Ordinary Consumption
Gronow, J. and A. Warde (eds), Ordinary Consumption (London: Routledge, 2001)
Chs 3, 6, and 8. (Shove and Chappels; Sassatelli; Longhurs, Bagnall and Savage) (339.47
ORD x 1 s/l)
E. Shove, (2003) Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organisation of
Normality, Oxford: Berg., chapters one, three, six. (306 SHO x 1 s/l)
Further reading:
Jean-Pierre Goubert, The Conquest of Water (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press,
1989), chapters six, seven, and nine.
F. Trentmann and V. Taylor, ‘From Users to Consumers: Water Politics in NineteenthCentury London’, in F. Trentmann (ed.) The Making of the Consumer:
Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World, (Oxford and New York:
Berg, 2005, chapter three.
Roche, D. (2000) A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France,
1600-1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
10) The Return of the Consumer-Citizen?: Neo-liberalism and new consumer
movements. Concluding discussion
Newspaper Clippings on the globalisation debate and “the Seattle riots” [TBA]
Naomi Klein, No Logo (1999), chs. 1, 2, 4, 14, conclusion (303.484 KLE – 2 x 3wk, 1 x
1wk & 1 x s/l)
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Catherine Needham, ‘Citizen-Consumers?’ Catalyst Pamphlet 2003 [handout]
* Bronwen Morgan, ‘Emerging Global Water Welfarism: Access to Water, Unruly
Consumers and Transnational Governance’ in John Brewer and Frank Trentmann
(eds), Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories,
Transnational Exchanges (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006), chapter 10.
Further reading:
T. Blair, ‘The Courage of Our Convictions’ (Fabian Pamphlet, 2003)
* Cohen, L. (2003) A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in
Postwar America, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, chapter eight.
F. Mort, ‘Competing Domains: Democratic Subjects and Consuming Subjects in Britain
and the United States since 1945’, in F. Trentmann (ed.), The Making of the
Consumer, chapter ten.
K. Lasn, ‘Culture Jamming’, in Schor, J. B. and D. B. Holt, (eds.) (2000) The Consumer
Society Reader, New York: The New Press, chapter 24.
I. Merkel, ‘From Stigma to Cult: Changing Meanings in East German Consumer Culture’,
in F. Trentmann (ed.), The Making of the Consumer, chapter eleven.
Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire, Conclusion.
Tim Lang and Yiannis Gabriel, The unmanageable consumer: contemporary
consumption and its fragmentations (London, Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage,
1995), chs 1 and 9.
Colin Hines, Localization : a global manifesto (London ; Sterling, VA : Earthscan,
2000)
J. Bove and F. Dufour, The World is Not for Sale (London, 2001).
D. Davis (ed.), The Consumer Revolution in China (2002).
Bibliographies and Research Tools:
The best starting point for primary and secondary sources on consumption and consumer
politics are the bibliographies and footnotes in the following collections:
V. de Grazia, ed., The Sex of Things
Furlough and Strikwerda, eds. Consumers Against Capitalism
S. Strasser et al., eds., Getting and Spending
M. Daunton and M. Hilton, eds., The Politics of Consumption.