The Consumer Revolution Comes Home: Material Inequalities in London’s Eighteenth-Century Polite Society

Abstract

Urban spaces are often considered nurseries of consumer developments. Focusing on eighteenth-century London, the cradle of the famed nascent consumer society, we employ newspaper advertisements of forthcoming auction sales to map changes in the domestic material culture of the city’s “polite society.” Over the course of the century, British-made products replaced Asian luxuries among the most distinct positional goods promoted in these advertisements, and new social distinctions emerged around objects related to leisure, gardening, music, and domestic sociability and conviviality. Overall, however, narrowing consumer inequalities outweighed these renewed differentiations in the social distribution of positional goods, suggesting a convergence of domestic material culture between London’s elite and upper middling sorts.