Paul G. E. Clemens

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the WMQ online. About 663 words from this article are provided below; about 17386 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the William and Mary Quarterly (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the William and Mary Quarterly.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Paul G. E. Clemens | The Consumer Culture of the Middle Atlantic, 1760–1820 | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4 | The History Cooperative

The Consumer Culture of the Middle Atlantic, 1760–1820

LATE-nineteenth-century America ushered in the most dramatic consumer revolution in the nation's history, yet it was not the first such fundamental transformation in consumption habits in the Western world. From the late seventeenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries, the mass production of goods—propelled by the spiraling demand of ordinary people for inexpensive, useful, and occasionally exotic household amenities—defined the first consumer revolution. Spread by Atlantic commerce, this revolution affected the New and Old Worlds alike and tapped a global economy. In British North America, the spread of consumer goods was even more revolutionary because it followed a period of austerity associated with the initial establishment of new settlements and farm building.	1
The first consumer revolution set in motion a long-term process of incremental change in what people used, valued, and accumulated in ordinary goods. For the period from the revolutionary era to about 1820 (less studied than the earlier era), change was a matter of evolution, not revolution, in consumption habits, yet the very ordinariness of products meant that people continued to buy, exchange, and collect goods despite the passionate, periodic outcries that luxury was corrupting early American virtue. Focusing on the rural Middle Atlantic (defined in terms of commercial geography as the region in the Philadelphia and New York City hinterland), examining consumer culture in the 1760s, and then tracing that culture into the early nineteenth century demonstrates that the market, through 1820, never overwhelmed people. Choice remained; distinctive patterns of accumulation existed and persisted within specific regions and among different classes. The great variety of goods, the global reach of the economy that supplied these goods, the regional variations in what was consumed, and the participation of ordinary householders (but usually not the poor) were each defining features of the evolution of America's first consumer economy.	2
Scholarship has established several general conclusions about the creation of a consumer society in the early modern Anglo-American world. Changes in household consumption patterns came first to England; there, the greatest changes occurred between the mid-seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries. In England's American colonies, new consumption patterns, paralleling those in the mother country, emerged in the late seventeenth century and drove the economy after the 1720s. In both lands householders acquired a greater variety of goods, especially tableware. They drank new hot drinks, in particular tea and cocoa sweetened with sugar, and smoked tobacco. In England and America, they constructed new rituals around food service and use of space that were as important as the new goods themselves, and they continued to live in fairly rudimentary homes and follow diets that left a substantial part of the population malnourished. Though the acquisition of some goods initially occurred among the gentry and then spread to the middling sort, consumer society was broad based and included much of the landowning and craft population, if not laborers and cottagers, or inmates, as they were more often called in the Middle Atlantic. Most householders acquired new goods—knives and forks, ceramic wares, copper and brass kettles and the like—without increasing the amount they spent on consumer goods. Change, then, was incremental, yet the sum of this process was revolutionary. Building from a foundation of basic subsistence, farms had been erected, fields cleared, and households stocked with a range of consumer goods that ushered their inhabitants into a new world of consumption. In the 1760s and 1770s, political upheaval brought into sharper relief for many Americans, especially true republicans and pious Congregationalists and Presbyterians, the insidious design by which long-gestating consumption habits had gnawed away at traditional ways of life, confused gender hierarchies, and destabilized class conventions. The first consumer revolution slowly altered the way people lived, reshaped how they thought of comfort and necessity, and invested material goods with new meaning (involving utility and status). Just as strikingly, the culmination of the consumer revolution tied Americans into an Atlantic culture of material goods.¹	. . .

There are about 17386 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.