The Industrial Turn in World History by Peter Stearns

Author:Peter Stearns [Stearns, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, World, Civilization
ISBN: 9781317203940
Google: R1cPDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-09-13T16:18:18+00:00

Consumerism

Closely related to the rise of modern leisure was the conversion of industrial societies and many individuals within them toward an increasing commitment to consumerism. The contrast was stark, if obvious at least on the surface: most people during the Agricultural Age did not have enough money, beyond subsistence needs, to engage in extensive consumerism and may have had relatively little interest as well. Most people in industrial societies have come to devote a fair amount of attention and resources to consumer activities, including shopping, planning for acquisitions, and at least sometimes enjoying the results. For better or worse, consumerism has added a dimension to life and personal expectations largely absent as recently as 250 years ago in many otherwise different countries around the world.

We have seen that consumerism—buying or seeking goods that were not strictly needed for survival—was limited in agricultural societies by the rules of social hierarchy and by alternative value systems, as well as by the limitations on resources. Many people preferred to use any excess earnings for religious purposes or to acquire more producing property (usually land); or they might be formally limited, as nonaristocrats, in what items they could safely display. These constraints and alternatives did not disappear with industrialization, but they tended to decline as consumer capacity developed. Some movement toward greater mass consumerism had begun to develop in the centuries just before industrialization, as we noted in Chapter 2, but the big push, particularly on a global scale, came with industrialization itself.

There were several reasons for this. Most obviously, the industrial factories generated a growing profusion of goods. Some of these fed the industrialization process itself, as in the machines or rail lines or steamships that moved the economy forward—the heavy goods sector, where output was purchased by businesses or governments. Some product was devoted to military expansion with the growth of weapons production. Some output, finally, simply kept pace with population growth, including exports as well as sales on the domestic market.

But some, given the steadily expanding rate of production, required that a fair number of relatively ordinary people increase their purchases of clothing, household items, or, increasingly, some of the new goods, like bicycles or automobiles, that kept the industrial economy humming. Not surprisingly, industrialists and their business colleagues began to realize this need explicitly. Already in 18th-century Britain, a porcelain manufacturer, Josiah Wedgwood, organized a sales network that allowed him to test new designs in selective markets to discover potential consumer demand, to which he could quickly adjust his output. In the late 18th century also, various new devices were introduced to increase sales from urban shops, from printed advertisements that included product endorsements from prominent individuals—Lord So and So uses this razor and guarantees top results—to eye-catching window displays or price reductions on one item that might draw people into a store, where they would end up buying other goods as well. New forms of consumer credit were organized as well. Fairly quickly, as we have seen, the need

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