Material Nation

Histories of consumption can take a variety of forms. They can propose a broad view of the development of consumption in a specific period or national or regional context. They can focus on one or more sectors such as retail, advertising, foodstuffs or fashion. They can look at a range of material and intangible goods or concentrate on just one. The biggest single problem facing the historian, as Emanuela Scarpellini says in the preface to her informative and endlessly fascinating history of Italian consumption, is that the topic can ‘fan out to include practically everything’ (p. viii). Choices therefore have to made. In this case, the author has not opted to focus on a specific period, as she might have done. The 1890s, inter-war years, the 1950s and 1960s, and the 1980s all present interesting specificities in the Italian context that have been treated before, if not exhaustively, and on which she could have focused. Instead she has taken a long view; her book covers the entire period from unification in the mid-nineteenth century to the present. In terms of goods, she deals mainly with material objects and their uses. Her book works well as a social history of the Italian economy, since she dedicates considerable space to macro-economic developments and to public policy issues such as poverty, regional and class differences, and international trade and protectionism. To this extent it acts as a useful complement to Vera Zamagni’s The Economic History of Italy, 1860–1990 (1993)

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