Consuming Behaviours

This is an outstanding collection of essays, edited by Erika Rappaport, Sandra Trudgen Dawson and Mark J. Crowley, that should be required reading for both academics and students, for the sheer consistency of its scholarship and ambition across no fewer than fifteen chapters. The volume’s title does not, in fact, do justice to the scope of its contributors’ work. The essays in the first section of the monograph certainly use changing practices of consumerism as a rich starting-point to explore the identity-formation of historic British actors including homosexuals, working-class youths, teenagers, football hooligans and middle-class men. Indeed, the focus on the emotional lives of male consumers in this section is particularly welcome in a field that often effaces men’s affective investment in the goods and services they purchase (with the notable exception of studies by Frank Mort and Matt Houlbrook). However, it is the second section, on ‘the local and the global in the production of consumer cultures’, that pushes the remit of the book far beyond its eponymous aims. Encompassing chapters that challenge the Americanisation thesis by analysing British global influence in advertising and television, as well as considering the impact of imperial trading systems on the market for tea and on credit relationships in post-war Ghana, the book significantly revises current scholarly perspectives on the geographies and networks across which modern consumer culture took shape. These chapters also force the reader to reconsider the pace and chronology of this apparently ‘modern’ phenomenon. Chapters by Stefan Schwarzkopf and Mark J. Crowley in particular trace the origins of, respectively, the global advertising industry and the ‘marketing’ of thrift via the Post Office Savings Bank into the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Similarly, Kenneth Mouré’s fascinating dissection of the advent of mass consumption in Western Europe after the Second World War identifies a much more gradual and piecemeal process than has previously been realised

Aesthetics · Art · Consumerism · Consumption (sociology · Identity (music · Media studies · Pleasure · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Psychology