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Consumer behaviour and social status in England, 1660–1750

This article is about the social dynamics behind the increasing consumption of manufactured goods and clothing in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It has long been recognised, and often repeated, that the home market for manufactured goods was essential to economic and social developments before industrialisation. The processes behind such changes, and even the extent of the changes themselves, are not, however, well understood and few writers have approached the subject with a sensitivity to the interrelationships between economic and social behaviour or with a due regard for the importance of the behaviour of the middle ranks, as distinct from wage-earners or the elites. There are also assumptions about consumption that are offered as if they were all-embracing, universal truths and this is particularly true when the role of fashion and social emulation are taken as explanations for changing consumption. The idea that people copied one another in a rather frenzied way has a fascination in dramatising the past, but common sense suggests that there are serious limitations in trying to understand the behaviour of large numbers of people in these terms. Nor does it fit with the otherwise sober and serious behaviour of the lesser gentry and people of middle rank. The assumption that wage-earners were able to afford significant quantities of manufactured goods needs also to be recon-