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Conclusion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2022

Michael Kwass
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University, Maryland
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Summary

The contemporary world seems obsessed with stuff: how to get it, what to do with it, how to get rid of it. Although historians long assumed that rising consumption began with industrialization, we now know that the pace of consumption accelerated in the early modern world well before the age of mass production. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, women and men began to accumulate more clothing, carry more personal accessories, fill their households with more furnishings, and wear, smoke, snort, eat, and drink prodigious quantities of colonial products. Although scholars debate whether to call this growth in consumption “revolutionary” or “evolutionary,” they agree that is was transformational. It changed how people looked, ate, socialized, and thought, giving rise to debates about moral progress and ushering in new forms of revolutionary political activism. This book has offered a new interpretation of the consumer revolution by incorporating questions of empire, political economy, global trade, slavery, material culture, philosophy, politics, and revolution. One important theme that remains to be explored, however, is the relationship between consumption and the environment. Any solution to the climate crisis will require a revolution in how humans think about – and practice – consumption. Although today nothing seems more natural than relentless consumption, it, too, has a history. Heightening awareness of the fact that consumption in the contemporary world is a historical construct, an outcome of contingent historical factors, is an important first step toward resolving the climate crisis. For any invention of human society can be reinvented.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Conclusion
  • Michael Kwass, The Johns Hopkins University, Maryland
  • Book: The Consumer Revolution, 1650–1800
  • Online publication: 13 January 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9780511979255.009
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  • Conclusion
  • Michael Kwass, The Johns Hopkins University, Maryland
  • Book: The Consumer Revolution, 1650–1800
  • Online publication: 13 January 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9780511979255.009
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Conclusion
  • Michael Kwass, The Johns Hopkins University, Maryland
  • Book: The Consumer Revolution, 1650–1800
  • Online publication: 13 January 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9780511979255.009
Available formats
×