Consumption and material culture

In the past three decades, there has been a proliferation in historical studies of consumption. These include explorations of changing attitudes towards acquisition and ownership as well as ways in which consumer goods were interpreted. This new work is rooted both in the use of previously neglected sources and in the development of a multidisciplinary approach to consumption studies. Together, these have transformed our knowledge of early modern society and culture. Despite such historiographical developments, in Ireland, the history of consumption and, indeed, the study of material culture in general have been slow to excite the interest of historians. Until recently, work in the area of Irish consumption was limited largely to attempts to chart the development of distinctive expressions of Irish culture. Lately, however, a number of influential works have emerged that have done much to develop interest in this field. Of particular importance are two books by Toby Barnard: Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641–1770, and A Guide to the Sources for the History of Material Culture in Ireland, 1500–2000. The former considered the ways in which Irish Protestant elites adopted the fashions of empire and of the Continent, while the latter, taking a multidisciplinary approach to material culture, explored the range of sources available for the study of this field in Irish history, including: family histories, wills, inventories, letters, diaries, account books, estate records, advertisements and manuscript sources. Other recent studies include Martyn Powell’s The Politics of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, which considered the politicisation of the consumer goods of the Protestant Ascendancy in eighteenth-century Ireland along with the consumption of display, leisure activities and entertainment; Helen Burke’s study of the politics of Anglo-Irish cross-dressing in the eighteenth century and Robert Mahony’s discussion of ideas of ‘dependence’ and ‘consumption’ in Swift’s Irish pamphlets. These works tend to mirror historiographical trends in studies of British and American consumption in terms of both methodology and chronological focus. In particular, they reflect the increasing tendency to represent consumption primarily as a cultural activity rather than as an economic or social one and, with this, in some cases, a distinct wariness of research that seeks to measure consumption in quantitative terms.