Consumption

Eighteenth-century North America witnessed a marked increase in the purchase and use of imported objects among white colonists. The previous century had seen basic improvements in standards of diet, dress, shelter, and furnishings for the wealthy. However, by the end of the 17th century these improvements started to move further down the social scale. Items of food, drink, and clothing that had been considered “luxuries” or even “decencies” started to become “necessities.” Consumer objects had little productive or explicitly practical value; their purpose was cultural. Elites and nonelites alike spent ever-increasing amounts on goods that could indicate high social status. By midcentury even prisoners in a Philadelphia poorhouse may have drunk “Bohea tea.”

The most common consumer item was cloth. The wide variety of available dry goods made fashionable clothing, and the ability to appear fashionable, accessible even to society’s middle and lower ranks. The second most popular consumer goods were groceries and related items: chocolate, sugar, and, most of all, tea and its accoutrements. Tea rapidly replaced coffee as the nonintoxicating drink of choice among all CLASSes. Moreover, most colonists aspired to turn tea-drinking into a social ritual through the use of specialized objects such as tea tables, cups, saucers, teapots, and silver spoons. By the middle of the 18th century almost every household in North America had at least part of a tea equipage, and in some urban counties even the poorest households had full sets. Even more than clothing, tea became a symbol of the colonists’ connection to the British Empire and its markets.

White women, who had long been responsible for the purchase of household goods, found increased cultural authority in consumerism. Women’s purchasing allowed them to imitate London styles, thereby creating new standards of polite fashion and behavior. Tea tables became known as female spaces, and fashionable dress became women’s prerogative.

One reason for this flood of goods into 18th-century North America was the contemporaneous increase in migration. The enormous mobility of the 18th-century Atlantic world had put new demands on social stratification. As so many people moved beyond the worlds in which they were known, other markers of elite status besides reputation had to be pressed into service. Consumer goods became new indicators of status hierarchies.

Social critics commented on the confusion between classes caused by the array of colorful clothing options and chinaware. Other critics feared the onset of an enervating luxury that might sap the strength of the colonies. They criticized fashionable women and men for their attention to goods and dependence on the consumer market. Their particular concern was the confusion of class hierarchies that consumer goods might provoke. Because so many people could don a fashionable dress, it seemed difficult to separate the elites from their social inferiors.

Eighteenth-century consumption differed from older status systems in its emphasis on the proper use of specific goods. Merely to own teacups or silver spoons was not enough; it became necessary to use them in specific gentri-fied spaces, such as parlors or assembly rooms. Carriage and demeanor likewise determined the acceptability of fashionable dress. Thus, behavior itself changed as a result of consumption. In addition, the increasing appearance in many households during the 18th century of forks and plates reflected the growing individualism among many Americans. Rather than eat communally from a single pot, as had their ancestors a century earlier, more white

Americans used their own cutlery and earthenware in the late colonial era.

Women and men of all classes participated in the consumer market. Those who could not afford to purchase newly imported cloth bought used clothes. Even criminals became consumers, stealing fashionable clothes, tea sets, and punch bowls. Taverns and pawnshops ran thriving businesses in secondhand consumer goods.

Consumerism was not limited to European immigrants. In Europe, for example, fashionable young men wore beaver hats made of pelts trapped by Native Americans. Native Americans, conversely, had been consuming European items since they met the first European traders. Indians often chose goods for other reasons than European fashions, such as ceremonial uses. They thus participated in the consumer market on their own terms. Many tribes became dependent on European metal goods, which eventually placed them at a disadvantage in their interaction with white people. However, Indians also recognized the social uses that colonists made of consumer goods, and by the 18th century some Indian diplomats, wearing laced hats and ruffled shirts, had become as fashionable as any colonial governor.

Further reading: T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1992); Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia for the United States Capital Historical Society, 1994).

—Serena Zabin and Billy G. Smith