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Honourable Mention, Wadsworth Prize for Business History 2006
Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Maxine Berg
392 pages
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numerous plates, tables, halftones, 1 figure, and 5 maps
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234x156mm
978-0-19-927208-2
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Hardback
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30 June 2005
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This item is printed to order. Items which are printed to order are normally despatched and charged within 5-10 days.
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- How luxury possessions became a central part of eighteenth-century middle-class British life
- Fashion victims and status anxiety: explores the competitive new world of design, advertising, retail, and consumerism
- Uncovers the lucrative international trade in luxury goods
Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain explores the invention, making, and buying of new, semi-luxury, and fashionable consumer goods during the eighteenth century. It follows these goods, from china tea ware to all sorts of metal ornaments such as candlesticks, cutlery, buckles, and buttons, as they were made and shopped for, then displayed in the private domestic settings of Britain's urban middling classes. It tells the stories and analyses the developments that led from a global trade in Eastern luxuries beginning in the sixteenth century to the new global trade in British-made consumer goods by the end of the eighteenth century.
These new products, regarded as luxuries by the rapidly growing urban and middling-class people of the eighteenth century, played an important part in helping to proclaim personal identities,and guide social interaction. Customers enjoyed shopping for them; they took pleasure in their beauty, ingenuity or convenience. All manner of new products appeared in shop windows; sophisticated mixed-media advertising seduced customers and created new wants. This unparalleled 'product revolution' provoked philosophers and pundits to proclaim a 'new luxury', one that reached out to the middling and trading classes, unlike the elite and corrupt luxury of old.
Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain is cultural history at its best, built on a fresh
empirical base drawn directly from customs accounts, advertising material, company papers, and contemporary correspondence. Maxine Berg traces how this new consumer society of the eighteenth century and the products first traded, then invented to satisfy it, stimulated industrialization itself. Global markets for the consumer goods of private and domestic life inspired the industrial revolution and British products 'won the world'.Readership: Readers interested in the Georgian Age and in antiques; scholars and students of modern British history; economic, cultural, and social historians; specialists in eighteenth-century studies.
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Maxine Berg, Professor of History, University of Warwick
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"...deserves to be the final word on the luxury debate in Britian" - Martyn Powell, Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature "Luxury and Pleasure is an interesting, accessible and well-illustrated synthesis of new research and recent writing, and helpfully concludes by pointing to further areas of research" - Hannah Smith, History Journal "She aims to re-connect product and process, and succeeds triumphantly. Massive detail, briskly summarized, is subordinated to a series of arguments that give this powerful but combative work its freshness." - Toby Barnard, TLS "...rewarding account..." - Toby Barnard, Times Literary Supplement "It offers fresh
insights not only into the character and motivations of American consumers, but also the broader social and cultural relationships between Britain and her (ex-)colonies." - Urban History Journal, Vol. 34/1 "Readers will find this book valuable" - Joyce Burnette, English Historical Review
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Introduction
Part 1: Luxury, Quality, and Delight
1: The Delights of Luxury
2: Goods from the East
3: Invention, Imitation, and Design
Part 2: How it was Made
4: Glass and Chinaware: The Grammar of the Polite Table
5: Metal Things: Useful Devices and Agreeable Trinkets
Part 3: A Nation of Shoppers
6: The Middling Classes: Acquisitiveness and Self-Respect
7: 'Shopping is a Place to Go': Fashion, Shopping, and Advertising
8: Mercantile Theatres: British Commodities and American Consumers
Conclusion
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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