Frank Trentmann

Beyond Consumerism: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption

Consumer culture has moved to the centre of contemporary debates about society, identity and citizenship. This article cuts a critical, comparative pathway through the literature to point to new directions for historical work. Initially driving research, concepts like ‘consumer revolution’, ‘consumer society’ and ‘consumerism’ have become problematic analytical concepts for understanding the changing dynamics, practices and meanings of consumption. Historical research has lost touch with theoretical and conceptual developments in the social sciences. Engaging with recent work on urban spaces, retailing, work-place, scarcity, the state and consumer politics, this article develops perspectives to frame historical debate. Problematizing a stage-theory of global convergence, the article draws attention to divergence and disjunctures. Instead of drawing a contrast between ‘traditional’ culture and ‘modern’ acquisitive, consumerist mentality, it emphasizes the persistence of social and collective dimensions of consumption practices and identities. Instead of privileging a utility-maximizing individual or self-fashioning and self-oriented individual, it points to contingent civic sensibilities and political practices of consumers. To foster dialogue with the growing interdisciplinary field of consumer studies, historians need to broaden their conception of consumption, become more self-critical of invoking an essentialist consumer and unitary western model of consumerism, and instead, be more sensitive of how historical actors have developed their knowledge of consumption and identity as ‘consumers’.

Before ''fair trade'': empire, free trade, and the moral economies of food in the modern world ¿

The last decade has seen a vibrant debate about the moralities of trade and the possibility of reconnecting consumers and producers in an age of globalisation. Fair trade, in particular, has attracted attention as the source of a new international moral economy. In this paper, I seek to widen the frame of discussion, bringing history, geography, and ethics into closer conversation. Looking beyond a conventional progressive narrative, I retrieve the ambivalent moralities of trade and consumption in the modern period. I highlight the role of empire shopping movements as well as of popular free trade and international distributive justice, putting imperialist consumers as well as liberals back into the picture. I offer a critique of a sequential view of traditional ‘moral economy’ being replaced by a modern demoralised ‘political economy’, which underlies current notions of ‘remoralising’ trade. Modern commerce has generated and been shaped by diverse moralities of consumption. Greater attention to the diverse social and ideological lineages of phenomena like fair trade will be useful to scholars reflecting on caring at a distance today.

Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and Politics

Frank Trentmann is professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London. From 2002 to 2007, he was director of the £5 million Cultures of Consumption research program, cofunded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). He is working on a book for Penguin, The Consuming Passion: How Things Came to Seduce, Enrich, and Define Our Lives, from the Seventeenth Century to the Twenty‐First. This article is one of a pair seeking to facilitate greater exchange between history and the social sciences. Its twin—“Crossing Divides: Globalization and Consumption in History” (forthcoming in the Handbook of Globalization Studies, ed. Bryan Turner)—shows what social scientists (and contemporary historians) might learn from earlier histories. The piece here follows the flow in the other direction. Many thanks to the ESRC for grant number RES‐052‐27‐002 and, for their comments, to Heather Chappells, Steve Pincus, Elizabeth Shove, and the editor and the reviewer.

Political culture and political economy: interest, ideology and free trade

This article explores the significance of ideas, values and collective representations in shaping political economy by examining the case of free trade in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Its aim is to tie a historical perspective on the importance of political culture to the current methodological debate about political economy in the social sciences. The opening critique of sectoral approaches is used to move the focus from material interests and economistic method to cultural significance and the interpretative framework underlying free trade. Shifting the attention to the knowledge of historical actors themselves reveals the formative role of ideology, historical memory and political language in constructing free trade as a collective good. Free trade was associated with a historical vision of national identity and societal self-development, and a moral ideal of the consumer, rather than with free market capitalism. The discussion concludes with some general thoughts on the importance of giving greater attention to political culture in the study of political economy.

Food and Conflict in Europe in the Age of the Two World Wars

Book synopsis: This volume examines conflicts over food and their implications for European societies in the first half of the Twentieth century. Food shortages and famines, fears of deprivation, and food regulations and controls were a shared European experience in this period. Conflicts over food, however, developed differently in different regions, under different regimes, and within different social groups. These developments had stark consequences for social solidarity and physical survival. Ranging across Europe, from Scandinavia and Britain to Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, this volume explores the political, economic and cultural dynamics that shaped conflicts over food and their legacies.

The transformation of fiscal reform: reciprocity, modernization, and the fiscal debate within the business community in early Twentieth-Century Britain

The debate over Free Trade was central to modern British history. This essay shifts attention from party politics to the changing discourse and perception of state and economy within the business community. It distinguishes three phases in the erosion of liberal political economy: reciprocity, defensive tariff reform, and modernizing protectionism. An analysis of the changing argument for protection points to the emergency of a new politico-economic settlement in the age of war and coordinated capitalism. The Free Trade culture of individualism and market was displaced by a new economic vision of combination and regulation. In political culture, however, state and economy continued to be viewed as separate spheres. Instead of a corporatist system, the new settlement between state and business was marked by a dissociation of economic from political pluralism.

Wealth versus welfare: the British left between free trade and national political economy before the First World War

The convergence of Free trade liberalism and radicalism was a central feature of British political culture after Chartism. This article explores the emergence of alternative visions of political economy on the left in the late Victorian and Edwardian period. Against the conventional view of a shared liberal Free Trade culture, it finds a plurality of languages. An interpretation of how Labour, social democrats, socialists and Fabians understood Britain’s development under Free Trade reveals an alternative spectrum of popular ideas about society and economy. In the Independent Labour Party, opposition to protectionism was linked to support for some trade regulation and a more balanced economy. It was tied to a cultural and economic critique of competitive exchange, social dislocation and commercial dependence under Free Trade capitalism. The economic critique co-existed with political internationalism and turned Labour’s position into one of socialist-radical dualism. This is compared to nationalist and imperialist socialist positions in Britain and abroad. The movement towards national political economy provided a link between older radical notions of moral economy and co-operation and more collectivist notions of economic order and state regulation. It marked a step in the evolution from mid Victorian popular liberalism to social democracy and from Free Trade to the welfare state.

Markets in Historical Contexts: Ideas, Practices, and Governance

Chapter 1 Markets in Contexts: Ideas, Practices, and Governance* Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann Social life requires coordination between individual actions. Coordination can arise intentionally or unintentionally and can take different forms. For much of the previous century, societies across the globe valorized two of forms of coordination – the market and state planning. All too often the market and the state appeared as polar opposites. Proponents of the market portrayed it as a natural and spontaneous form of order in which the free activities of individuals were coordinated for the public benefit by an invisible hand. Proponents of the state, meanwhile, portrayed hierarchical planning as a rational and just form of order in which humans took control of their own activity so as to overcome the irrationality and exploitation of unbridled capitalism. Today, in contrast, we witness increasing doubts not only about each of these visions, but also about the very dichotomy they seem to instantiate. Of course, there still remains a prominent – perhaps even a dominant – neo-liberal discourse that holds to an idealized vision of the market as a spontaneous coordinating mechanism that operates for the public good provided only that individuals are left to exchange freely with one another. Nonetheless, there is also a blossoming “new political economy” that points to the superficialities and blindspots of this idealized account of the market. The new political economy draws on transactional, institutional, and evolutionary economics to argue that all economic institutions, including markets, are necessarily established and transformed in the context of political, social, and cultural authorities. 1 All economies have to be governed through complex patterns of rule that connect and regulate economic actors, organizations, and interactions.

After the Nation-State: Citizenship, Empire and Global Coordination in the New Internationalism, 1914–1930

Few historical systems have been subjected to such wide-ranging critical reassessment in the last two decades as the nation-state. Social scientists have debated the withering away of the state and the expansion of global networks of power such as transnational society and global civil society.2 Political theorists have turned away from the methodological nationalism bequeathed by the nation-state towards ideas of cosmopolitan democracy.3 Recent historians, too, have problematised the essentialist and bounded nature of the nation-state. Post-colonial studies in particular have criticised insular approaches to the nation and have emphasised the systemic interpenetration of metropole and colony.

After Modernism: Local Reasoning, Consumption, and Governance

Contemporary social theory is dominated by two alternative concepts of rationality, associated with different forms of social explanation, and with competing views of consumption and citizenship. Both of the two dominant concepts of rationality arose as part of a general modernist culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The economic concept of rationality privileges utility maximization; it arose with neoclassical theorists, and has spread through rational choice theory. The sociological concept of rationality privileges appropriateness given social norms; it arose with modern functionalism, and today is associated with communitarianism.