The Consumer Revolution Comes Home: Material Inequalities in London’s Eighteenth-Century Polite Society

Urban spaces are often considered nurseries of consumer developments. Focusing on eighteenth-century London, the cradle of the famed ‘birth of a consumer society’, we employ newspaper advertisements of forthcoming auction sales to map changes in the domestic material culture of the city’s ‘polite society’. Over the course of the century, British-made products replaced Asian luxuries among the most distinct positional goods promoted in these advertisements, and new social distinctions emerged around objects related to leisure: gardening, music and domestic sociability and conviviality. Overall, however, narrowing consumer inequalities outweighed these renewed differentiations in the social distribution of positional goods, suggesting a convergence of domestic material culture between London’s elite and upper middling sorts.