Introductory description

The history of consumption is the history of all the things that are part of our daily lives -- the things we desire, buy, wear, eat, drink, discard -- and about the ways in which the things we consume shape our lives. It is as much part of our daily lives today as it was part of every period in the past; and as much about the worlds we inhabit locally as about distant worlds. The history of consumption is also about the ways in which patterns of consumption connect the past and the present, and the local and the global. Each of the themes we have selected (see the syllabus for details, but they include Consumption and Consumer Revolutions, the Problem of Shopping, the Cultural Lives of Things, Fashion and Taste, Food and Food Cultures, Drugs and Stimulants) can be studies as part of different times and places.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

1. Consumption and Consumer Revolutions
2. Consumption and the Cold War
3. Visual and Material Cultures of Consumption
4. Fashion and Taste
5. Food and Food Cultures
6. Reading week
7. Drinking Cultures
8. Consumption and Collecting
9. Drugs and Stimulants
10. Global Trade and Commodities in Everyday Life

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate an understanding of a longer chronological and broader geographic understanding of consumption as a thematic field of historical expertise.
• A conceptual and practical understanding of the skills of an historian of consumption.
• The ability to formulate and achieve a piece of critical and reflective historiographical writing.
• Demonstrate the ability to undertake critical analysis.
• Demonstrate the ability to formulate and test concepts and hypotheses.
• Demonstrate a longer chronological and broader geographic understanding of their chosen thematic field of historical expertise.

Indicative reading list

• Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social life of things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986).
• Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, A History of Global Consumption (London: Routledge, 2015).
• Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
• John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routldge, 1993).
• John Brewer and Frank Trentmann, eds., Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (Oxford: Berg, 2006).
• Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press, 2004).
• Paula Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things (New York: Routledge, 2014).
• Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, eds., Writing Material Culture History (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
• Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).
• Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
• Jeremy Prestholt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
• Donald Quataert, ed., Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire, 1550-1922 (New York: CUNY, 2000).
• Daniel Roche, History of Everyday Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
• Frank Trentmann, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
• Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen, eds., Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2002).

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.