LUXURY & PLEASURE IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BRITAIN PAPER

by Maxine Berg

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.
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."

Genres: History, 18th Century, Nonfiction, Academic

391 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Professor of History at the University of Warwick, where she has taught since 1998. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society.

Reviews

[Gergana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is this coursework reading? Yes.
Is it highly specialized and part of an ongoing academic debate? Yes.
Did I enjoy it and read all of it regardless? Yes.