Skip to main content

Consumers, Empires and Globalisation, 1500 to 2000

Overview

  • Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
  • Convenor: Prof Frank Trentmann
  • Assessment: a 1000-word in-term essay (20%) and 4000-word final essay (80%)

Module description

In the last decade 'the consumer' has returned to the centre stage of popular politics and academic interest. Do consumers make good citizens? What happens to our sense of taste and style in consumer societies? How does consumption affect individual and collective identities? Far from being new, these questions have important longer histories. This module provides a historically informed perspective on the changing meanings and roles of consumption in modern society.

We will explore key moments in the birth and transformation of consumer identities in modern societies, beginning with the rise of consumer co-operatives and shopping malls, and ending with the recent reassessment of famines and the return of consumer activism. We will encounter consumers in different social and cultural settings, at times of plenty and at times of want, negotiating the worlds of citizenship and aesthetics, and read about developments in Europe, the United States and Asia from the middle of the nineteenth to the late twentieth century.

Indicative syllabus

  • Introduction: consumption – meanings, theories, approaches
  • Consumption in Renaissance Europe and late Ming China
  • Luxury and empire
  • Slavery
  • Consumer boycotts and politics
  • Urban and domestic spaces
  • The United States as a consumers’ republic
  • Asian pathways
  • Taste and status
  • Sustainable consumption?

Learning objectives

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

  • evaluate different types of consumer culture from the early modern to the contemporary period.
  • analyse a range of textual, visual and material sources
  • understand how, by focusing on some types of evidence over others, different spheres of consumption are brought to the fore
  • participate in informed seminar-style debates about the interactions between the world of goods and political economic systems, including empires and globalisation.