Extract

Since the horrific bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the declaration of war against terrorism, policy makers have repeatedly urged us to spend. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates to encourage home sales and purchase of “big-ticket” items. New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani suggests that we travel, go shopping, seek entertainment, attend plays, rather than, as in World War II, buy bonds, recycle tin, and ration consumer goods.

Yet the current connection of luxury and war frames a historical paradox. Medieval and early modern prescriptive literatures link luxury not with times of war but with peace leading to decadence. The de-moralization of the idea of luxury, historians of consumption argue, only took place in the later seventeenth century when writers such as Nicholas Barbon and Bernard Mandeville recognized the importance of luxury to the economy. Eighteenth-century luxury consumption, fueled by new wants and new wares purchased by middle-class consumers, it is argued, marked a sharp departure from the court centered consumption of previous centuries.

Footnotes

This essay is part of a chapter in a larger work entitled “Consuming Splendor: Luxury Consumption in England, 1600–1670.” I am grateful to Stanley L. Engerman, Barbara J. Harris, and Barbara Taft who read earlier drafts of this essay; to the University of Texas British History Seminar, directed by Wm. Roger Louis, at which an earlier version was first presented, and to all those who have provided excellent advice and specific suggestions for this work.

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