Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain [Paperback]

Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britainexplores 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 Britainis 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.

Introduction
Part 1: Luxury, Quality, and Delight
1. The Delights of Luxury
2. Goods from the East
3. Invention, Imitation, and Design
Part 2: How it was Made
4. Glass and Chinaware: The Grammar of the Polite Table
5. Metal Things: Useful Devices and Agreeable Trinkets
Part 3: A Nation of Shoppers
6. The Middling Classes: Acquisitiveness and Self-Respect
7. 'Shopping is a Place to Go': Fashion, Shopping, and Advertising
8. Mercantile Theatres: British Commodities and American Consumers
Conclusion

Maxine Bergis Professor of History at the University of Warwick where she has taught since 1978. She is also Director of the Warwick Eighteenth-Century Centre and has recenl“}