Consumerism and the Emergence of the Middle Class in Colonial America

Abstract

This interdisciplinary study presents compelling evidence for a revolutionary idea: that to understand the historical entrenchment of gentility in America, we must understand its creation among non-elite people: colonial middling sorts who laid the groundwork for the later American middle class. Focusing on the daily life of Widow Elizabeth Pratt, a shopkeeper from early eighteenth-century Newport, Rhode Island, Christina J. Hodge uses material remains as a means of reconstructing not only how Mrs Pratt lived, but also how these objects reflect shifting class and gender relationships in this period. Challenging the 'emulation thesis', a common assumption that wealthy elites led fashion and culture change while middling sorts only followed, Hodge shows how middling consumers were in fact discerning cultural leaders, adopting genteel material practices early and aggressively. By focusing on the rise and emergence of the middle class, this book brings new insights into the evolution of consumerism, class, and identity in colonial America.

Which town did it come from?: Sourcing locally-made ceramics in the Mid-Atlantic

“…While this would certainly describe what we are seeing, saying it in this way strips the consumers who lived in the cabin of any meaningful amount of agency by turning our attention to the larger structural forces that shaped local ceramic production. On the other hand, we can lean into these consumers’ agencies, arguing that it was the very choices they made about where to acquire ceramics that led to the rise of Strasburg and the decline of Stephens City and that the traces (sensu Joyce, 2015; Trouillot, 1995) of these agencies are preserved in the ceramic sherds recovered from the two features (also see Dietler, 2010; Hodge, 2014; Martindale, 2009; Pezzarossi, 2015). In other words, we can say that it was consumers in the Valley – including the enslaved consumers at Quarter site B – who brought about the decline of Stephens City potteries by buying fewer vessels there and the rising prosperity of Strasburg potters by traveling to this town when they needed ceramics.…”

Contextualising Apartheid at the End of Empire: Repression, ‘Development’ and the Bantustans

“…After 1945, somewhat paradoxically, modernising postcolonial states also took up the developmentalist baton from late colonial regimes, employing many of the same strategies to govern and control their populations and to bring about the unfulfilled promises of colonial development through authoritarian forms of resettlement planning. 26 Apartheid mass relocation and the elaboration of the bantustan scheme must be understood against the backdrop of the growing influence of colonial counter-insurgency strategies upon rural 'development' planning (and, indeed, vice-versa), 27 while Verwoerd and Vorster re-imagined and propagandised South Africa's apartheid project through an explicit mimicry of British decolonisation. 28…”

"To Dress Against Nature and Reason": fashion and transgressive dressing in the mid-to-late eighteenth century British North Atlantic

“…255 Christina Hodge argues that the middle class allowed for the normalization of genteel values. 256 Sources indicate that those in the middle developed the financial means to participate in consumption. 257 This allowed for the display of refinement, allowing them access to genteel circles, especially in the colonies.…”