is professor of marketing, Bilkent University, Ankara, 06800, Turkey. The authors would like to thank Halil İnalcık and Mehmet Kalpaklı for sharing their invaluable knowledge and sources and Jonathan Schroeder for his useful comments on earlier versions of this article. The authors are grateful for the supportive and helpful remarks and insights provided by the editor, associate editor, and the reviewers, particularly the trainee reviewer.
AbstractWe examine the socio-historical formation of the consumer subject during the development of consumer culture in the context of leisure consumption. Specifically, we investigate how an active consumer was forming while a coffeehouse culture was taking shape during early modern Ottoman society. Utilizing multiple historical data sources and analysis techniques, we focus on the discursive negotiations and the practices of the consumers, marketers, the state, and the religious institution as relevant stakeholders. Our findings demonstrate that multiparty resistance, enacted by consumers and marketers, first challenged the authority of the state and religion and then changed them. Simultaneously and at interplay with various institutional transformations, a public sphere, a coffeehouse culture, and a consumer subject constructing his self-ethics were developed, normalized, and legalized. We discuss the implications of the centrality of transgressive hedonism in this process as well as the existence of an active consumer in an early modern context.