The politics of consumption as discursive space: structures, actors, and interactions in the modern age

Abstract

ABSTRACT This special issue on the ‘politics of consumption’ in the modern age revisits the political approaches adopted within consumption history in the last twenty years. New directions to explore in the future study of the politics of consumption are identified, here defined as the discursive process through which consumers and consumption become framed and politicized by state- and/or market-driven actors for wider societal frameworks and goals. In what follows, the complex interrelations between politics and consumption will be interrogated from a variety of perspectives by combining insights from a diverse range of cases throughout the North Atlantic World from the early nineteenth-century until the 1980s. The five contributions all apply fundamental theories, concepts and methodologies from political history, investigating topics such as the municipal regulation of meat consumption, parliamentary debates about consumer citizenship, food propaganda among expat communities, anti-imperial sartorial practices and discourses of consumer austerity in times of economic crisis. The articles reunited here underline the centrality of power dynamics in shaping consumers and consumption, observable on all levels and affecting all actors, hence emphasizing the necessity to reckon with these often hidden but very real forces in historical research on consumption.