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The Introduction defines the book’s major concepts, such as belonging with, elucidates its major keywords – movement, listening, radiance, resuscitating, restoring, and recycling, and explains its foundational ideas and methodology. These intertwine feminist, historical, ecological, and subject–object analyses to underpin how diminishing women and objects is a related activity. Second, it establishes how texts heal injurious mergings between women and matter and jettison the supposed “female virtues” – dissimulation and passivity – in order to embrace actual ethical beliefs and independence, reconnect women’s corporeality, reason, spirit, sexuality, and virtue, rendering these cooperating, rather than sparring, bodies. Third, it argues that these materialist ethics reveal how consumption can be constructive, a finding that disputes mainstream concerns that women were merely thoughtless consumers. Finally, it illuminates how the political and personal need to incarnate ideals by rendering concrete such abstractions as the “rights of man” entwines with gender debates and subject–object explorations during the revolutionary years.
Although France and Germany would acquire modern industrial economies after 1850, neither was in a position to do so even a few decades earlier. Only the coming of railroads would give either country the kind of national market that was so important in Britain. The same was true for science in France, but not in Germany, for reasons that had to do with the same fragmentation that kept its economy traditional. The impact of railroad construction made up for that absence in making economic transformation possible, so that organizing spheres in accord with principles derived from the activities carried on within them would come as a concomitant of industrial transformation rather than a precondition for it. Its most striking expression would be the organization of national professional organizations, dedicated to giving doctors, engineers, chemists, and academic researchers control over their own domains, and providing essential services for modern industrial societies.
Plebeian Consumers is both a global and local study. It tells the story of how peasants, day workers, formerly enslaved people, and small landholders became the largest consumers of foreign commodities in nineteenth-century Colombia, and dynamic participants of an increasingly interconnected world. By studying how plebeian consumers altered global processes from below, Ana María Otero-Cleves challenges ongoing stereotypes about Latin America's peripheral role in the world economy through the nineteenth century, and its undisputed dependency on the Global North. By exploring Colombians' everyday practices of consumption, Otero-Cleves also invites historians to pay close attention to the intimate relationship between the political world and the economic world in nineteenth-century Latin America. She also sheds light on new methodologies and approaches for studying the material world of men and women who left little record of their own experiences.
Chapter 1 explores how the elites’ economic republican project, based on the modern science of political economy, was closely linked to ordinary people’s desire to consume foreign goods. It explores how for those in power as well as for those seeking recognition as political subjects, ideas and practices of citizenship were inevitably tied to participation as consumers in the marketplace – understood not as a mere container of economic transactions but as a node of complex social processes and a creator of cultural and political activity. By so doing, the chapter reveals that in nineteenth-century Colombia, politics was everywhere, and the marketplace was no exception.
I conclude with a review of my findings in Chapters 3–7. I elucidate the relationship between “oil” and “Islam” and what that relationship teaches us about politics in Gulf monarchies. The overwhelming message is that with their abundant wealth, Gulf rulers have been exploiting not only oil rents but also religious doctrine and its (re-)formulations to function as tools of social management and social control. Their aim is to bolster their authoritarian ambitions: ruling families’ capacity to both dominate and shape their societies and retain their monopoly over resources. For the sake of maintaining – and enriching – dynastic states and constructing the nation, oil and Islam are their principal tools.
Using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, this research investigates how post-retirement employment influences older people’s expenditure in urban China. By broadening the understanding of post-retirement employment behaviour from a consumer welfare perspective, this study expands the literature on retirement consumption and provides theoretical explanations, empirical insights and policy recommendations. The findings reveal that post-retirement employment behaviour reduces urban retirees’ household expenditure and has a more significant effect on men than on women, but this effect diminishes as consumption levels rise. Increasing income, promoting social participation and improving subjective health outcomes are all potential channels through which post-retirement employment can affect consumption. Further analysis shows two main reasons why post-retirement employment reduces older people’s expenditure: first, the increase in subjective health levels resulting from post-retirement employment reduces healthcare expenditure; second, post-retirement employment does not promote social participation and self-rated health for all consumption levels and all genders of retirees – it also decreases expenditure. Preliminary evidence suggests that internet use positively moderates the negative impact of post-retirement employment on older people’s expenditure. These findings provide policy implications for retirement policies and the promotion of the silver economy.
This paper examines the economic and other social relations that emerged in the colonial landscape of the northern Aegean through a new approach to pottery production, exchange and consumption. Our analytical data about pottery origins allow a new reconstruction of the exchange networks between the northern and central Aegean. The chapter suggests that the gradual increase in non-local pottery use along the northern Aegean shores and certain changes in local pottery production cannot be taken as a result of any growing colonial agency. They are interpreted instead as the low residue of locally driven transformations in the economic organisation of the northern Aegean. The new analytical data support a recently expressed view that these advances represent a pull factor of migration from central Greece towards its so-called northern Aegean periphery.
This paper summarises some of the results obtained from Neutron Activation Analysis of early Greek pottery that was sampled in the Mediterranean. It provides an overview of analytical evidence about the provenance and geochemical clustering of major pottery wares such as the Protogeometric and Geomtric transport amporas and K-22 or common pottery types such as PSC, chevron, Thapsos and Aetos 666 bowls. Their historical implications include aspects of specialisation in pottery production, modes of technology transfer, appropriation and exchange of ‘colonial’ pottery types. Finally, this concluding chapter presents new insights into the economic and cultural relations among remote communities in the Mediterranean, and the chronological implications of our pottery analysis on the correlation of Phoenician and Greek migrations.
We start by introducing the key ingredients in macroeconomic modelling: investment, production, income and consumption, and explain the corresponding equilibrium conditions. Modelling these quantities in discrete time, we describe the multiplier-accelerator model, a classic model of macroeconomic dynamics, and an example of a second-order recurrence equation. We then embark on describing how to solve linear constant-coefficient second-order recurrence equations in general. The general solution is the sum of the solution of a corresponding homogeneous equation and a particular solution. There is a general method for determining the solution of the homogeneous equation, involving the solution of a corresponding quadratic equation known as the auxiliary equation.
We are the first to study how the resources freed up when a child, child-in-law, or grandchild moves out of a household are reallocated, taking into account the age of the leaver. Using the 2011 and 2013 waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, we document that, on average, the remaining household members save part of the resources freed up by the leaver and consume another part. Differentiating the leavers by age, we find that after the departure of a member of the younger generation aged 0–24, the remaining household members save the resources freed up by the leaver. However, if the leaver is above 24, they spend the freed-up resources. Our results are robust to the use of different specifications, estimation methods, and consumption aggregates. Finally, we observe that remittances directed toward non-resident offspring do not increase after the departure of a member of the younger generation.
The relationship between feminism and sexuality in the long twentieth century is both complex and multifaceted. Whether sexuality is understood as congenital or acquired, defined by object choice or aim, central to the character of an individual or the health of a population, it is a highly contested and contradictory set of discourses and institutional practices. Feminism is similarly impossible to define as a coherent ideology or political praxis. At once a historically specific political and cultural phenomenon emerging in the first decades of the twentieth century, feminism is also a highly differentiated transnational event that belies a single origin, set of beliefs, or constituency. Organized around two key historical figures–the modern girl and the feminist-as-lesbian–this essay draws on feminist, queer, and historical studies of the world-wide feminist movements of the 1910s-1930s, and of the women’s liberation era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, to trace the connections between the commodification and politicization of women’s sexuality as two axes around which the unsettled and generative relationship between modern sexuality and feminism revolves.
In line with recent research that regards the Second World War as a “defining moment” rather than a temporary disruption to the development of consumer societies, this paper explores how consumers were imagined in nonbelligerent Sweden. The main empirical source material consists of business-to-business advertisements from newspaper and magazine publishers aimed at potential advertisers. There, publishers portrayed their readers as suitable consumers, and, given that the division of the press constituted the main infrastructure for reaching different consumer groups, this is interpreted as a key to understanding market segmentation processes. The findings show how geographical, demographic, and psychological factors were considered in optimizing advertising influence and reaching classed and gendered target audiences. Although the segmentation process consolidated during the war, focusing on stable, large consumer groups, the imagined consumer also underwent fundamental changes, combating anxiety and despair through dreams of both future and present patriotic consumption.
Analysing customer loyalty card data is a novel method for assessing nutritional quality and changes in a population’s food consumption. However, prior to its use, the thousands of grocery products available in stores must be reclassified from the retailer’s original hierarchical structure into a structure that is suitable for the use of nutrition and health research. We created LoCard Food Classification (LCFC) and examined how it reflects the nutritional quality of the grocery product groups. Nutritional quality was considered the main criterion guiding the reclassification of the 3574 grocery product groups. Information on the main ingredient of the product group, purpose of use and carbon footprint was also used at the more granular levels of LCFC. The main challenge in the reclassification was a lack of detailed information on the type of products included in each group, and some of the groups included products that have opposite health effects. The final LCFC has four hierarchical levels, and it is openly available online. After reclassification, the product groups were linked with the Finnish food composition database, and the nutrient profile was assessed by calculating the Nutrient-Rich Food Index (NRFI) for each product group. sd in NRFI decreased from 0·21 of the least granular level to 0·08 of the most granular level of LCFC indicating that the most granular level of LCFC has more homogeneous nutritional quality. Studies that apply LCFC to examine loyalty card data with health and environmental outcomes are needed to further demonstrate its validity.
Using consumption data, this chapter profiles in detail the arrival of China’s age of abundance, from improvements in diet, to clothing, housing, and transportation. It documents and establishes the arrival of China’s age of material abundance.
Empirical models of consumption, investment, and net exports are constructed and compared with predictions from theoretical models. The role of inventory investment in economic fluctuations is discussed. The empirical dependence of aggregate demand on aggregate output and income is computed, resulting in a rough estimate of a Keynesian (demand) multiplier.
Contrary to the prevailing narratives about China’s economic miracle, this chapter lays out the book’s main arguments that the spectacular economic boom lasting four decades was largely unexpected by both Chinese leaders and the world’s leading economists, that China’s age of abundance originated somewhere, and that a set of historical conditions made it possible. It also discusses the data sources used for this project.
The introduction sets out the main themes and provides a historical background to the core of the book. There is, firstly, a discussion of how the planting of the vine was shaped by larger imperial dynamics under the Dutch East India Company and subsequently under British rule. It addresses the transition from slavery to a form of labour that was nominally free. Secondly, there is an analysis of the relative importance of the domestic and imperial markets and the manner in which British duties shaped the Cape wine industry. And thirdly, the chapter provides an account of the increased importance of wine science concerned with managing the fermentation process and dealing with diseases. The phylloxera crisis is shown to be a turning point, not least with respect to South Africa’s engagement with international scientific opinion. The career of A.I. Perold unfolds as part of that story. The chapter concludes by identifying some of the challenges that were faced during the research and how the project evolved to take account of what was possible. The introduction alludes to work that deploys Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of fields, and justifies its decision not to go down that route.
The Conclusion recapitulates the ways in which the shifting balance of scientific opinion, economic power and bureaucratic intervention (which was inevitably political) shaped the trajectory of wine over the course of the twentieth century and into the new millennium. The lesson is that innovations in one field did not necessarily spill over into the others, which often meant that they stalled. Race runs as a thread through this history because its inscription in laws shaped consumption patterns, had a bearing on export possibilities, and led producers and merchants alike to set their priorities according to their reading of the market and where the profits lay. The Conclusion ends by speculating about whether the legacies of racial framings are finally being addressed.
This chapter addresses the rapid increase in the consumption of white wines in the 1950s. It traces some of the changes to the efforts of the wine companies to develop the consumer market through brand building. But the breakthrough came with the perfection of the method of cool fermentation that permitted the preservation of the aromatic character of white wines. Boosted by innovations in the cellar, in the form of temperature-controlled stainless steel tanks, it became possible to produce wine of a reliable quality on an industrial scale. The chapter argues that while the KWV criticised the merchants, they worked with selected farmers to improve the quality of the wine. This was true of Stellenbosch Farmers’ Winery (SFW) and Distillers. The greater costs involved, however, led many farmers to resort to selling their grapes to the cooperatives rather than making their own wine. The chapter focuses on specifc farms like Rustenberg where it is possible to precisely date the turn to cool femerntation The importance of brand development is underlined through an account of the meteoric wise of SFW’s Lieberstein, which was reputedly the world’s largest brand in the early 1960s.