Men's things: masculine possession in the consumer revolution

This article uses the diaries of the Sussex shopkeeper Thomas Turner, the R everends James Woodforde of Norfolk and William Holland of Somerset, and th e Yorkshire schoolmaster Robert Sharp to explore men's multiple relations t o the consumer market in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Engl and. Arguing that historians have unduly discounted male participation in h ousehold provisioning and personal purchasing, it documents these diarists' engagement with a host of quotidian exchange activities. Avid purchasers a nd consumers of fish, potatoes, lace, buttons, china and clocks, these men were also active in promoting extended gift relations among neighbours, fri ends and kin. Their strategic deployment of gifts fostered sociability and commerce while bolstering hierarchical distinctions within the community an d the state. Helping to constitute a broad-based 'moral economy' of exchang e, these masculine gifting behaviours meshed easily with the men's identiti es as acquisitive purchasers of consumer goods but undercut their ability t o act as economic free agents. An understanding of men's shifting relations to the world of things in this period helps to explain the broader changes in English market moralities that underpinned the transition from custom t o contract in the nineteenth century.