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Finalized article topic: Consumer revolution.
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Semi-Luxury and Imitation
editThe seventeenth and eighteenth-century in England was a period of learning from ancient civilizations, particularly the Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and Japanese. Popular culture drew aesthetic techniques, design, and technology from the goods England gathered from trade in Asia and the Mediterranean. With the increased demand for Asian ceramics, European markets had difficulty supplying buyers so inventors started imitating Chinese porcelain. Porcelain remained popular for tableware and pottery, but the style, shape and decoration of the porcelain changed to fit more Western tastes, painting flowers and English scenes rather than Chinese ones.[1]
Imitation goods were also used to disguise social class. Middle-class consumers could not afford the same exotic luxury goods brought back from overseas trade that the elite class used to distinguish their elevated rank. Markets and shops whose target buyers were middle-class consumers began creating "semi-luxury" goods that imitated actual luxury goods. These goods were part of a movement to create a "counterfeit culture" that gave middle-class consumers an opportunity to emulate the wealth and luxurious life that the elite class lived without paying as much. To avoid entirely copying Asian goods, English inventors imitated goods from other countries that also traded with Asia such as France, Holland, Switzerland, and Spain. [2]
Imitation and semi-luxury goods were also popular because they showed the modernization of English production and manufacturing processes. Large-scale production required standardization, advanced mechanical replication, and an organized system of assembly. Substitutes for the indigenous materials used to create the original products were scene as a show of enlightened and advanced thinking. The imitation and innovation of semi-luxury goods was a testament to the potential the English had to impact the global economy, to be France, China and India in national exports.[3]
Notes
edit- ^ Berg, Maxine, "From imitation to invention: creating commodities in eighteenth-century Britain," Economic History Review, 2002.
- ^ Berg, Maxine, "From imitation to invention: creating commodities in eighteenth-century Britain," Economic History Review, 2002.
- ^ Berg, Maxine, "In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century," Oxford University Press, 2004.