Abstract
The increase in boycotts since the 1980s is often heralded as a sign of a new moral economy and civil society. This chapter, by contrast, highlights the importance of the state. It places boycotts in the context of state power in the modern world. It shows how the turn to boycotts in the years around 1900 was an anti-colonial weapon in the vacuum of state sovereignty, how the state became a target for social reformers, and how states mobilised consumers directly for war and empire. The shift to “caring at a distance” since the 1950s and the declining interest in conditions at home is related to the rise of the welfare state. Rather than ushering in a new kind of politics, consumer activists operate in the shadow of the state.
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Notes
- 1.
Quoted in Nancy Young Reynolds, Commodity Cultures: Interweavings of Market Cultures, Consumption Practices, and Social Power in Egypt, 1907–61 (Stanford PhD, 2003), 300. For China, see Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge, MA, 2003) esp. chs. 3–4.
- 2.
Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender and British Slavery, 1713–1833 (Stanford, 2000). K. Kish Sklar, ‘The Consumers’ White Label Campaign of the National Consumers’ League, 1898–1918’, in: Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, eds. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt, (Cambridge, 1998); Landon R. Y. Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumer’s League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill, 2000). Michele Micheletti, Political Virtue and Shopping: Individuals, Consumerism, and Collective Action (New York and Basingstoke, 2003). Sophie Dubuisson-Quellier, La Consommation Engagée (Paris, 2009). For the somewhat different role of boycotts as a space of action for social Catholics in early twentieth-century France, see Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel, Consommateurs engagés à la Belle époque: La Ligue sociale d’acheteurs (Paris, 2012).
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See Gavin Fridell, ‘Fair Trade and Neoliberalism: Assessing Emerging Perspectives’, Latin American Perspectives, vol. 33, no. 6, (2006), 8–28; Gavin Fridell, Fair Trade Coffee: The Prospects and Pitfalls of Market-Driven Social Justice (Toronto, 2007). Cf. Frank Trentmann, ‘Before “Fair Trade”: Empire, Free Trade, and the Moral Economies of Food in the Modern World’, Environment and Planning D, vol. 25, no. 6, (2007), 1079–1102.
- 11.
See http://fairtrade.ca; http://www.thepowerofyou.org.nz/resources/, last accessed 24 January 2014.
- 12.
Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York, 1994).
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See http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/boycotts.aspx, last accessed at 10 September 2017.
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Cadbury advert in The Times, 17 Oct. 1910, 6. For pastoral scenery, see The Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times, 4 Oct. 1902.
- 17.
For this argument, see Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first (London, 2016), ch. 3. For chocolate, see Roman Rossfeld, Schweizer Schokolade: industrielle Produktion und kulturelle Konstruktion eines nationalen Symbols, 1860–1920 (Baden, 2007), for the English marketing of ‘safe’ Indian tea from the British Raj versus ‘dirty’ foreign Chinese tea, see Erika Rappaport, ‘Packaging China: Foreign Articles and Dangerous Tastes in the Mid-Victorian Tea Party’ in: The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World, ed. Frank Trentmann, (Oxford and New York, 2006), 125–46, and now at length Erika Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, 2017).
- 18.
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge, 1991), quoted at pp. 81, 214.
- 19.
Quoted from Sussman, Consuming Anxieties, 155.
- 20.
M. Micheletti, D. Stolle, and M. Hoogh, ‘Zwischen Markt und Zivilgesellschaft: Politischer Konsum als bürgerliches Engagement’, in: Zivilgesellschaft – national und transational, eds. D. Gosewinkel, et al., (Berlin, 2003), 151–71. See also: Michele Micheletti and Dietlind Stolle, ‘Swedish Political Consumers: Who They Are and Why They Use the Market as an Arena for Politics’, in: Political Consumerism: Its Motivations, Power, and Conditions in the Nordic Countries and Elsewhere, eds. M. Boström, et al., (Oslo, 2005), 145–164.
- 21.
Frank Trentmann, ‘The Modern Genealogy of the Consumer: Meanings, Identities and Political Synapses’, in: Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges, eds. John Brewer and Frank Trentmann, (Oxford and New York, 2006), 19–69.
- 22.
Elisabeth von Knebel-Doeberitz, ‘Die Aufgabe und Pflicht der Frau als Konsument’, in: Hefte der Freien Kirchlich-Sozialen Konferenz, 40 (Berlin, 1907), 39, my translation. For the citizen consumer in the United States, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003); Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, 2005); cf.: David Steigerwald, ‘All Hail the Republic of Choice: Consumer History as Contemporary Thought’, The Journal of American History, vol. 93, no. 2, (2006) 385–403. For Britain, see Matthew Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2003); Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain.
- 23.
Alice Malpass, Clive Barnett, Nick Clarke, and Paul Cloke, ‘Problematizing Choice: Responsible Consumers and Sceptical Citizens’, in: Governance, Citizens, and Consumers: Agency and Resistance in Contemporary Politics, eds. Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann, (Basingstoke, 2007), 231–56; Alice Malpass, Paul Cloke, Clive Barnett, and Nick Clarke, ‘Fairtrade urbanism? The politics of place beyond place in the Bristol fairtrade city campaign’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 31, no. 3, (2007), 633–45.
- 24.
Kathryn Wheeler, Fair Trade and the Citizen-Consumer (Basingstoke, 2012).
- 25.
Office for National Statistics, chapter 5 ‘Weekly household expenditure, an analysis of the regions of England and countries of the United Kingdom’, 8 Feb 2013, available at http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171766_297746.pdf, last accessed 22 January 2015.
- 26.
The Guardian, 3 Sept. 2014.
- 27.
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Trentmann, F. (2019). Consumer Boycotts in Modern History: States, Moral Boundaries, and Political Action. In: Feldman, D. (eds) Boycotts Past and Present. Palgrave Critical Studies of Antisemitism and Racism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94872-0_2
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