Pictorial Prints and the Growth of Consumerism: Class and Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Culture
Author(s)
Mukerji, Chandra
Abstract
This article traces the meaning and the impact of early modern consumerism through the example of pictorial prints, one of the first mass consumer goods of purely decorative value. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, “… the increased production and use of consumer commodities was helping to join both rich and poor into similar market relations and gathering together buyers throughout Europe into common patterns of taste. The new patterns of consumption of these novel goods brought to life a cultural system that, because it tapped and bred new levels and types of demand, was particularly suited to and encouraging of capitalist development.
