ABSTRACT
Why were towns given a role in consumer behaviour distinct from that of the country? Towns were not just collections of buildings grouped together with populations of various sizes in them, providing various services. They were, and were felt to be, different kinds of communities: not only did they look and smell different, but people in them behaved differently and valued different things. They were seen at the time, as they have been since, as representing something distinctive about civilized human behaviour and experience. In the seventeenth century it was taken for granted that towns were not merely social and economic centres, but essential manifestations of political civilization and of a well-ordered state. That this was so can be seen from the confusion that visitors felt when they went to Virginia or Maryland, where there were no urban developments until much later. Settlement there was in widely dispersed plantations of various sizes, with the marketing, administrative, and other functions of towns also widely distributed. Social and commercial life functioned in an orderly and sophisticated way, but visitors, government officials, clergymen, and others condemned the lack of towns and villages as fundamentally detrimental to life and morals; it hindered the proper government, and it led to a fear that there could be a mass reversion to savagery, for it was thought that the very nature of man required settled communities, in which natural, sinful instincts could be controlled and civilized. Thus there were many comments on the ‘barbarism’ of scattered dwellings, and officials held that towns were desirable both for people’s behaviour and for trade.6 The attitudes expressed in this physical and cultural environment, different from Europe in many ways, are revealing, since they show that towns were believed at the time to have an important role in cultural experience and that an area lacking in them was seen as devoid of important elements of civilization.
