ABSTRACT
Marketers, advertisers, corporations, political parties, voluntary and state agencies relentlessly tried to cultivate and control the consumer behaviours of men and women in the UK and its Empire. The American revolutionaries, British abolitionists, temperance reformers, co-operators, free traders, tariff reformers, suffragists and anti-colonial nationalists disagreed about what constituted productive consumer behaviours, but they all envisioned consumers as political actors. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins with Justin Bengry’s historiographical essay reviewing how queer history has dealt with the history of capitalism and then explains how the idea of a queer market developed in the twentieth century through artwork, photography, magazines, retail shops, clubs and bars. It concludes with two essays that similarly identify the continued presence of Victorian understandings of young, working-class male consumerism.
