ABSTRACT
Consumption has taken on ever-increasing importance in explaining the economic growth that both preceded and accompanied industrialisation. Indeed, Jan de Vries’ (2008) ‘industrious revolution’ assigns the power to motivate increased market-orientation and labour supply to the emergence of new, particularly oriental, goods and the acquisitive desires they prompted. People worked harder and longer and more frequently for wages to earn more money in order to be able to buy these novel goods. The new orthodoxy has industriousness as precursor to the Industrial Revolution itself (see e.g. Allen, 2009).
