ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the way luxury goods have been used in the past, as expressions of wealth and status in societies marked by the absence of material consumption by the majority of the population. I show how early societies sought to normatively prescribe behavior and consumption habits as part of overall attempts to regulate morality. Sometimes this entailed the invocation of religious concerns and prescripts (against avarice); in others secular attitudes towards the preservation of community stability were emphasized. With the rise of Christianity, luxury goods acquired a sacred dimension and then following the writings of Adam Smith, luxury became viewed as an almost inevitable expression of individual effort and initiative, framed in an institutional context of an emerging market economy. With the growth of industrialism luxury became de-moralized as social mobility appeared to open the pathway to material success for larger numbers of the population.
