ABSTRACT

This chapter explains the analysis of probate inventories shows the gradual diffusion in the consumption of durable and semi-durable goods in urban and rural families as well as households with different levels of wealth. There was an interest in consuming exotic and foreign goods filling consumer needs, but at the same time the display of goods, in public life, caused a social backlash, because those goods were the symbol of social transgressions against traditional lifestyles. Therefore, in eighteenth-century Spanish literature, as well as political texts such as letters, prohibitions or pamphlets, th author's find the major platform for traditional voices that were imposing barriers against the conversion of the national territory into a melting pot composed of both national and foreign human, economic, material and cultural capital. The chapter talks about the major socio-economic agents that stimulated and created the demand for textiles and luxury and colonial commodities were merchants.