In recent years a plethora of books on British commodity and consumer culture have established consumerism as a fertile area of British cultural history. But unlike in the United States, in Britain there has been relatively little consideration of consumerism as a politicized campaign for consumer rights. Perhaps this is understandable. The sustained presence of Ralph Nader in American political culture over several decades and the centrality of material abundance to the American dream have made the political dimension of consumerism a more obvious focus of research for American historians. For the British, Matthew Hilton tells us, Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain is properly situated within Labour's fraught relationship with affluence and the emergence of supranational politics after World War II.

Hilton sets out to write a systematic account of consumer movements, ideologies, and official institutions in Britain. He begins with the premise “we are all consumers now” (1), but this is not a book in which the actual consumers, their behavior, or their preferences figure prominently. Rather, Hilton's analysis centers on ideas about consumers, largely propagated by the Left, and on the development of various organizations, both private and public, that have sought to represent consumers. The book is divided into two parts, “Necessity” and “Affluence,” which treat prewar and postwar consumerism, respectively.

Part 1 traces the “politics of necessitous consumption” (29) prior to World War II. Hilton casts his net widely. He looks at government organizations, such as the Consumer's Council (1918–21), which during World War I sought to articulate working-class concerns to the Ministry of Food; the Food Council (1924–39), which was supposed to mediate between producers and consumers; the agricultural marketing boards begun in the 1930s; and the various consumer councils formed for coal, electricity, and transport under Labour nationalization schemes of the 1940s. But he is also interested in early theorists of consumer socialism such as Percy Redfern, the campaign for the “living wage” initiated by the Independent Labour Party in the 1920s, and the policy documents of the pressure group Political and Economic Planning (PEP) in the 1930s. Often Hilton finds that early socialist interpretations of consumerism are paternalist in tone. Hilton contends that by the 1940s the distinction between needs and luxuries began to break down. The war created a sense that everyone had a right to some material abundance. Nonetheless, Clement Attlee put “the people's needs” above “mink coats” (144). Utility schemes and the purchase tax “represented a controversial paternalist consumer politics in which questions of the moral value of individual commodities were answered not by, but on behalf of consumers” (144). Here, in passing, Hilton takes issue with Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska's view (in Austerity in Britain [Oxford, 2000]) that Labour rhetoric of thrift and restraint contributed to Attlee's defeat in 1951. Throughout, Hilton sees a consistent theme: a distrust of the irrationality of consumers meant that consumers themselves should only assume an advisory role.

Part 2 examines the shift from amateurism to professionalism that has dominated comparative product testing both by voluntary and government bodies. For instance, immediately after the war the National Council of Women examined household items such as cookers, blankets, and children's clothes. But as amateurs, Hilton argues, the women could be “out-manoeuvered on any technical committee” or be reduced to “handmaidens of industry” at tea receptions for businessmen (181). With the founding of the Consumer's Association in 1956 and the launch of Which? magazine in 1957, the male scientist, not the housewife, recommended a “best buy” largely to a middle-class, apolitical audience, intent on value for money rather than a socioeconomic agenda. The main development of the late twentieth century has been the transformation of the consumer from a housewife with the shopping basket to a citizen with a social democratic vision. Consumer Advice Centres from 1969 and the National Consumer Council from 1975 have endeavored to work, not just to create “a narrow individualist ‘race of supershoppers’” among middle-class professionals but to promote social responsibility, inclusion, and equity for the “inarticulate and disadvantaged” (282). New Labour and globalization debates have switched the focus of politics away from class and toward the nontraditional areas of animal rights, environmentalism, and sexual orientation, for example, which offer not only individual and collective identities but “a point of entry to construct a third way in politics” with the potential to unite rich and poor, North and South, in a transnational citizenship free of “the anti-democratic shackles alleged to be cast upon it by the vested interests of the capitalist and the trade unionist” (337). Moving beyond moral condemnation and class, Hilton provides a meticulously researched analysis of twentieth-century consumerism that should appeal to the specialist and to those interested in British politics, broadly defined.