Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

When historians have gone back to wrestle with the question of why the industrial revolution happened, when they have tried to define the forces that made it possible, their eyes have been drawn to more familiar culprits on the supply side: technological innovations that increased industrial productivity, the expansion of credit networks and financing structures; insurance markets that took significant risk out of global shipping channels. But the frivolities of shopping have long been considered a secondary effect of the industrial revolution itself, an effect, not a cause; a cultural appetite that wouldn’t be whetted until the rise of nineteenth-century department stores like Le Bon Marché and Macy’s. According to the standard theory, industrialization created mechanical processes that greatly reduced the cost of manufacturing and transporting goods, and built up a base of upper-middle-class citizens with enough spare cash to drop on the niceties—which then led to the birth of consumerism. But the Calico Madams suggest that the standard theory is, at the very least, more complicated than that: the “agreeable amusements” of shopping most likely came first, and set the thunderous chain of industrialization into motion with their seemingly trivial pursuits.