By far the largest expense in a traditional household budget was food and clothing, which together with housing took up much of a family’s earnings. Most people did not shop or ‘consume’ in the modern sense; they subsisted. For the overwhelming majority of the European population up to the middle of the twentieth century, ‘disposable income’ was a contradiction in terms. As recently as 1950, the average western European household spent more than half its cash outlay on necessities: food, drink and tobacco (sic). In Mediterranean Europe the figure was distinctly higher. Once clothing and rent
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