Urban Amenities and Rural Sufficiency: Living Standards and Consumer Behavior in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1643–1777

Lorena S. Walsh

The Journal of Economic History, 1983, vol. 43, issue 1, 109-117

Abstract: By the mid-eighteenth century, tidewater Chesapeake households at all levels of wealth were both able and willing to buy a wide range of non-essential consumer goods either previously unavailable or long considered unimportant. The use of amenities and often luxuries as props for increasingly elaborated and differentiated life styles was not a result of country folk imitating city consumption patterns, however. Urban life styles did produce new spending habits, but the vast majority of the population who lived in rural areas managed to improve their consumption levels without altering traditional patterns of resource allocation.

Date: 1983
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