This book conceives the role of the modern town as a crucial place for mate-
rial and cultural circulations of luxury. It concentrates on a critical period
of historical change, the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that was
marked by the passage from a society of scarcity to one of expenditure and
accumulation, from ranks and orders to greater social mobility, from tradi-
tional aristocratic luxury to a new bourgeois and even democratic form of
luxury. This volume recognizes not only the notion that luxury operated as
a mechanism of social separation, but also that all classes aspired to engage
in consumption at some level, thus extending the idea of what constituted
luxury and blurring the boundaries of class and status, often in unsettling
ways. It moves beyond the moral aspects of luxury and the luxury debates
to analyse how the production, distribution, purchase or display of luxury
goods could participate in the creation of autonomous selves and thus chal-
lenge gender roles.