In eighteenth-century Britain, industrial production and domestic consumption of cheap goods rose precipitously. To understand both the cultural causes and impacts of this trend, historians have increasingly turned to analysis of its incipience in the seventeenth century. According to this method, evidence from material culture—the mass of objects that makes up the setting and the tools of a people's everyday lives—demonstrates that seemingly smaller, slower changes to people's goods and their attitudes about them laid the groundwork for the rapid and sweeping change that followed. The availability of extremely cheap tobacco pipes and sewing thimbles, for example, made these the first truly disposable goods to be widely consumed in Britain. Moreover, households began to change shape as fireplaces and cookware came to accomodate the warmer, more convenient coal that began to replace wood as fuel.
However, there were new additions to British material culture that can be properly assigned to the eighteenth century. In one example, the widespread acceptance of conspicuous consumption outside of London was slow to materialize. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, excessive material wealth and especially gaudy displays of it were considered to be not only uncouth but also immoral; as average household wealth increased and goods became more widely available throughout the country, consumption for its own sake became normalized in every region.