1. The concept of a ‘consumer revolution’ was coined by N. McKendrick, ‘Commercialization and the economy’, in N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J. H. Plumb eds,The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England(London: Europa, 1982), pp. 9–194. For a critique of this concept and a study of consumption in the Spanish context, see J. Torras and B. Yun eds,Consumo, Condiciones de Vida y Comercialización. Cataluña y Castilla, siglos XVIII–XIX(Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, Consejería de Educación y Cultura, 1999).
2. Tailors and shoemakers accounted for 8·5 and 7·7 per cent, respectively, of Madrid’s artisans in 1757. See J. A. Nieto Sánchez,Artesanos y Mercaderes. Una Historia Social y Económica de Madrid(Madrid: Fundamentos, 2006), pp. 328–29.
3. Lemire B,Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade before the Factory(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); M. Lambert, ‘Cast-off wearing apparel: the consumption and distribution of second-hand clothing in northern England during the long eighteenth century’,Textile History, xxxv, no. 1 (2004), pp. 1–26. From a broader chronological and geographical perspective, see L. Fontaine ed.Alternative Exchanges: Second-Hand Circulations from the Sixteenth Century to the Present(Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2008).
4. The deteriorating living conditions of Madrid workers are explored in J. Soubeyroux, ‘Pauperismo y relaciones sociales en el Madrid del siglo XVIII’,Estudios de Historia Social, i, nos 12–13 (1980), pp. 7–227; J. M. López García,El Motín contra Esquilache. Crisis y Protesta Popular en el Madrid del Siglo XVIII(Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2006).
5. Consumerism in Preindustrial and Early Industrial England: The Trade in Secondhand Clothes