How commercial interests have been shaped by, and influenced, our senses

If the senses have a history, as Karl Marx wrote, then that history is inseparable from the development of capitalism, which has both taken advantage of the senses and influenced how sensory experience has changed over time. 

Capitalism and the Senses (University of Pennsylvania Press, June 2023) is the first edited volume to explore how the forces of capitalism are entangled with everyday sensory experience. Authors Regina Lee Blaszczyk, professor of business history and leadership chair in the history of business and society at the University of Leeds, and David Suisman, associate professor in the University of Delaware Department of History, have compiled this pioneering collection  that shows how seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching have both shaped and been shaped by commercial interests from the turn of the twentieth century to our own time. 

From the manipulation of taste and texture in the food industry to the careful engineering of the feel of artificial fabrics, capitalist enterprises have worked to commodify the senses in a wide variety of ways. Drawing on history, anthropology, geography and other fields, the volume’s essays analyze not only where this effort has succeeded but also where the senses have resisted control and the logic of markets. The result is an innovative ensemble that demonstrates how the drive to exploit sensorial experience for profit became a defining feature of capitalist modernity and establishes the senses as an important dimension of the history of capitalism.