Social Changes 377

had more than 30,000 inhabitants: Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and Kiev.
Yet the Polish capital, Warsaw, which had only 7,000 inhabitants in the
mid-sixteenth century, had grown to 150,000 a century later.
As cities developed, those with money and leisure time found more to
do. The largest English towns sported theaters and concert halls, gentle­
men’s clubs, scientific societies, and racetracks. Towns took pride in their
development, publishing guides for visitors and directories listing the names
of shops. Elegant buildings of brick and stone replaced tottering wood­
beamed medieval structures. Streets were widened, paved, and cleaned, at
least in wealthy neighborhoods. Dublin, Boston, and Calcutta offered
smaller versions of English urban society, sporting private clubs and munici­
pal pride, at least for British residents.
Wealthy merchants and bankers lived in elegant townhouses near the
docks in Hamburg, Nantes, and Genoa, bustling port cities of interna­
tional trade. Expanded trade and urban growth engendered consumerism.
Paris became the European capital of luxury goods, as French nobles con­
tinually raised the standards of conspicuous consumption. Polish lords
traded grain for luxury goods from Western Europe. In Sweden, such lux­
ury reached court, aristocrats, and wealthy bourgeois, but a diplomat in
1778 estimated the market for such goods in Sweden to be only 70,000
people of a population of 2.5 million. Thomas Jefferson, who espoused sim­
plicity in life, nonetheless paid for a stream of luxury goods from London
and Paris to be shipped to Virginia.
Noble and wealthy bourgeois alike insisted on personal prerogatives of
taste, for example, in decoration and food. It became a compliment to say

Elegant shops on Capel Street in Dublin.