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Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire. By Peter N. Stearns. New York: Routledge, 2002. x + 147 pp. Index, references. Paper, $17.95. ISBN 0-415-24409-9.
This succinct text provides a valuable and fairly comprehensive overview of the history of consumer society. It is divided into three parts: "The Emergence of Consumerism in the West," "Consumerism Goes Global," and "Consumerism Toward the New Century." Although primarily offered as a synthesis, Stearns provides useful definitions of key terms, and throughout notes unasked questions and unresolved issues in the rapidly growing field of consumer studies.
The first chapter, "Before Consumerism," highlights the crucial difference between individual acts of consumption and an ethic of consumerism. While aristocrats and nobles, going back to the ancient world, bought and displayed luxury items, Stearns argues that mass consumption is a crucial component of modern consumer societies. He also shows that, prior to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the values and infrastructure of all of the major world cultures were not amenable to consumerism.
In addressing the emergence of consumerism, Stearns highlights the importance of a "consumer apparatus," which he claims existed by the mid-eighteenth-century in Britain, France, and the Low Countries, as well as in parts of Germany and Italy. Arguing against the view that America was born to shop, he claims that the American colonies and the early United States "participated in Europe's first consumer revolution as imitators but with a definite lag" (p. 42). Shops and markets were important, but so was the development of a consumerist ethic. While showing the ways in which eighteenth-century advertising contributed to the...