Globalized desires. European development and global histories of early modern consumption

Jasmin Palamar

doi:10.18352/tseg.1128

Abstract

Books under review: Beverly Lemire, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures. The Material World Remade, c.1500-1820 (Cambridge 2018). Elif Akcetin and Suraiya Faroqhi (eds.), Living the Good Life. Consumption in the Qing and Ottoman Empires of the Eighteenth Century (Leiden 2018). Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things. How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (New York 2016).

Highlights

The idea of a ‘consumer society’ came up after the end of the Second World War in English-language scholarship and was for the first time substantially conceptualized by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith in his influential bestseller The Affluent Society (1958).[2]
Historians of the early modern era took on the objective of battling the idea that consumerism was a distinctive element of modernity.[6]
For example, by Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and John Harold Plumb in their pioneering and highly influential The Birth of a Consumer Society in 1982.8 as consumption historians departed from their narrow focus on the modern era, the search for the ‘birth’ of the consumer society upheld their preoccupation with industrial societies; Britain and continental Europe in particular

Summary

Globalized Desires

Books under review: Beverly Lemire, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cul tures. The Material World Remade, c.1500-1820 (Cambridge 2018). Elif Akçetin and Suraiya Faroqhi (eds.), Living the Good Life. Consump tion in the Qing and Ottoman Empires of the Eighteenth Century (Leiden 2018). How We Became a World of Con sumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First (New York 2016)

Introduction

Conclusion