Introduction: Toward a Global History of Credit in Modern Consumer Societies

Abstract

During the late 1920s, many German retailers vigorously fought the spread of new installment sales methods as an “Americanism,” an unwelcome import from what was widely regarded as the “classic land of consumer credit.” Germany, one trade journal commentator observed, was not an “economic colony” of the United States and should uphold “German methods” of solid cash payment rather than kneel before the “American idol of prosperity” with its seductive credit schemes.1 More than eighty years have passed, and Germany is now unquestionably a developed consumer society, yet the topic of consumer credit still reveals deep anxieties about economic and cultural change brought from the outside. Reports about rising household indebtedness in Germany and elsewhere in Europe still frequently invoke the image of European societies approaching “American conditions” of unsustainable consumer debt.2 KeywordsCredit CardCredit UnionConsumer CreditConsumer SocietyLending PracticeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.