Separately, The New York Review of Books has a review of Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann, an 880 page (700 of text) book that I doubt I will ever get to. The review itself is a lot shorter, and while a touch dense, it’s really interesting, and challenges a lot of common wisdom about consumption, notably the notion that variations by country are rooted in deep underlying cultural differences. The review is largely a summary of the book – here’s a passage that is kind of a summary of the summary:
“How did we come to be such voracious, irrepressible consumers? And how has all of this consuming changed the world? Those are the questions at the heart of Frank Trentmann’s Empire of Things, a more-is-more sort of book, each of its nearly seven hundred pages of text jam-packed with telling facts and counterintuitive provocations. Trentmann deals with five hundred-plus years of history, from the Renaissance city-states, with their tastes for gilded goblets and Oriental silks, to present-day China, where state capitalism has proven that liberalism is no requirement for booming consumerism. It’s a book about material objects (such as a department store window featuring a model of St. Paul’s Cathedral composed entirely of hankies), but even more, about all of the consumption that cannot be so readily seen—unspectacular, everyday acts such as changing your underpants daily (only 5 percent of German men did so in 1966).”