Too Much of a Good Thing? Consumption, Consumerism, and Consumer Cooperation in Modern History

Denounced by evangelical Christians, the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxists, new age cultists, and conservative and liberal moralists alike, consumerism has had a strange history as a subject of scholarship.Economics as a discipline has always assumed that demand played a central role in determining prosperity or poverty.Yet, only in the last thirty years has consumption, the purchase and use of goods and services by individuals, become a subject of systematic inquiry by historians and social scientists.Frank Trentmann, professor at Birkbeck College, University of London, is the world's foremost scholar on the history of what we buy.The "Cultures of Consumption" research program, which he led at the University of London from 2002 to 2007, generated an impressive set of scholarly studies that have defined the field. 1 His magnum opus, Empire of 1.