Upon discovering this book, a globe trotting history spanning view of consumers and consumer culture, I was excited. Placing current events through the lens of history is an appealing prospect, and this subject is doubly interesting.
The book starts off far back in history, detailing the gradual transition to where human economic activity reached the level that would make consumerism even possible. I love that the author was able to take European, Asian, and Indian examples, which makes for a more well balanced look at our topic.
However as the book went on, I kept loosing track of where I was in the grand history of consumption. It felt like the author wasn’t just losing the forest for the trees, he was losing the trees for the leaves, then spending a long time telling me about what the local culture believed about those leaves. I would have appreciated even a thin layer of narrative overlay to describe common patterns of consumer development, or at least seperating out the meta-consumer debate from actual consumption patterns. Instead we end up with a narrative that marches rigidly chronologically, giving the reader no broader waypoints into the trends that matter.
Arriving to the second half, I rejoiced that now we could get into synthesis, and that my plodding through a monotonous timeline would be rewarded. Instead, the author expands the scope, as if the entire economic history of humanity were not enough, to talk about related topics of age, time, and other overlapping topic, but each would require at least a book to do justice.
So, we’re left an implicit core narrative that consumption, and all the patterns we see about consumption, are neither new nor unique in history. There are numerous adjacent topics to explore, but by trying to cover all of them, the author did none of them justice.