Consumer Culture, Market Empire, and the Global South

The development of U.S. consumer culture and its advance through Western Europe has absorbed the attention of many U.S. and European historians who are increasingly in dialogue with one another. Efforts to include the rest of the world as a subject in this dialogue, however, have been unsatisfactory. This is regrettable, considering that greater attention to the history of the global expansion of U.S. consumer culture has much to offer historians, from problematizing geopolitical taxonomies (e.g., the West vs. the Rest, First World vs. Third World, North Atlantic vs. Global South) to high-lighting the importance of transnational actors, agents, and circuits, not only in the history of consumption but in national and regional histories as well