How We Became a World of Consumers

Frank Trentmann, Ph.D.,  is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. His many publications include Free Trade Nation which won the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize in 2009. His latest book is Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First with several foreign translations appearing in 2017. Things, things, and more things. Today we live in a world where all we do is consume more than we ever have before.  Is this a good thing or a bad thing?  Frank Trentmann explains the history of consumerism and how human behavior has changed over time.