More is More

[jody boy]

 Deborah Cohen on Frank Trentmann's" :

"Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the
Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First:"

In the NY Review:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/05/25/consumer-society-more-is-more/


"Just where and when the impetus toward material acquisition
originated, though, has been a matter of debate...

What, then, about the Dutch Republic during the seventeenth-century
Golden Age, when even the maid had paintings in her room? Although
Trentmann criticizes the energy that’s been devoted to proving the
origin of consumerism, he nonetheless agrees with those scholars who
have pinpointed a qualitative and quantitative change in consumption
in northwestern Europe, particularly the Netherlands and England, in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries..."
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l