Consumerism in World History. The Global Transformation of Desire. By Peter N. Stearns. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Pp. 147. $10.99

This book is one in a series, “Themes in World History,” edited by Peter Stearns, who is also the author of two of the three volumes produced thus far, including this one. The series is designed to provide supplementary reading for undergraduate history students, and if this volume is any guide, the underlying assumption about the target audience is that it is barely literate. With a limited vocabulary and simplified sentence structure, Stearns introduces his putative charges to a new “ism”—consumerism—and proceeds to chart the emergence and development of this force from its western point of origin (“The discovery of significant consumerism, of the modern sort, in eighteenth-century Western Europe was a major historical find” [p. 15]) to the rest of the world and up to the present day.