Ina Baghdiantz McCabe’s A history of global consumption, 1500–1800 is a cogent synthesis of scholarship in the field and constitutes both a useful resource for undergraduate students and a valuable contribution to the burgeoning body of literature on the history of consumption. It is not the first volume promising to examine this subject through a global lens – Peter Stearns’ Consumerism in world history: the global transformation of desire and The Oxford handbook of the history of consumption are two notable examples – but McCabe’s approach diverges from both in fruitful ways. Whereas Stearns argued that consumerism was essentially a Western phenomenon that only subsequently spread to other parts of the world, McCabe offers a more complicated, and more compelling, narrative of the development and evolution of consumer politics, tastes, and habits. The Oxford handbook, like so many edited volumes with a ‘global’ approach to almost any historical subject, presents an assemblage of discrete, geographically variegated pieces that ultimately do not speak directly to each other. A history of global consumption has less segmentation by good and region, and knits together some of the most dramatic transformations in the history of global consumption into a single narrative that is, on the whole, a cohesive and engaging read.

The introduction presents key debates in the field, including disagreements over the social origins of consumerism and the question of Western exceptionalism in the rise of consumption. The narrative is then organized chronologically into seven chapters that span the early modern period. Each chapter concludes with a set of study questions and thorough citations, which enhance the book’s value as a tool for educators.

The first chapter draws attention to the rising prominence of merchants from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. Members of this emergent elite not only transported goods around the world but also accumulated wealth and developed a penchant for collecting exotic goods as signifiers of their social status and political influence. This section effectively outlines important innovations in legal and banking systems that developed to facilitate, and at times to limit, such accumulation and display.

Chapters 2 and 3 address the impact on global consumption of European encounters with the environment, resources, and native peoples of the Americas. There is a succinct summary of the spread of sugar plantations from Ottoman North Africa to Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and British colonies in the western hemisphere, and a discussion of how this commodity was intimately tied to the transatlantic slave trade, global silver circulation, and consumption habits within circles of merchants and nobles. McCabe introduces the concept of the triangular trade, and notes the importance of American crops such as cassava and maize in supporting population growth in Africa and Europe. These chapters also treat the uses of tobacco and chocolate in Amerindian cultures, and the ideas and practices associated with the consumption of these goods as they spread into Europe and China. On the one hand, the chapters are among the more compellingly ‘global’ of the volume. On the other, European desires and consumption practices receive by far the most sustained attention. Though this reflects a general imbalance in the literature, a wave of recent and forthcoming scholarship is turning attention to consumption in places such as West Africa, and will require historians to rethink their narratives about the global nature of consumption in the modern and early modern worlds.

The fourth chapter is an authoritative examination of the transformation of ‘exotic’ goods into domestic products in Europe, and includes fantastic detail on the spread of coffee consumption and the development of fashion in France. Chapter 5 is the least cohesive chapter. After tracing the rise and fall of tulipmania, the text rapidly skips through sections on seventeenth-century Dutch home interiors, paintings, clothing, linens, the birth of fashion marketing in France, dolls, and fashion trends in late Ming and early Qing China. A uniting theme is not clearly delineated or analysed in sufficient depth to bind these within the same frame.

Chapter 6 turns to the economic and political consequences of runaway consumption. McCabe provides brief accounts of the Mississippi and South Sea bubbles, each resulting from financing schemes intended to fund French and British government debts, respectively. Thinkers of the eighteenth century expressed concerns over the bullion bleeding from national coffers to pay for the import of luxury goods, and advocated the internalization of the production of exotic items, where possible. The ideas of Kenneth Pomeranz and his critics regarding the Great Divergence also receive ample space in these pages. The book concludes on a solid note with a chapter that focuses on the moral and political implications of consumption in the Age of Revolutions, from the spread of French fashion throughout Europe to the boycotts of British goods and support of homespun in North America.

In some places, McCabe attempts to do too much, and does not allow sufficient space to illuminate connections between various goods and broader processes. The result is an abundance of interesting detail, but an occasional degeneration into a loose organizational structure that relies more on subheadings than narrative to move things along. A major missed opportunity was the chance to follow through on the promise laid out in the introduction, to ‘balance the over-representation of Europe by including groups never discussed such as Native Americans’ (p. 1). But of course, Native Americans are often discussed, and shifting patterns of consumption, be they of livestock, horses, land, slaves, or arms, have been central in some of the most innovative scholarship in recent years on the native peoples of North America. Unfortunately, Native Americans feature but rarely in this account, primarily as a contrast to European habits and styles when they do make an appearance, and disappear entirely quite early in the book.

A history of global consumption will nevertheless serve its purpose as a clear and wide-ranging survey of the formation and impacts of consumption practices and tastes around the world. McCabe’s synthetic treatment of dispersed regions, and her effective integration of major theories and debates into the body of the text itself, make this a handy teaching resource and an excellent overview of some of the most influential developments in consumer tastes and habits throughout the early modern period.