ABSTRACT
Roughly speaking, we can look at the last two hundred years in Europe as representing a radical break with all the historic and prehistoric ages that preceded them. This is because technological advances of the Industrial Revolution made possible the mass production of manufactured goods and their quick and widespread distribution through modem means of communication such as the railways. Later, from the 1920s onwards, capitalist manufacturing industry became organised around highly mechanised production lines like the car assembly plants set up by Henry Ford, a kind of industrial organisation known as 'Fordism'. Because this system involved a great deal of capital investment the products produced had to be consumed en masse. The last forty years represent another important and distinctive 'post-Fordist' period. The development of electronic mass media, of radio and TV, allowed widespread advertising, even to illiterate people, so that most of the population could be targeted as potential consumers. These were the technological circumstances which enabled the development of modem consumer capitalism.
