ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses two issues: first, the explanations for the European economic miracle and how British experience compares to that on the Continent, and, second, how this era fostered the development of a modern ‘consumer society’ in Britain and Western Europe. Millions suffered unemployment in the 1930s, and human and material losses in World War II left Europe devastated. The US led international developments from a position of unrivalled economic and financial power. The 1950s opened a period of transition in Western Europe, with the mass consumption of manufactured goods as the key change in a major shift in European consumption. For European consumers, deprivation in depression and war combined with the example of US abundance to fuel desires for new consumption, plus resentments when material conditions slowly improved. The importance of new consumption after the war is clearest in the purchases of durable goods, household appliances and automobiles.
