ABSTRACT
The study of consumption has a long and distinguished pedigree, encompassing a number of disciplines, among which perhaps history and anthropology are the most notable. As Brewer and Porter comment, historians have regarded the ‘world of goods’ in a relatively unsystematic way, rarely bringing the insights of cultural, economic and political historians together. In the United Kingdom the analysis of ‘goods and things’, as the historian Asa Briggs described them, has frequently led to useful insights about the society from which they sprang. The principal focus is the material consequences of the way that the environment is constructed socially, a construction which is increasingly global in reach. Non-governmental organisations such as Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and Oxfam, have been at the forefront of demands to place Northern consumption within the context of North/South trade, global environmental destruction and the transport of wastes. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.
