Berg's pronouncements on globalization are crucial in this respect: In the eighteenth century a global trade in luxuries and manufactured consumer goods provided not just the labour and the materials that went into making of new goods, but the designs, fashions, and sophisticated marketing that shaped the product development of the period. The author has shown that consumption is a considerably more complex phenomenon than has generally been depicted in the historical literature of the last two decades Without ignoring the role of economic historians in this important narrative, Berg has taught them the merit of injecting design, taste, and fashion in their calculus of appraising economic change.