Charts the rise of consumerism and the new cosmopolitan material cultures that took shape across the globe from 1500 to 1820.

1. Early globalisation, rising cosmopolitanism and a new world of goods; 2. Fabric and furs: a new framework of global consumption; 3. Dressing world peoples: regulation and cosmopolitan desire; 4. Smuggling, wrecking and scavenging: or, the informal pathways to consumption; 5. Tobacco and the politics of consumption; 6. Stitching the global: contact, connection and translation in needlework arts in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries; 7. Conclusion: realising cosmopolitan material culture.

Beverly Lemire is Professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair at the University of Alberta, Canada. She publishes widely in textile history, gender and economic development, and material history and was founding Director of the University of Alberta's Material Culture Institute. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2003.