1. For inter-European differences in “cultures of credit,” see Lucia A. Reisch and Wencke Gwozdz, “Finanzkulturen in Europa: Ähnlichkeiten und Unterschiede,” in SCHUFA Kredit-Kompass 2010 (Wiesbaden, 2010), 139–57.
2. A good overview of recent scholarship on the transnational turn in the historical profession: Ian Tyrrell, “Reflections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and Practice,” Journal of Global History 4 (2009): 453–74.
3. The present volume, to be sure, while global in its approach, is by no means all-encompassing, as it lacks contributions on the development of credit in Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and large parts of Asia. In part, these omissions follow from the book’s focus on those “developed” consumer societies in which assumptions about convergence appear most prominent and existing differences are perhaps most surprising. The omissions are also rooted, however, in a dearth of research on the credit history of these areas despite some exceptions. See, for example, Grietjie Verhoef, “Informal Financial Service Institutions for Survival: African Women and Stokvels in Urban South Africa, 1930–1998,” Enterprise & Society 2 (2001): 259–96.
4. Recent stocktaking of the state of the field of consumption history: Hartmut Berghoff and Uwe Spiekermann, eds., Decoding Modern Consumer Societies (New York, 2012).
5. See, for example, Martha Olney, Buy Now, Pay Later: Advertising, Credit, and Consumer Durables in the 1920s (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991); Britta Stücker, “Konsum auf Kredit in der Bundesrepublik,” Economic History Yearbook, no. 2 (2007): 63–88;