You need look no further than the United States, at least in the telling of one prominent historian. In The Marketplace of Revolution:, T.H. Breen posits that it was the shared consumption of luxury consumer goods, from the poorest to the wealthiest strata of society, that helped to bind the disparate peoples living in the British North American colonies into an identity known as "American." This identification was a key factor in the development of the American Revolution.

Specifically, the increasing taste for--and reliance on--consumer goods by Americans contributed to their negative reactions to the tightening of British mercantilism after the Seven Years' War. Faced with huge debts run up from that war, in particular the fielding of a large professional army in North America, British governments sought to recoup that investment through increased taxation of the colonists, who they saw as the primary beneficiaries of that high level of spending. The colonists disagreed, recognizing their own importance as consumers in the imperial economy. In Breen's telling, they also used strategies they learned from consumerism, including boycotts, to help organize their resistance to the Crown and Parliament in the years running up to 1775. For one example, it became fashionable among colonial elites to wear homespun garments, rather than the elaborate (and expensive) imported fabrics that had become the norms. Perhaps most famously, tea boycotts became quite popular means of resistance.