The stage was set for the consumer age to begin.
In Britain, William Lever founded his empire on Sunlight soap in the 1880s and his company became the first to use packaging to sell its products. In order to feed its demand for natural resources, especially vegetable oil for margarine, he went abroad and developed plantation economies in Africa. When Lever Bros. amalgamated with a Dutch company, UNI, it became Unilever, the first multinational food company. Its exploitation of underdeveloped countries in Africa, Asia, and South America was the blueprint for what is known as neocolonialism.
This was the second major stage in capitalism's evolution: the first was industrialization, and we are now witnessing the third: globalization. Under neocolonialism the underdeveloped world was used as a source of cheap raw materials for markets in Western Europe and North America, and under globalization the whole world becomes a market. Capital is switched between nations and continents wherever the rate of profit is higher. Older industrial economies such as the United States, Britain, and Germany find themselves being behind as the new, lean economies of the Pacific rim attract investment.
If Adam Smith returned to life and saw some of the more extreme aspects of neoliberalism, he would probably find them bizarre. Nevertheless, they derive from the ideas of early liberalism. The belief in the market, in market forces, has separated from the factual production of goods and services. It has become an end in itself, and this is one reason to speak of "neoliberalism" and not of "liberalism". A general characteristic of neoliberalism is the desire to intensify and expand the market, by intensifying the number, frequency, repeatability, and formalization of transactions. The ultimate (unreachable) goal of neoliberalism is a universe where every action of every being is a market transaction, conducted in competition with every other being and with every other transaction, influencing every other transaction, with transactions occurring in an infinitely short time, and repeated at an infinitely fast rate.