Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  Should we despair? The acceleration of life has its costs, such as ‘burn-out’. But that does not mean society is flying off the rails, as some commentators fear. Humans are extraordinarily flexible and adaptive, much more so than they are sometimes given credit for. William James in the 1890s noted how people acquired habits and routines to free up the mind for other, more conscious and directed activities. The ‘great thing’, James wrote, ‘in all education, is to ‘make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy . . . [and to] make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can’.95 The twentieth century has been a long lesson in such habituation. Early listeners gave the radio their full attention. Swedish ads in the late 1920s praised the banana as the ideal quiet snack during radio hours.96 Gradually, people learnt to listen to the radio and eat their breakfast, talk and read the paper. Similar feats of coordination and multi-tasking happened with the car, the TV, the computer, the mobile phone, and will, presumably, continue to do so with unknown technologies in the future. One act of consumption has served as a platform for another. What is fast and slow, then, is an evolving affair without a given threshold. There is no reason to believe this evolution is finished.

  Leisure, we have noted, has been a Western concept, and it was industrial European and American societies which first wrestled with its quantity and quality. The data for non-Western societies is thinner. Still, it is worth pondering at least briefly to what degree the Western story of leisure in the twentieth century is indicative of general trends. Outside the affluent core, the answer probably would be ‘not much’. In Africa, colonial rulers constantly complained of ‘lazy’ natives. Such charges were steeped in racism but they also recorded that time was ticking to a different rhythm. Many Africans who arrived in inter-war Brazzaville (Congo), for example, were used to a four-day week. They were not easily disciplined into a continuous imperial working week with a few dedicated hours for structured leisure on the side. Absenteeism was rife. Before the arrival of football and dance halls, men filled their time playing cards or strolling about. For a woman to be seen with time on her hands, by contrast, marked her out as a bad wife or prostitute. As late as the 1980s, social workers struggled to persuade women in rural Congo that recreation was not dishonourable.97 Communist China underwent its own revolution in time. Mao ordered workers to sleep in the middle of the work day. A three-hour nap was quite normal, the very opposite of intense leisure and an intervention that makes Western decelerators look positively feeble.98 Today, the Chinese watch as much television as the heaviest viewers in Europe – two hours and six minutes – but their day in many ways retains its own distinct rhythm. The Chinese spend less time cooking, cleaning and shopping. And 40 per cent take a nap between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m., although few may nod off dreaming of Mao; far fewer Europeans take a siesta.99 Mao’s China, though, was hardly an exemplar of commercial leisure. A look across the Sea of Japan is instructive.

  The creative use of free time had long been cherished in Japan as a path to self-discovery. The arts had absorbed the Buddhist idea of self-cultivation in the late Heian period (794–1185 CE). Competence in flute and kin – a string instrument – was a measure of one’s worth and a central feature of elite culture and identity, as captured in the Tale of Genji, the eleventh-century novel about the life and love of an emperor’s son. ‘Genji was at leisure, and he spent his time at music making of all kinds.’ He organized nocturnal dances and had princes and nobles pick up their own favourite instruments and join the professionals. Their ‘playing of “Ah, Wondrous Day!” brought the most ignorant manservants in to listen among the horses and carriages crowded by the gate, smiling broadly as though life was at last worth living’.100

  The opening of Japan to the West in the late nineteenth century ushered in a dramatic revolution of leisure. In Edo, leisure had been communal, taking place in temple festivals and floating worlds (ukiyo) with puppet theatres, games and songs. Westernization spread commercial entertainment instead. And it broke the elite’s control over leisure. Once the preserve of samurai, budō (martial arts) became sport for the masses. The years around 1900 saw the invention of a host of new traditions like judo with their own grades and competitions; women were admitted, too. Bars and cinemas offered dreams of modernity.

  Looking back from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, it would be foolish to deny the impact of Western ideas and practices on Japanese leisure. At the same time, it was not a simple story of one replacing the other but rather of advance through permeation, with new practices drawing strength from inherited customs and ideals. New products and habits were incorporated into an existing leisure culture. The Japanese used to talk of spare time at home as ‘killing time’ (hima tsubushi). A main activity was ‘lying around’ (gorone). With the arrival of TV, surveys recorded a switch to terene : lying down to watch TV.101 In the 1960s, Pachinko, a kind of pinball game, advanced into the national pastime – at its height, in the 1980s, it is said to have contributed 5 per cent to Japan’s GDP and, even after a recent decline, one in seven Japanese today regularly put their yen in the slot, spending Y19 trillion ($175 billion) in 2013.102 Especially popular with young adults on low income, Pachinko offered an escape from the drudgery of everyday life (see Plate 50). As in Edo times, it created public spaces for entertainment.

  In Japan, as in the West, recent decades have seen a shift from passive to active leisure, from recovery and recreation to self-improvement. The emphasis on active recreation has been able to draw on an older tradition of creative play and self-cultivation. Hiking, fishing and other active outdoor activities (asobi) reached new popularity in the 1970s. Leisure parks started to combine education and fun. The Japanese can visit a reconstruction of the Dresdner Zwinger (Dresden’s magnificent Rococo palace) in Arita and learn about porcelain, or visit Huis Ten Bosch – a theme park replica of a Dutch town twice the size of Tokyo Disneyland which opened in Nagasaki prefecture in 1992 – to admire the windmills and experience the force of Dutch floods in a high-tech video diorama.103 By international comparison, vacations and free time in Japan continue to be the victim of a long-hours culture, notwithstanding government efforts since the 1990s to reduce work hours. Still, the Japanese feel less rushed than Americans, in spite of sleeping less; one reason frequently given is that they are better at demarcating blocks of time for eating, hobbies and conversation.104 The Japanese tea hour provides a separate time zone to unwind, similar to the long lunch in France. ‘Grazing’ Americans have lost this sense of time.105

  THE DAY OF REST?

  1949: Sunday in a working-class household in south London. Stella, a twenty-four-year-old housewife; her two-year-old son Steven; her younger sister, Joan (a clerk) and a dog. Stella’s husband is away in the army:

  8.45 a.m.

  Stella gets up . . . makes pot of tea, takes tray to bedroom with Sunday Pictorial . . .

  9.30 a.m.

  Stella comes into kitchen again in pyjamas . . . Starts to cook fritters and fried bread, goes to fetch Steven [and feeds him].

  10 a.m.

  Makes another pot of tea . . . reading the paper.

  10.30 a.m.

  Joan gets up . . . They eat at table . . .

  11 a.m.

  Steven is washed . . . Stella puts on her clothes . . . the wireless provides background music.

  12.30 p.m.

  Stella preparing pudding for dinner . . .

  1 p.m.

  Stella cooking. Steven playing. Joan plucking eyebrows in front of kitchen mirror. The two women talking about artists heard at the moment on ‘Family Favourites’.

  2 p.m.

  All have dinner . . . Menu: joint, boiled potatoes, sprouts, suet pudding with golden syrup – pot of tea. Wireless background.

  3 p.m.

  Stella washes . . . up dinner things – then joins Joan, playing with Steven. They talk. Joan makes a pot of tea.

  3.30 to 6 p.m.

  Both women . . . reading. S
tella, Red Star Weekly, Women’s Own and Sunday Pictorial – Joan, American Comics. Steven plays with cards. Dog asleep. Wireless background – light programme. Bursts of conversation – bursts of knitting.

  6 p.m.

  Stella laying tea . . . in kitchen . . .

  8 to 10 p.m.

  Like the afternoon again.

  10.30 p.m.

  Sitting over supper – talking about underwear. Stella writes a letter to her husband. Joan writes a letter too.

  11.30 p.m.

  Library books open (novels) but both talking . . . The dog is sent down the garden for a few minutes.

  12.30 a.m.

  They go to bed.106

  We have this sequence of a normal Sunday thanks to Mass Observation, which, beginning in 1937, sent out volunteer observers to record ordinary life in Britain. It is a good way to start the final leg of our exploration of the changing nature of leisure time. So far we have encountered time in several dimensions: clock time that counts the hours; pace; and density. But time also has a rhythm. The seven-day cycle, with a day of rest following a working week, has been a powerful one, although neither natural, nor universal. The seven-day rhythm was a human invention, a mathematical contrivance with roots in Judaism and astrology. Not all civilizations have shared it. In 1929, in the last serious experiment with an alternative pattern, the Soviets tried to rationalize activity into an ‘uninterrupted’ work week (nepreryvka) and abolished a shared day of rest – it caused so much disruption that it had to be suspended two years later.107

  For most readers, the slightly abbreviated pattern of Stella’s Sunday will look so alien that it might just as well have come from a documentary about a distant tribe. Yet it happened just over sixty years ago in one of the most developed corners of the world. Although recovering from war and austerity, Britain had been in the vanguard of consumer culture. This would be hard to tell from the record of Stella’s Sunday. Admittedly, the family drank an impressive volume of tea, and Sunday was the day to get ‘stuffed’ with a rich meal. Plenty of time went on reading the papers and magazines – many Britons took three or more newspapers on Sundays. Most strikingly, however, by midnight, when Stella sank into bed, the family had not set a foot outdoors, not even to walk the family dog. What consumption there was took place within the four walls of their home. Public spaces, shops and entertainment might just as well not have existed.

  The reason, of course, was that most of these were closed on Sundays. Across the border, puritanical Scotland went so far as to put the swings in parks out of use, although shops here could choose to open on Sundays. To be sure, not every Briton was solidly stuck at home. One in seven went to church, slightly more preferred the pub when it opened at 11 a.m. Some fathers took their children to parks and fountains. Nor was entertainment completely absent. Across the River Thames, in working-class Hammersmith, there was a swimming pool, a few tennis courts, two cinemas and theatres, a musical concert and a Lyons tea house. Still, as the mass observers stressed, that was ‘not a lot’ for 100,000 people. For adolescents, in particular, Sunday was an uphill struggle to find some fun. Here and there, an amusement arcade and skating rink were open, but these were rare oases. A good deal of entertainment was self-made. In Hammersmith, the fourteen- to eighteen-year-old members of the ‘White City Racers’ turned a waste site into a speedway track for their bicycles, delighting local onlookers with their stunts and ‘pseudo-leather’ uniforms. In the rest of the country, however, Sundays were largely immobile. A tiny minority (5 per cent) went ‘motoring’. In the industrial north, mass observers found the town centres empty. In the countryside, residents rarely strayed beyond the village green. It was as close to ‘slow living’ as modern Britons got. In pubs, customers sipped their pint of beer more slowly, to pass the empty hours. ‘Sunday is a dreary day,’ a metalworker’s wife told researchers: ‘Everywhere is dead.’ A fifteen-year-old schoolgirl was slightly more charitable: ‘nothing particular ever happens, and yet I would not call it dull.’108

  One day a week was fenced off as the very opposite of the over-stimulated eventfulness with which consumption is associated. This deserves more attention than it has received. For there was nothing natural about putting Sunday off limits, not even in Christian societies. In colonial North America, settlers trading on a Sabbath were fined. However, when the Spanish brought the seven-day week to Latin America in the sixteenth century they made sure to set up Sunday markets. Sunday was a day for church and commerce, prayer and play. As late as 1857, the municipal Council of Ambato (Ecuador) was worried that the bulk of the population would abstain from Mass if Sunday commerce was prohibited. ‘It is a fallacy to believe,’ it said, that Sunday ‘being given over to vice and complete idleness . . . would favour religious practice and public morality.’109 To the contrary, allowing people to sell on the way to church made it easier to save souls. The Council was right. Once Sunday was exclusively devoted to the service of God, in the 1860s, attendance at mass began to plummet.

  Ecuador was caught up in a larger movement that gathered pace in commercial Christian societies in the middle of the nineteenth century. Some forces were local and specific – prohibition in Ecuador was driven by a devout Catholic magnate, whereas sabbatarianism in Britain was led by evangelicals who tried to ban all recreation and labour on a Sunday as sinful. Other facilitating factors were of a more general sort – advances in transport made it easier for goods and people to reach markets on other days of the week. In England, the 1830 Beer Act limited pub opening hours to 1–3 p.m. and 5–10 p.m. on Sundays. Fairs were prohibited twenty years later. The Lord, however, never gained complete control of Sunday. When sabbatarians joined with temperance reformers in 1855 and tried to prohibit Sunday trading after having reduced drinking hours a year earlier, Londoners started a riot in Hyde Park. Karl Marx believed the English revolution had finally begun. In reality, Britons’ revolutionary struggle ended with winning back two and a half additional hours to drink up on Sundays.110

  Shop hours remained flexible in England until the Shops Act of 1911 entitled all employees to a half-day holiday and required all shops to have an early-closing day; in Canada, Sunday had been designated a weekly day of rest four years earlier with the federal Lord’s Day Act. In the nation of shopkeepers, Sunday trading had largely ceased by the 1930s. Britons seeking entertainment elsewhere could go cycling and boating or visit the British Museum, which opened its doors on Sundays in 1896. A 1932 law permitted concerts, zoos and some cinemas to open, but most other forms of recreation struggled for decades before they managed to shake off the sabbatarian straitjacket. Amateur football matches on Sundays went ahead only in 1960; professional games not until 1974. Horse racing and betting had to wait another generation. On the continent, too, shops did not pull down their shutters on Sundays until well into the twentieth century. Bismarck’s Berlin was a shopper’s paradise. On Sundays, many shops opened at six in the morning and closed only at eleven o’clock at night. Shops had no interest in losing valuable customers who came to town for church or other distractions. In 1892, opening times were limited to five hours in the German empire, but it was not until 1919 that most shopkeepers and salespeople earned a full day of rest. Even then, shops were allowed to stay open on ‘Special Sundays’ and Christmas Eve.111

  The partial closing down of Sunday in the century after 1850 points to a number of ironies. At the very moment societies began to enjoy greater purchasing power and greater access to mass consumer goods, they lost precious time to shop and spend. It is a reminder that advanced societies do not only tick to the rhythm of the till. Real wages picked up in the 1870s and consumer culture boomed in the roaring 1920s but they did so in what were predominantly industrial societies. And until the 1960s, they remained such. Sunday closure reflected the influence of churches but, even more so, of trade unions. Legislation was tightened as church attendance was plummeting. The voice of dispersed consumers was no match for that of organized workers. In an era of trade-union
power, attention was on shorter working hours, not longer shopping hours.

  Another irony concerns the role reversal between otherwise more open and more regimented societies. Commercial societies, it is often said, are naturally more open, flexible and consumer friendly than those where states, producers and traders rely on privileges and restrictions. Hence, it is possible today to shop in an American mall or British supermarket on a Sunday but stand in front of closed doors in Germany. These contemporary positions are far from natural, however. A Berlin housewife in the 1880s had at least as much access to shops on Sundays as one in London. She would have found the limited opening hours in Anglo-Saxon cities a century later distinctly illiberal.

  Sunday closing was not some natural default in consumer society but the historic outcome of forces and circumstances specific to each country. The current situation is distinguished by remarkable variety. On one extreme are Austria and Germany, where only shops at railway stations and airports have the right to open on a Sunday. On the other is Finland, where smaller stores can trade around the clock on weekends and larger ones can open from 12 to 6 p.m., and as late as 9 p.m. in December. In between, there is an impressive range of compromises. Spain initially allowed shops to open on Sunday in the 1980s, before restoring some restrictions in the 1990s. Today, most Spanish shops open on the first Sunday of each month. Norway limited Sunday opening to December; France and Belgium to a maximum of five days a year. Mediterranean countries tend to exempt tourist areas, a considerable concession. In England and Wales, the 1994 Sunday Trading Act gave small shops permission to open; shops larger than 280 square metres (3,000 square feet) were limited to six continuous hours between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. Across the border, in Scotland, such regulations have been unknown.112