Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  Such antecedents notwithstanding, the rise in remittances in the last half-century has been unprecedented. The European miracle sucked in guest workers from Greece, Turkey, Morocco and Algeria, who, by 1975, sent $5 billion back home, roughly a quarter what these countries earned from their exports. For many developing countries, remittances were bringing in as much as tourism. The oil boom in the Middle East pulled in workers from India, Egypt and Yemen, who collectively sent back $1.5 billion. By 2000, Saudi Arabia had almost caught up with the United States as the source of the most generous transfers. In the last decade, remittances to Africa have quadrupled (to $40 billion in 2010), today exceed official aid and are close to the level of foreign direct investment.73

  What did the lucky recipients do with the money? Remittances do not equal consumption. After all, the money might be used to set up a business or buy a tractor. There is good evidence that remittances help such investment and, with it, long-term development, but this is another subject.74 We are interested in the more immediate difference migration and transfers make to the way people live, that is, their food, dress, comfort and lifestyle. At first glance, the answer looks straightforward. In 1982, the sociologist Douglas Massey and his colleagues compared the possessions and spending patterns of Mexican non-migrant households with those of their neighbours who had someone earning money in the United States. In Altamira, a rural town in southern Jalisco, migration made all the difference. In non-migrant households, only a small minority owned a fridge and a washing machine. The rate climbed up steadily the longer a family’s migrant experience. After ten years, three in four households with a family member who had migrated had a fridge and a washing machine. In the industrial town of Santiago, Jalisco, by contrast, it did not matter whether one stepped into a home with or without a family member working in the States. In both, most had such appliances.75

  The effect of migration depends on the level of development, or, more precisely, on the gap in material civilization between home and away. The American way of life has had a more profound impact on rural than on industrial communities south of the border. Just as important as conditions in the receiving country is where remittances come from, for migrants bring back ideas of the good life as well as money. In 2009, the World Bank conducted household surveys for the Africa Migration Project and compared who had a mobile phone, radio, TV and access to a computer. In Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and Burkina Faso, there was a difference between households receiving remittances from within Africa and those without remittances, but it was minor; in the case of Ghana, the former group even scored lower, although that may have been the result of the small Ghanaian sample. Throughout, it was families who received money from outside Africa that were the best equipped.

  Tracing the effects of remittances is enormously complicated. Transfers reach home communities in a great variety of ways – cheques, money orders, cash and gifts – which makes it hard to know for sure their value. In his pioneering study, Massey sidestepped this problem by looking only at how migrants spent their savings from their last journey of work. Money first went towards food, clothing and consumer goods. A second chunk – between 20 per cent and 40 per cent – went into bricks and mortar, into buying or building a house, or repairs. Only the little that was left was invested in land or business.76

  When remittances took off in the 1970s and ’80s, there were frequent complaints that recipients frittered them away on flashy clothes and lavish ceremonies, indulging in short-lived pleasures rather than committing themselves to long-term development.77 This view mirrored anxieties in the affluent North over ‘wasteful’ conspicuous consumption, but, just as for the North, it is misleading. For one, from the migrant’s point of view, building a home is an investment in the future, not consumption. It keeps the family together, ties money down and prevents it from being spent on baubles and fripperies. In Nigeria, many houses stand empty, ready for the owner’s return. Migrant communities today continue to live according to the Italian motto of an earlier era of migration: ‘Whoever crosses the ocean, he will buy a house.’ Secondly, remittance cultures have varied considerably across the world. While not unique, the high spending on consumption in Mexico is not representative. In rural Egypt, Pakistan and Guatemala in the 1990s, most money sent home found its way into business, land, education and health. Spending on weddings and funerals was only a tiny fraction.78

  Finally, it is unclear whether remittances really are so special. Some economists have argued that they are just like any other source of income.79 Our perspective may have been warped because we are not comparing like with like. A Nigerian family, say, receiving a monthly transfer from London, will behave differently from poorer neighbours. Yet do they consume any differently from a neighbour who banks an equivalent pay rise? The jury is out. While migrant households do consume more in total, remittances in fact reduce the relative amount spent on food and dress. After all, these families are better off and can afford to put extra money aside for land and business. In that sense, they are no different from generations of upwardly mobile people before them. On the other hand, remittances are in some ways distinctive. Most strikingly, they flow in a counter-cyclical fashion, that is, they go up when depression and disaster strike, at the very moment when other investments and wages go down. For families in developing countries, they are, therefore, hugely important – a cushion in hard times. Unlike a pay rise, moreover, migrant families tend to view remittances as a temporary gain. It is uncertain when the foreign well will dry up. Interestingly, this does not encourage a mad binge, where the windfall is consumed on the spot. Quite the opposite: it prompts prudent, forward-looking behaviour and investment. For many families in Africa and elsewhere, migration is a carefully planned path. Step by step, one or two family members move to a more distant, better-paid job. And with every step, the family moves up in the world. The Africa Migration Project suggests that the further migrants move afield, the more remittances are invested in health, education and a new house.80

  Contrary to negative stereotypes, then, migration has progressively favoured investment over consumption. This is not to say that we should ignore the often dramatic effects remittances have had on local lifestyles. A pronounced example is Chen village, a farming community in southern China, which a group of anthropologists has been following since the 1960s. In 1979, several hundred men moved to Hong Kong, where they were able to earn ten to twenty times as much on construction sites as when ploughing their ancestral land back home. Their remittances and gifts on visits during the Chinese New Year transformed life for their families beyond recognition. Three years after they had left, every second home had a Hitachi colour television equipped to show Hong Kong programmes. Instead of going to political meetings, peasants stayed at home to watch variety shows. They wore fashionable Hong Kong clothes. The transfers set off a spiral of competitive gift-giving. While the construction workers themselves lived in overcrowded rooms in exile, their hard-earned savings funded Hong Kong-style villas with tiled bathrooms for their kin back home. That some parents actually chose to stay put in their old house was a separate matter. A modern house demonstrated a family’s worth and a son’s filial piety. Rising expectations shattered inherited values and created a culture of dependence. Idleness, instead of being a stigma, advanced into a mark of success. Hard work in the fields was now looked down upon as a ‘backward’ activity, practised only by those lesser families without a dutiful son earning big in Hong Kong. In the village, young men started lounging about, either subsidized by their cousins’ generosity or propping themselves up with smuggling and theft, rather than taking up a local job that paid a pittance in comparison.81

  Chen village may be an extreme case, but it does point to some more general patterns. Economic migration probably exacerbates social inequality. It tends to be the better off and better educated who manage to leave. With the remittances they send back their families edge still further ahead. Migrant families may invest relatively more than they c
onsume, but what less fortunate neighbours see is their absolute accumulation of possessions. Remittances can thus sharpen a sense of relative deprivation by making inequality more visible. So far, we have presumed that remittances are necessarily a private family affair. Of course, there have been many times in history when they were not and migrants have given their fortune to their church or town; initially, in Chen village, emigrants would bring gifts to the local Communist Party secretary. It is specifically gifts in the form of consumer goods that have had a privatizing effect. Electric fans, TV sets and modern bathrooms – and the domestic habits that come with them – tighten family ties while loosening those with the community. Status progressively resides in a family’s material comfort. The lavish private wedding takes the place of the communal Saint’s Day, a shift noticeable in Mexico.82

  So far, we have looked at the return flow of money and things to home societies. But what about the migrants themselves and the role of lifestyle, taste and possessions for their own identity and their impact on their host society? There is probably no social group for whom things matter quite so much as for people on the move. Personal possessions provide an anchor for people adrift, a reminder of home, their family and self.

  Migration is not necessarily, as often presumed, from a place without things to one overflowing with stuff. Some migrations are triangular, as in the case of Indian professionals who worked in Aden in the 1960s, accustomed to a life of modern comfort and conveniences, until Britain pulled out of Yemen in 1967, when they first moved back to India, into homes without running water, before moving on again to Britain. Decolonization resulted in the mass exodus of Indians and Pakistanis from East Africa to Britain. An anthropologist who studied South Asian families in north London who had been expelled from Kenya and Uganda in 1972 has noted the symbolic significance of Asian objects and food in their homes. Without the customary public space for expressing their identity, their private homes grew into substitute shrines. Many families had never lived in South Asia but surrounded themselves with Peshawari silk paintings and mass-produced carvings. In East Africa, one woman said, they did not have any displays on their walls, but now her husband collected animal pictures. Families acknowledged that the many copper plates would be considered kitsch in East Africa, but in England they had real value, a reminder of their Sangat identity. An elephant-foot stool, complete with hair and skin, brought a piece of Africa to Harlesden.83

  What is true for objects in general is especially so for food, which, physiologically and sensually, is a uniquely intimate form of consumption. For the South Asian families in Harlesden, cooking and eating kept their identity alive. They prepared saag, a Punjabi spinach dish, in a terracotta mati ka handi, not a metal pot. Purified water was served in a terracotta jug. Across the world, there are countless examples of local foods serving migrants as reminders of the homeland and maternal love, from Polish sausages to the local care packets that Greek mothers would send their sons abroad. ‘Home food’ in a migrant community, however, rarely resembles everyday diet back home. It tends to be super-charged, a menu of special offerings, such as Polish flaczki (a thick tripe soup), that evokes feast days and family gatherings. Home food is about more than an authentic sausage. When South Asian corner shops in Britain started stocking Polish foods in the 2000s, Polish migrants continued to flock to their Polish shops, which were laid out and lit to evoke the motherland and where they were greeted by a Krakowianka doll. Ethnic shops provide a shared sense of place as much as native food and drink.84

  For host societies, the arrival of migrant food cultures has been no less transformative. The take-off of Indian, Italian and Greek take-aways and restaurants since the 1960s is sometimes viewed as a milestone, a culinary revolution that, at last, opened Anglo-Saxon, German and Scandinavian tastebuds to previously unknown foreign delights. There is no dispute about the size of this market. A German today is as likely to bite into a Döner Kebap as into a grilled sausage. In Britain in 1997, 10 per cent of all eating-out purchases happened in ethnic restaurants and take-aways – a figure that does not include the many curries sold in pubs after a few pints of beer.

  What is debatable is chronology and causation. Food cultures were not closed or frozen in national cuisines before the 1960s. Inter-war Britain, for example, had Jewish fried fish, Italian ice cream and Chinese restaurants. Indian restaurants, such as Veeraswamy’s, which opened in London’s exclusive West End in 1926, may have been rare sights, catering mainly to retired colonial officials from the Raj, yet dishes inspired by the subcontinent, such as kedgeree (a rice and smoked haddock version of the lentil dish khichari) already featured in the more plebeian recipe book Dainty Dishes for Slender Incomes in 1895.85 ‘National’ cuisines with dedicated menus and cookbooks were themselves an invention of the mid-twentieth century, a culinary reaction to the foreign and colonial people and influences arriving in Europe. In his Traditional Dishes of Britain (1953), Philip Harben disingenuously presented fish and chips as a model British food, ignoring its mixed Jewish and French provenance. A study of restaurants and recipes in Germany points to a similar dialectic. Foreign-sounding dishes were a common sight on menus until the Nazis launched their culinary Aryanization programme. The delicate entrecôte became the more chewy Doppelrumpfstück.86 The classic nineteenth-century cookbook Mrs Beeton’s Household Management (1861) was organized by type of food and preparation, not by national cuisine. English roast beef was followed by instructions on ‘the Dutch way to salt beef’, Folkestone Pudding-pies (a puff-pastry custard tart with currants and lemon peel), by Dampfnudeln (sweet, steamed German buns). Mrs Beeton also included Indian chutneys and a ‘Fowl Pillau’ with generous amounts of cardamom.87

  Part of the problem is pinning down what exactly is meant by ‘foreign’ and ‘national’ foods, since plenty of what people ate and drank in 1800 and 1900 was not originally grown in their own backyard but came from across the oceans – foodstuffs that would have been exotic novelties only a few centuries earlier: potatoes, tea and coffee for Europeans; pork for Latin Americans; maize for the Chinese. The changes that have taken place since the 1960s should be seen in the context of earlier waves of migration and globalization.

  Between 1860 and 1920, some 30 million people migrated to the United States.88 Most came from Europe – Chinese and Asians were barred from the 1880s. It was an unprecedented exodus. Between the 1880s and 1920s, 4 million Italians alone arrived in the United States; in the decade after 1900, more than 10 per cent of the Italian population made the journey. They were joined by the Irish, Scandinavians, and Jews escaping pogroms in Eastern Europe. In the United States, we therefore have a real-life experiment about what happens to different eating cultures on the move.

  Italians have been singled out as ‘culinary conservatives’.89 In one sense, this is correct. Italian immigrants did not switch to the foods and menus of earlier Anglo-Saxon and German settlers but favoured Italian macaroni, tomato sauce and salami. However, they did change their diets radically. Most Italian migrants came from the poor, rural south, where they had been used to a diet of beans, potatoes and dry bread soaked in boiling water, with a bit of salt or olive oil for flavouring. Pasta was found in cities and was mainly a luxury of the well-off. In Calabria, there were peasants who had never seen meat. Italian-American food, then, turned a previously imagined land of cockayne – a fantastic land of milk and honey – into reality. Wheat replaced rye and chestnut flour. Above all, meat became a must, now eaten daily. In New York City, any self-respecting Italian family had at least one pepperoni hanging from the ceiling. A budget survey in 1904 revealed how an Italian family who spent $9 a month on rent devoted almost the same amount to beef, veal and chicken, in spite of the breadwinner, a stone-cutter, being frequently out of work. Back in Sicily and Puglia, families had drunk beverages made of roasted grains. In the New World, they had real coffee. Candy and cake transformed breakfast. Social workers frequently complained about the damaging effects on health and household bu
dgets. ‘A three-year-old boy’s lunch furnishes an extreme example,’ one researcher in New Haven reported in 1938: ‘he sat in a high-chair holding a cup of strong, black sweet Italian coffee with a trace of whiskey in it and dipping doughnuts in powdered sugar before eating them. “My girl,” asserted the mother of a six-year-old to the school nurse, “she likes candy.” ’90

  Perhaps, most decisively, the Italian-American meal became prized as a shared family affair. In the old country, people had eaten together on feast days and special occasions, but rarely in everyday life. Peasants who had to walk several miles to work did not have a chance to sit down for a family meal. They ate alone. While prized ingredients, then, did come from the old world, what and how Italian migrants ate was very new.

  Italian life in America was an example of how high-status food from the homeland became the cornerstone of ethnic identity in the New World. Social workers despaired over poor migrant families’ insistence on cooking with expensive, imported olive oil and eating tinned Italian tomatoes. Yet, whatever the drain on the weekly budget, the Italian meal gave these families a sense of pride and authority in the host society: Italians knew how to cook and eat well. They commanded taste, which, over time, gained them acceptance and status. It did not matter that meatballs in tomato sauce was a recent invention.