Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  62. See Perez Galdos’s novel, La da Bringas (1884). Lara Anderson, Allegories of Decadence in Fin-de-siècle Spain: The Female Consumer in the Novels of Emilia Pardo Bazán and Benito Pérez Galdós (Dyfed, 2006).

  63. Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London Geographies, 1680–1780 (New York, 1998), 116–57.

  64. Nead, Victorian Babylon, 62–79; and Krista Lysack, Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women’s Writing (Athens, Ohio, 2008).

  65. Zola, The Ladies’ Paradise, 422; Elaine Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving (Oxford, 1989); Detlef Briesen, Warenhaus, Massenkonsum und Sozialmoral: Zur Geschichte der Konsumkritik im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 2001); and Uwe Spiekermann, ‘Theft and Thieves in German Department Stores, 1895–1930’, in: Crossick & Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals of Consumption, 135–59. See also: Mona Domosh, ‘The “Women of New York”: A Fashionable Moral Geography’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19, 2001: 573–92.

  66. Paul Göhre, Das Warenhaus (Frankfurt am Main, 1907).

  67. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London, 1900/1990), 449–61.

  68. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Eiland Howard & Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 389, K1, 4.

  69. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 408, L2, 4.

  70. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 540, R2, 3.

  71. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 43, A4, 1; see also 60, A12, 5. For different readings, see Beatrice Hanssen, ed., Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (London, 2006); Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA, 1989); Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin (London, 2007); and Esther Leslie, ‘Flâneurs in Paris and Berlin’, in: Histories of Leisure, ed. Rudy Koshar (Oxford and New York, 2002).

  72. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, pp. 370f AP, J 81, 1.

  73. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 132–41.

  74. Göhre, Das Warenhaus, 141–2, my translation. Warren G. Breckman, ‘Disciplining Consumption: The Debate about Luxury in Wilhelmine Germany, 1890–1914’, in : Journal of Social History 24, no. 3, 1991: 485–505.

  75. Rachel Morley, ‘Crime without Punishment: Reworkings of Nineteenth-century Russian Literary Sources in Evgenii Bauer’s Child of the Big City’, in: Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 1900–2001, ed. Stephen Hutchings & Anat Vernitski (London, 2004), 27–43.

  76. Julius Hirsch, Das Warenhaus in Westdeutschland (PhD thesis, Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn, 1909), 28. At the Les Grands Magasins du Louvre in Paris, the average sale price was 20 francs.

  77. Quoted in Susan Matt, Keeping up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890–1930 (Philadelphia, 2003), 78.

  78. Brent Shannon, ‘ReFashioning Men: Fashion, Masculinity and the Cultivation of the Male Consumer in Britain, 1860–1914’, in: Victorian Studies 46, no. 4, 2004: 597–630; and Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life, 1860–1914 (Manchester, 1999).

  79. E. E. Perkins, The Lady’s Shopping Manual and Mercery Album (London, 1834), vi, emphases in original.

  80. Margot C. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge, 2003), esp. 264–73; and Whitlock, Crime, Gender and Consumer Culture.

  81. Fred W. Leigh, ‘Let’s Go Shopping’ (London, 1913).

  82. Uwe Spiekermann, Basis der Konsumgesellschaft: Entstehung und Entwicklung des modernen Kleinhandels in Deutschland, 1850–1914 (Munich, 1999), 380f.

  83. William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York, 1994), 62.

  84. Sarah Elvins, Sales and Celebrations: Retailing and Regional Identity in Western New York State, 1920–40 (Athens, OH, 2004).

  85. Huda Sha’arawi, Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, 1879–1924, quoted in the sourcebook: Reina Lewis & Nancy Micklewright (eds.), Gender, Modernity, Liberty: Middle Eastern and Western Women’s Writings (London, 2006), 192. For sales assistants, see Nancy Young Reynolds, Commodity Cultures: Interweavings of Market Cultures, Consumption Practices and Social Power in Egypt, 1907–61 (PhD, Stanford University, 2003), ch. 3.

  86. Werner Sombart, Der Moderne Kapitalismus (Munich, 1916, 2nd edn), Vol. II, Part I, ch. 28.

  87. T. K. Dennison, The Institutional Framework of Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, 2011), 199–212.

  88. David Blanke, Sowing the American Dream: How Consumer Culture Took Root in the Rural Midwest (Athens, OH, 2000). See also: Roman Sandgruber, Die Anfänge der Konsumgesellschaft: Konsumgütergesellschaft, Lebensstandard und Alltagskultur in Österreich im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1982); and Michael Prinz, ed., Der lange Weg in den Überfluss: Anfänge und Entwicklung der Konsumgesellschaft seit der Vormoderne (Paderborn, 2003).

  89. John Benson, ‘Large-scale Retailing in Canada’, in: John Benson & Gareth Shaw, eds., The Evolution of Retail Systems, c.1800–1914 (Leicester, 1992), 190ff.

  90. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, I (Frankfurt am Main, 1867/1969), 314. See also: Braudel, Structures of Everyday Life, I, ch. 8.

  91. Sombart, Der Moderne Kapitalismus, II, 379; and Miller, Bon Marché, 61f.

  92. Harvey Pitcher, Muir and Mirrielees: The Scottisch Partnership that became a Household Name in Russia (Cromer, 1994), 145–7.

  93. Rita Andrade, ‘Mappin Stores: Adding an English Touch to the Sao Paulo Fashion Scene’, in: Regina A. Root, ed., The Latin American Fashion Reader (Oxford, 2005), ch. 10; Orlove, ed., The Allure of the Foreign: Imported Goods in Post-colonial Latin America; and Christine Ruane, ‘Clothes Shopping in Imperial Russia: The Development of a Consumer Culture’, in: Journal of Social History 28, no. 4, 1995: 765–82.

  94. Reynolds, Commodity Cultures in Egypt, 75–88. For Isma’il Pasha’s modernization, see Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton, NJ, 1971), 98–117.

  95. James Jefferys, Retail Trading in Britain, 1850–1950 (Cambridge, 1954), 21–30.

  96. Spiekermann, Basis; H.-G. Haupt, ‘Der Laden’, in: Orte des Alltags, ed. H.-G. Haupt (Munich, 1994), 61–7; and H.-G. Haupt & Geoffrey Crossick, eds., The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe, 1780–1914 (London, 1998).

  97. Martin Philips, ‘The Evolution of Markets and Shops in Britain’, in: Benson & Shaw, eds., The Evolution of Retail Systems, c.1800–1914, 54. See also: Margot Finn, ‘Scotch Drapers and the Politics of Modernity’, in: The Politics of Consumption: Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America, eds. Martin J. Daunton & Matthew Hilton (Oxford, 2001), 89–107. Charlotte Niermann, ‘ “Gewerbe im Umherziehen” – Hausierer und Wanderlager in Bremen vor 1914’, in: Der Bremer Kleinhandel um 1900, ed. H.-G. Haupt (Bremen, 1982), 207–55.

  98. Spiekermann, Basis, 277–95, 382–415, 736–41.

  99. G. J. Holyoake, inaugural address, 19th Co-operative Congress (Manchester, 1887), 11.

  100. G. D. H. Cole, A Century of Co-operation (London, 1944); Ellen Furlough & Carl Strikwerda, eds., Consumers against Capitalism? Consumer Cooperation in Europe, North America and Japan, 1840–1990 (Lanham, 1999); Michael Prinz, Brot und Dividende: Konsumvereine in Deutschland und England vor 1914 (Göttingen, 1996); and Martin Purvis, ‘Societies of Consumers and Consumer Societies: Co-operation, Consumption and Politics in Britain and Continental Europe c.1850–1920’, in: Journal of Historical Geography 24, no. 2, 1998: 147–69.

  101. James Schmiechen & Kenneth Carls, The British Market Hall (New Haven, CT, 1999). Andrew Lohmeier, ‘Bürgerliche Gesellschaft and Consumer Interests: The Berlin Public Market Hall Reform, 1867–1891’, in: Business History Review 73, no. 1, 1999: 91–113.

  102. Lange, 1911, quoted in Spiekermann, Basis, 183.

  103. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991) 57.

  104. Shanghai Municipal Archive, Municipal Council, Annual Report 1929, 169, 170–2.

  105. Rosemary Bromley, ‘Market-place Trading and the Transformation of Retail Space in the Expan
ding Latin American City’, in: Urban Studies 35, no. 8, 1998: 1311–33; G. M. Zinkhan, S. M. Fontenelle & A. L. Balazs, ‘The Structure of Sao Paolo Street Markets’, in: Journal of Consumer Affairs 33, no. 1, 1999: 3–26.

  106. Schmiechen & Carls, The British Market Hall, 192.

  107. Christina M. Jiménez, ‘From the Lettered City to the Sellers’ City: Vendor Politics and Public Space in Urban Mexico, 1880–1926’, in: Gyan Prakash & Kevin M. Kruse, eds., The Spaces of the Modern City (Princeton, NJ, 2008), 214–46.

  108. Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (London, 2004/1992), 40–1.

  109. Elizabeth Shove, Frank Trentmann & Richard Wilk, eds., Time, Consumption and Everyday Life (Oxford, 2009). See also below, 233–4.

  110. George R. Sims, ed., Living London: Its Work and Its Play, Its Humour and Its Pathos, Its Sights and Its Scenes, 3 vols. (London, 1904), Vol. II, 13, 380; Vol. III, 143.

  111. See Schmiechen & Carls, The British Market Hall, 142–75.

  112. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 86.

  113. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA, 1983); compare James Chandler & Kevin Gilmartin, eds., Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780-1840 (Cambridge, 2005).

  114. What Max Weber called Lebensführung.

  115. Georg Simmel, ‘Die Grossstädte und das Geistesleben’, in: Die Grossstadt. Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung, Jahrbuch der Gehe-Stiftung 9, 1903: 185–206, repr. in Gesamtausgabe, Vol. VII (1995), and transl. as ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in: The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt Wolff (New York, 1950).

  116. ‘Die kleinen Ladenmädchen gehen ins Kino’, March 1927, repr. in Siegfried Kracauer, Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt am Main, 1977), quoted at 279–80, emphasis in original; ‘Kult der Zerstreung’, 4 March 1926, repr. in Kracauer, Ornament, quoted at 311, 313, my translations.

  117. Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin, permanent exhibition.

  118. Michael M. Davis, The Exploitation of Pleasure: A Study of Commercial Recreations in New York City (New York, 1912), 21; Douglas Gomery, Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (London, 1992); Joseph Garncarz, ‘Film im Wanderkino’, in: Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland: Vol. I: Kaiserreich, 1895–1918, eds. Uli Jung & Martin Loiperdinger (Stuttgart, 2005); Jon Burrows, ‘Penny Pleasures: Film Exhibition in London during the Nicklodeon Era, 1906–14’, Film History 16, no. 1, 2004: 60–91; and Luke McKernan, ‘ “A Fury for Seeing”: London Cinemas and Their Audiences, 1906–1914 (Working Paper no. 1),’ (AHRC Centre for British Film and Television Studies, 2005). See also the searchable database at www.londonfilm.bbk.ac.uk.

  119. Jean-Jacques Meusy, Paris-Palaces, ou le temps de cinemas (1894–1918), (Paris, 1995), 173f. For Ireland, see Kevin Rockett & Emer Rockett, Magic Lantern, Panorama and Moving Picture Shows in Ireland, 1786–1909 (Dublin, 2011).

  120. C. H. Rolph, London Particulars (Oxford, 1980), 105.

  121. Georges Dureau, quoted in Meusy, Paris-Palaces, 255, my translation.

  122. Simmel, ‘Grossstädte’.

  123. Quoted in Meusy, Paris-Palaces, 229. V. Toulmin, S. Popple & P. Russell, eds., The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film (London, 2004); and Lynda Nead, ‘Animating the Everyday: London on Camera circa 1900’, in: Journal of British Studies 43, 2004: 65–90.

  124. Melvyn Stokes & Richard Maltby, eds., American Movie Audiences (London, 1999); Richard Butsch, The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990 (Cambridge, 2000), 142–7; and Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986).

  125. Emilie Altenloh, Zur Soziologie des Kino: Die Kino-Unternehmung und die sozialen Schichten ihrer Besucher (Jena, 1914), 67–8.

  126. Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England (London, 1978).

  127. George Barton Cutten, The Threat of Leisure (New Haven, CT, 1926), 17, 72, 90.

  128. Granville Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to physiology, Vol. I (New York, 1904); and John R. Gillis, Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770–Present (New York, 1981 edn).

  129. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 424-24/88, 14 Jan. 1922, Herr Lorenzen, department of youth welfare, Altona, my translation. For the United States, see David Nasaw, Children of the City (New York, 1985).

  130. Davis, Exploitation of Pleasure (1912), 3, and 9 for the previous quotation.

  131. Henry W. Thurston, Delinquency and Spare Time: A Study of a Few Stories Written into the Court Records of the City of Cleveland (Cleveland, 1918), 22–3, 79, 85.

  132. Michael M. Davis Jr, The Exploitation of Pleasure: A Study of Commercial Recreations in New York City (New York, 1912), 14.

  133. Raymond Moley, Commercial Recreation (Cleveland, 1920), 87, and 91 for the above.

  134. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 614-1/18/57, ‘Kampf gegen Schmutz und Schund in Wort und Bild’, Dec. 1921 and 24 Oct. 1922.

  135. Davis Jr, Exploitation of Pleasure, 44.

  136. Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge, 1983), 147. For Manchester, see H. E. Meller, Leisure and the Changing City, 1870–1914 (London 1976). For Cologne: Hans Langenfeld in Zusammenarbeit mit Stefan Nielsen/Klaus Reinarz und Josef Santel, ‘Sportangebot und -nachfrage in grossstädtischen Zentren Nordwestdeutschlands (1848–1933)’, in: Juergen Reulecke, ed., Die Stadt als Dienstleistungszentrum (St Katharinen, 1995), 461.

  137. Roland S. Vaile, Research Memorandum on Social Aspects of Consumption in the Depression (New York, 1937), 25.

  138. For Coney Island and Blackpool, see Gary S. Cross & John K. Walton, The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2005), quoted at 109.

  139. Wong Yunn Chii & Tan Kar Lin, ‘Emergence of a Cosmopolitan Space for Culture and Consumption: The New World Amusement Park – Singapore (1923–70) in the Inter-War Years’, in: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 5, no. 2, 2004: 279–304; Philip Holden, ‘At Home in the Worlds: Community and Consumption in Urban Singapore’, in: Beyond Description: Singapore Space Historicity, eds. Ryan Bishop, John Phillips & Yeo Wei-Wei (New York, 2004), 79–94; and Yung Sai Shing & Chan Kwok Bun, ‘Leisure, Pleasure and Consumption: Ways of Entertaining Oneself’, in: Past Times: A Social History of Singapore, eds. Kwok Bun Chan & Tong Chee Kiong, (Singapore, 2003), 153–81.

  140. In the 1970s, Manuel Castells argued that industrial capitalism led to the disappearance of the city as an autonomous social system, in The Urban Question (London, 1978).

  CHAPTER 5

  1. Bruno Taut, Die neue Wohnung (Leipzig, 1924/1928: 5th rev. edn), quoted at 10–12, 59–60, my translation.

  2. Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918–45 (Cambridge, MA, 1968); for Taut as architect, see Erich Weitz, Weimar Germany (Princeton, NJ, 2007), 169–83.

  3. Clarence Cook, The House Beautiful (New York, 1881), 49.

  4. Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven, CT, 2006), 36.

  5. Edward Young, Labor in Europe and in America (Washington, DC, 1875), tables, 822–5.

  6. Sergej Prokopowitsch, ‘Haushaltungs-budgets Petersburger Arbeiter’, in: Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 30, 1910, 66–99, so-called summer tenants (Sommermieter).

  7. Daunton, ‘Public Place and Private Space: The Victorian City and the Working-Class Household’, 227.

  8. Report by Mr Andrews, the Hon. Minister for the USA in Stockholm, 1873, in Young, Labor in Europe and in America, 698. See also: the Amuri district in Tampere, Finland, now a museum of workers’ housing.

  9. Taut, Die neue Wohnung, 98, my translation.

  10. For this, and much more, see the excellent thesis by Charpy, ‘Le Théâtre des objets’, Vol. I. See also: Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900 (Cambridge, MA, 2006).

  11. Lou
ise, d’Alq, Le Maître et la mâitresse de maison (1885), quoted in Charpy, ‘Le Théâtre des objets’, I, 179. See also: Jean-Pierre Goubert, ed., Du luxe au confort (Paris, 1988).

  12. Judy Neiswander, The Cosmopolitan Interior: Liberalism and the British Home, 1870–1914 (New Haven, CT, 2008).

  13. Sonia Ashmore, ‘Liberty and Lifestyle’, in: David Hussey & Margaret Ponsonby, eds., Buying for the Home: Domestic Consumption from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Aldershot, 2008).

  14. Natacha Coquery ‘Luxe et demi-luxe: Bijoutiers et tapissiers parisiens à la fin du XVIIe siècle’, in Stephane Castelluccio (ed.), Le Commerce de luxe à Paris au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle (Bern, 2009).

  15. Between 1820 and 1890, London trade directories show a rise in the number of furniture brokers from 2 to 390, furniture dealers from 2 to 47, upholsterers from 165 to 468; Clive Edwards & Margaret Ponsonby, ‘Desirable Commodity or Practical Necessity?’, in: Hussey & Ponsonby, Buying for the Home, 123–4. For Paris, see Charpy, ‘Le Théâtre des objets’, I, esp. 507–614.

  16. Steven M. Gelber, Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America (New York, 1999), 139. See also: Belk, Collecting in a Consumer Society; and Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London, 1994).

  17. See the discussion in ch. 3.

  18. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, 69. David Riesman distinguished between the inner-directed conspicuous consumer and a more conformist outer-directed type in The Lonely Crowd (1950/1953), 143f.

  19. Veblen, Leisure Class, 69.

  20. Veblen, Leisure Class, 69.

  21. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903/2002), 120.

  22. Taut, Die Neue Wohnung, 87. For a critique of Veblen and other universal theories, see Jean-Pascal Daloz, The Sociology of Elite Distinction (Basingstoke, 2010).

  23. George & Weedon Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody (London, 1892/1999), 31–5.

  24. Max Weber, ‘Zwischenbetrachtung’, in: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie I (1920/1988), esp. 568–71, my translation. In English, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. Hans Heinrich Gerth & Charles Wright Mills (Oxford, 1946).