Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  74. Shanghai Municipal Archive, Municipal Gazette, 12 December 1920, 48; 11 March 1920, 71; 17 June 1920, 237; see also: Annual Report of the Shanghai Municipal Council, 1905, 30–3; Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation (Cambridge, MA, 2003); and Jane Leung Larson, ‘The 1905 Anti-American Boycott as a Transnational Chinese Movement’, in: Chinese Historical Society: History & Perspectives 21, 2007: 191–8.

  75. Quoted in Reynolds, Commodity Cultures in Egypt, 300.

  76. Gerth, China Made, 279f., 285–332.

  77. Quoted in Reynolds, Commodity Cultures in Egypt, 364.

  78. The above draws on the excellent PhD thesis by Reynolds, Commodity Cultures in Egypt, 175–7, 281–400.

  79. Home and Politics, June 1924, 23. Trentmann, Free Trade Nation, 228–40; Constantine, ‘ “Bringing the Empire Alive”: The Empire Marketing Board and Imperial Propaganda, 1926–33’.

  80. For Soviet data, see also: Igor Birman, Personal Consumption in the USSR and the USA (Basingstoke, 1983), who offers comparable figures by population.

  81. Giovanni di Somogyi, ‘Il boom dei consumi’, in: Storia dell’economia mondiale, V: La modernizzazione e i problemi del sottosviluppo, ed. Valerio Castronovo (Rome, 2001), 149–70.

  82. Reaching 7% in 1966–70; see Seweryn Bialer, Stalin’s Successors (Cambridge, 1980), table 6, 153.

  83. Detlef Siegfried, Time is on My Side: Konsum und Politik in der westdeutschen Jugendkultur der 60er Jahre (Göttingen, 2006), 37–42.

  84. Raising it to 4.2 hours.

  85. Ivan T. Berend, An Economic History of Twentieth-century Europe (Cambridge, 2006), 253–5.

  86. Written by Marcello Marchesi and produced by Carlo Ponti.

  87. David Forgacs, ‘Cultural Consumption, 1940s to 1990s’, in: Italian Cultural Studies, eds. David Forgacs & Robert Lumley (Oxford, 1996), 273–90, 278.

  88. Michael Wildt, ‘Continuities and Discontinuities of Consumer Mentality in West Germany in the 1950s’, in: Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History of Europe During the 1940s and 1950s, eds. Richard Bessel & Dirk Schumann (Cambridge, 2003), 211–30, 222.

  89. Vera Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middle-class Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, 1976), 43–8. For film and fashionability, see Juliane Fürst, ‘The Importance of Being Stylish’, in: Juliane Fürst, ed., Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention (London, 2006), 209–30.

  90. Jean Fourastie, Les Trente Glorieuses, ou la revolution invisible de 1946 à 1975 (Paris, 1979), 17: in 1975 there were 212 homes, of which 210 had a fridge; 197 gas or electric cooking; 100 central heating. They owned 280 cars; 250 radios; 200 TVs; 180 washing machines; 150 interior WCs.

  91. Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 199f., and 128–9, 203 and 218 for the above. On the production of wants, Galbraith was developing the argument made by his young Harvard colleague James Duesenberry in: Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior (Cambridge, MA, 1949).

  92. Crosland, Future of Socialism, 355, 357, 175 and 214, 216 for the above.

  93. Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 203.

  94. Steven Fielding, ‘Activists against “Affluence”: Labour Party Culture During the “Golden Age”, circa 1950–1970’, in: Journal of British Studies 40, 2001: 241–67; and Lawrence Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 1951–64: Old Labour, New Britain? (Basingstoke, 2003), ch. 6.

  95. Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979 (Amherst, MA, 2004), 102–8.

  96. Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 218f.

  97. Historical Statistics of the United States, Vol. III, 291.

  98. Spending by federal government grew from 3% of GDP in 1925 to 16% in 1950. Federal spending on social security and medicare was 0.2% of GDP in 1948, rising to 1.7% in 1958, when The Affluent Society was published; by 1968 it had reached 3.3%. State and local government spending rose from 5.5% of GDP in 1948 to 8.2% in 1958. Defence spending declined from the 15% peak at the end of the Korean War in 1953 to around 10% for the rest of the 1950s and ’60s. See the official data in: Congressional Budget Office, 3 July 2002: Long-range Fiscal Policy Brief, and table 15.5: ‘Total Government Expenditures as Percentages of GDP: 1948–2006’, at: www. gpoaccess.gov/USbudget/fy08/sheets/hist15z5.xls. See further: 537–44 below.

  99. Cohen, Consumers’ Republic.

  100. Life magazine, 12 July 1948, 94–113, quoted at 97, 104.

  101. Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, CA, 1993), ch. 4.

  102. Priestley, Thoughts in the Wilderness (London, 1957), 23.

  103. Kuisel, Seducing the French, 38.

  104. Maria Mitchell, ‘Materialism and Secularism: CDU Politicians and National Socialism, 1945–1949’, in: Journal of Modern History 67, no. 2, 1995: 278–308; and Axel Schildt, Moderne Zeiten: Freizeit, Massenmedien und ‘Zeitgeist’ in der Bundesrepublik der 50er Jahre (Hamburg, 1995), 354–61.

  105. Quoted in Peter Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge, 1978), 288.

  106. B. Seebohm Rowntree & G. R. Lavers, English Life and Leisure: A Social Study (London, 1951), p. 277; and pp. 225–27; 249–50 and 363ff.

  107. de Grazia, Irresistible Empire; Roberta Sassatelli, ‘Impero o mercato? Americanizzazione e regimi di consumo in Europa’, in: Stato e Mercato, no. 80, 2007: 309–23. See also: Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge, MA, 2006).

  108. Sheryl Kroen, ‘Negotiations with the American Way’, in: Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives, eds. John Brewer & Frank Trentmann (Oxford, 2006), 251–77.

  109. Bundesarchiv Koblenz, B 146/1138, 3 December 1952, my translation. The official English translation was ‘A Higher Standard of Living’, which fails to capture the prescriptive meaning of the original.

  110. Bundesarchiv Koblenz B 146/389 and B 146/1138.

  111. Ralph Harris, Margot Naylor & Arthur Seldon, Hire Purchase in a Free Society (1961), 28.

  112. Kelly Longitudinal Study, interview with Lucille Windam, quoted in E. T. May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1999), 180. See also: Erica Carter, How German is She? Post-war West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (Ann Arbor, MI, 1997).

  113. Glen H. Elder, Children of the Great Depression: Social Change in Life Experience (Colorado, 1974/1999).

  114. Richard Easterlin, ‘The American Baby Boom in Historical Perspective’, in: American Economic Review LI, no. 5, 1961: 869–911.

  115. Bundesarchiv Koblenz B 146/389 (1950).

  116. ‘Der Verbraucher sichert Lohn und Brot’, in: Freude im Alltag (July 1951), 13, in Bundesarchiv Koblenz B 146/384.

  117. Ludivine Bantigny, Le Plus Bel ge? Jeunes et jeunesse en France de l’aube des “Trente Glorieuses” à la guerre d’Algérie (Paris, 2007); Georges Lapassade, L’Entrée dans la vie (Paris 1963); Fürst, ed., Late Stalinist Russia; Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-war Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford, 2010); Uta Poiger, Jazz, Rock and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley, CA, 2000); and Paola Ghione & Marco Grispigni, eds., Giovani prima della rivolta (Rome, 1998).

  118. Kunsten en Wetenschappen Netherlands Ministerie van Onderwijs, Maatschappelijke Verwildering der Jeugd (The Hague, 1952), 17–18, 35, my translation.

  119. Kunsten en Wetenschappen Netherlands Ministerie van Onderwijs, Bronnenboek bevattende gegevens ten grondslag liggend aan rapport Maatschappelijke verwildering der jeugd, etc. (1953).

  120. 1956, quoted in Siegfried, Time is on My Side, 327, my translation. For the cult of speed, see Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1996).

  121. Bantigny, Le Plus Bel ge?, 140f.

  122. Bantigny, Le Plus Bel ge?, 71f.

  123. Peter Wilmott, Adolescent Boys of East London (1966/1969), 20.


  124. Bantigny, Le Plus Bel ge?, 53

  125. August B. Hollingshead, Elmtown’s Youth: The Impact of Social Classes on Adolescents (New York, 1949), 397.

  126. Susan E. Reid & David Crowley, Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-war Eastern Europe (London, 2000).

  127. Juliane Fürst, ‘The Importance of being Stylish’, in: Fürst, ed., Late Stalinist Russia, 224.

  128. Rowntree & Lavers, English Life and Leisure, 214.

  129. Thurston, Delinquency and Spare Time: A Study of a Few Stories Written into the Court Records of the City of Cleveland, 165.

  130. Françoise Giroud, La Nouvelle Vague: Portraits de la jeunesse (Paris, 1958), 331–2.

  131. 16–22-year-olds in Nuremberg, interviewed by Reinhold Bergler, ‘Dimensionen der Wunsch – und Erlebniswelt Jugendlicher’, in: Ludwig v. Friedeburg, ed., Jugend in der modernen Gesellschaft (Cologne, 1965), 513–30.

  132. Kaspar Maase, ‘Establishing Cultural Democracy: Youth, “Americanization” and the Irresistible Rise of Popular Culture’, in: Richard Bessel & Dirk Schumann, eds., Life after Death (Cambridge, 2003), 428–50.

  133. Rowntree & Lavers, English Life and Leisure, 383f.

  134. Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago, 1997), 189–97.

  135. Guia Croce, ed., Tutto il meglio di Carosello, 1957–77 (Turin, 2011).

  136. Umberto Eco, Apocalittici e integrati (Milan, 1964/1988), 29–64.

  137. Ernest Dichter, The Strategy of Desire (New York, 1960), 18, 90, 169, 263. Compare Horowitz, Anxieties of Affluence, ch. 2; David Bennett, ‘Getting the Id to go Shopping’, in: Public Culture 17, no. 1, 2005: 1–26; and Stefan Schwarzkopf & Rainer Gries, eds., Ernest Dichter and Motivation Research (Basingstoke, 2010).

  138. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York, 1963).

  139. Ernest Dichter, Handbook of Consumer Motivations: The Psychology of the World of Objects (New York, 1964), 5; 458–69 on saving and life insurance.

  140. Herbert Marcuse, One-dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London, 1964/2002), 150.

  141. See Richard S. Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (New York, 1990); and Stuart Ewen, Captions of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York, 1976).

  142. The above draws on Josh Lauer, ‘Making the Ledgers Talk: Customer Control and the Origins of Retail Data Mining, 1920–1940’, in: Hartmut Berghoff, Philip Scranton & Uwe Spiekermann, The Rise of Marketing and Market Research, (New York, 2012), 153–69; and Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (New York, 1989), esp. 211–20. See also: Hartmut Berghoff, ed., Marketinggeschichte: Die Genese einer modernen Sozialtechnik (Frankfurt am Main, 2007).

  143. Christiane Lamberty, Reklame in Deutschland, 1890–1914: Wahrnehmung, Professionalisierung und Kritik der Wirtschaftswerbung (Berlin, 2001).

  144. Sean Nixon, ‘Mrs Housewife and the Ad Men: Advertising, Market Research and Mass Consumption in Post-war Britain’, in: Hartmut Berghoff, Philip Scranton & Uwe Spiekermann, eds., The Rise of Marketing (New York, 2012), 193–213. See also: Sean Nixon, Hard Sell: Advertising, Affluence and Transatlantic Relations, c.1951–69 (Manchester, 2013).

  145. Stefan Schwarzkopf, ‘Respectable Persuaders: The Advertising Industry and British Society, 1900–1939’, PhD, Birkbeck College, University of London, 2008; Stefan Schwarzkopf, ‘Markets, Consumers and the State: The Uses of Market Research in Government and the Public Sector in Britain, 1925–55’, in: Berghoff, Scranton & Spiekermann, eds., Rise of Marketing, 171–92; and Kerstin Brueckweh, ed., The Voice of the Citizen Consumer: A History of Market Research, Consumer Movements, and the Political Public Sphere (Oxford, 2011).

  146. Starch Inra Hooper Group and International Advertising Association, Sixteenth Survey of Advertising Expenditures Around the World: A Survey of World Advertising Expenditure in 1980 (1981).

  147. R. Van der Wurff & P. Bakker, ‘Economic Growth and Advertising Expenditures in Different Media in Different Countries’, in: Journal of Media Economics 21, 2008: 28–52, table 1.

  148. Gerhard Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main, 1992).

  149. Hermann Gossen, Entwicklung der Gesetze des menschlichen Verkehrs und der daraus fliessenden Regeln für menschliches Handeln (1854); and Sergio Nistico, ‘Consumption and Time in Economics: Prices and Quantities in a Temporary Equilibrium Perspective’, in: Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2005, 29: 943–57.

  150. The Times, 17 May 1968, 12. Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle (Paris, 1967); and Thomas Hecken & Agata Grzenia, ‘Situationism’, in: Martin Klimke & Joachim Scharloth, eds., 1968 in Europe (Basingstoke, 2008), ch. 2.

  151. See the opinion survey in Kuisel, Seducing the French, 189.

  152. Detlef Siegfried, ‘Aesthetik des Andersseins’, in: K. Weinhauer, J. Requate & H.-G. Haupt, Terrorismus in der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt am Main, 2006), 76–98.

  153. Württembergische Landesbibliothek Stuttgart, Collection ‘Neue Soziale Bewegungen’, D0895, flyers nos. 7 & 8, both 24 May 1967.

  154. Quoted in Gerd Koenen, Vesper, Ensslin, Baader: Urszenen des deutschen Terrorismus (Frankfurt am Main, 2005), 142, 176. See also: Stephan Malinowski and Alexander Sedlmaier, ‘“1968” als Katalysator der Konsumgesellschaft’, in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft no. 2, April–June, 2006: 238–67

  155. Kunzelmann of Kommune 1.

  156. Marcuse, Onedimensional Man.

  157. Rainer Langhans & Fritz Teufel, Klau mich (Frankfurt am Main, 1968).

  158. Personal information.

  159. Gudrun Cyprian, Sozialisation in Wohngemeinschaften: Eine empirische Untersuchung ihrer strukturellen Bedingungen (Stuttgart, 1978), 81–5; the research was conducted in 1974.

  160. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Scritti corsari (Milan, 1975/2008), see esp. 9 Dec. 1973, 22–5; and 10 June 1974, 39–44, my translation.

  161. Jean Baudrillard, Société de consommation (1970) (English: The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London, 1970/98), 27, emphasis in original, my translation.

  162. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Letter to Soviet Leaders (London, 1974), 21–4.

  163. Kuisel, Seducing the French, 153.

  164. Jean-François Revel, Without Marx or Jesus, trans. J. F. Bernard (New York, 1970/1971).

  165. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA, 1974/1984); Mary Douglas & Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (London, 1979); and Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches. For disciplinary routines, see Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, Volume 2 (London, 2002 (1961)); and Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life; see the chapter ‘Not so Fast!’, below.

  166. The quotes are from King’s ‘Drum Major Instinct’ sermon in Atlanta, 4 February 1968; full text at: http://mlk-kpp01.stanford. edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_the_drum_major_instinct/.See further: Horowitz, Anxieties of Affluence, ch. 6.

  167. Felicia Kornbluh, ‘To Fulfil Their “Rightly Needs”: Consumerism and the National Welfare Rights Movement’, in: Radical History Review 69, 1997: 76–113.

  168. 15 July 1979, available at: www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carter/filmmore/ps_crisis.html.

  169. Energy Information Administration, Monthly Energy Review, Sept. 2013. The share of all renewable energy sources together has not changed much since 1973; it currently stands at 9%.

  170. Jean Saint-Geours, Vive la société de consommation (Paris, 1971), 28, 33, 128–9, my translation.

  171. Imogene Erro, ‘And What of the Consumer?’, in: Problems of Communism (1963), 34–7.

  172. Reid & Crowley, Style and Socialism, 42; Philip Hanson, Advertising and Socialism: The Nature and Extent of Consumer Advertising in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia (London, 1974); and Patrick Hyder Patterson, ‘Truth Half Told: Finding the
Perfect Pitch for Advertising and Marketing in Socialist Yugoslavia, 1950–1991’, in: Enterprise & Society 4, no. 2, 2003: 179–225.

  173. Robert H. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s (Washington, DC, 1997). Riesman had anticipated this diplomacy of goods in his 1951 satire ‘The Nylon War’, repr. in David Riesman, Abundance for What? And Other Essays (London, 1964), 65–77.

  174. Mark Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand: The Politics of Consumerism in East Germany (Cambridge, MA, 2005).

  175. Pence, ‘“A World in Miniature”: The Leipzig Trade Fairs in the 1950s’, in: David F. Crew, ed., Consuming Germany in the Cold War (Oxford, 2003), 21–50; and Judd Stitziel, ‘On the Seam between Socialism and Capitalism: East German Fashion Shows’, in: Crew, ed., Consuming Germany, 51–86.

  176. ‘Überholen und Einholen’; this is sometimes rendered as ‘Überholen ohne einzuholen’. I follow Ina Merkel’s version, in ‘Konsumpolitik in der DDR ’, in: Haupt & Torp, eds., Konsumgesellschaft, 291.

  177. Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceausescu’s Romania (Berkeley, CA, 1991); and Thomas W. Simons, Jr. Eastern Europe in the Post-war World (Basingstoke, 1993, 2nd edn), 106–13.

  178. See Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand, esp. 195–7.

  179. Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York, 1997); Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty, 201–29; and David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford, 2003), 42–9.

  180. Jürgen Barsch, Freizeiteinstellung und Freizeitverhalten weltanschaulich unterschiedlich eingestellter Jugendlicher (Leipzig, 1974).

  181. Natalya Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era (London, 2013), quoted at 50.

  182. Ty I Ja, cited in David Crowley, ‘Warsaw’s Shops, Stalinism and the Thaw’, in: Reid & Crowley, Style and Socialism, 42.

  183. Bundesarchiv Berlin, DL 102/543 (Institut für Marktforschung), ‘Zur Entwicklung Sozialistischer Verbrauchsund Lebensgewohnheiten der Bevölkerung der DDR ’ (1971), 17.