Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  CHAPTER 14

  1. Encyclical Letter of John Paul II, On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum, 5 Jan. 1991, see ch. 36, at https://capp-usa.org/social_encyclicals/45#chapter_36. For affluence as the cause of religious decline, see Mark Lynas, New Statesman, 15 Jan. 2007; Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London, 2000); and Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York, 1998), 302.

  2. In the 2011 Census, 59 per cent of English and Welsh people identified themselves as Christian; http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census/detailed-characteristics-for-local-authorities-in-england-and-wales/sty-religion.html.

  3. Alasdair Crockett & David Voas, ‘Generations of Decline: Religious Change in Twentieth-century Britain’, in: Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 45, no. 4, 2006: 567–84. See also 306 above.

  4. Centre for the Study of Global Christianity, ‘World Christian Database’, http://www.worldchristiandatabase.org/wcd/. For an accessible overview, esp. on the United States, see John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge, God is Back: How the Rise of Faith is Changing the World (London, 2010).

  5. Roger Finke & Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776–2005: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, NJ, 2005); Dianne Kirby, ‘The Cold War’ in: Hugh McLeod, ed., The Cambridge History of Christianity: Vol. IX, World Christianities, c.1914–c.2000 (Cambridge, 2006).

  6. Shane Leslie, Henry Edward Manning: His Life and Labour (London, 1921), quoted at 358.

  7. R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York, 1994), 95–8; David Morgan, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture and the Age of American Mass Production (New York, 1999).

  8. Bruce Evensen, God’s Man for the Gilded Age: D. L. Moody and the Rise of Modern Mass Evangelism (New York, 2003), 88–96.

  9. William Hoyt Colement, quoted in William Revell Moody, The Life of Dwight L. Moody (New York, 1900), 278.

  10. See Mark Bevir, ‘Welfarism, Socialism and Religion: On T. H. Green and Others’, in: Review of Politics 55, no. 4, 1993: 639–61.

  11. Greg (‘Fritz’) Umbach, ‘Learning to Shop in Zion: The Consumer Revolution in Great Basin Mormon Culture, 1847–1910’, in: Journal of Social History 38, 2004: 29–61, quoted at 44, 48.

  12. Moore, Selling God, 206–9.

  13. Lecture on ‘The Ministry of Wealth’, at the Dowse Institute, Cambridge, MA, Cambridge Chronicle, XXXI/47, 18 Nov. 1876: 1.

  14. See 97, 118 above.

  15. Quoted from http://hopefaithprayer.com/faith/kenneth-hagin-faith-lesson-no-15-faith-for-prosperity/. See also: www.rhema.org; and Kenneth E. Hagin, Biblical Keys to Financial Prosperity (Broken Arrow, OK, 1973).

  16. Los Angeles Times, 22 May 1987.

  17. 1988, quoted by Thomas C. O’Guinn & Russell W. Belk, ‘Heaven on Earth: Consumption at Heritage Village, USA’, in: Journal of Consumer Research 16, no. 2, 1989: 227–38, at 234.

  18. Finke & Stark, Churching of America; Micklethwait & Wooldridge, God is Back; and The Economist, 24 Dec. 2005, 59–61.

  19. Richard N. Ostling, ‘Power, Glory – and Politics’, Time, 24 June 2001.

  20. Obituaries: Corriere della Sera, 15 Feb. 2015; La Stampa, 15 Feb. 2015; The Economist, 21 Feb. 2015.

  21. Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven, CT, 1995).

  22. Richard Cimino & Don Lattin, Shopping for Faith: American Religion in the New Millennium (San Francisco, 1998), 56–63.

  23. http://www.willowcreek.org/. See further: Nancy Tator Ammerman, Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and Their Partners (Berkeley, CA, 2005); and Richard Kyle, Evangelicalism: An Americanized Christianity (New Brunswick, NJ, 2006).

  24. Hugh McLeod ‘The Crisis of Christianity in the West: Entering a Post-Christian Era?’, in: McLeod, ed., Cambridge History of Christianity IX, ch. 18.

  25. Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton, NJ, 2001), quoted at 31. See also: Adam Possamai, ‘Cultural Consumption of History and Popular Culture in Alternative Spiritualities’, in: Journal of Consumer Culture 2, no. 2, 2002: 197–218.

  26. Christian Smith & Melinda Lundquist, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York, 2005), quoted at 136, 165.

  27. When asked which image of God was ‘extremely likely’ to come to their mind by the US General Social Survey (1972–2006), 70% picked ‘healer’, 63% ‘friend’ and only 48% ‘judge’. See database ‘Images of God’, under Religion, at http://www3.norc.org/GSS+Website/.

  28. David Maxwell, ‘ “Delivered from the Spirit of Poverty?”: Pentecostalism, Prosperity and Modernity in Zimbabwe’, in: Journal of Religion in Africa 28, no. 3, 1998: 350–73; and Birgit Meyer, ‘Make a Complete Break with the Past: Memory and Post-colonial Modernity in Ghanaian Pentecostalist Discourse’, in: Journal of Religion in Africa 28, no. 3, 1998: 316–349. For Brazil, see Andrew Reine Johnson, ‘If I Give My Soul: Pentecostalism inside of Prison in Rio de Janeiro’, PhD thesis, University of Minnesota, 2012.

  29. See 133–5 above.

  30. Enoch Adeboye, How to Turn Your Austerity to Prosperity (Lagos, 1989), quoted in Asonzeh Ukah, A New Paradigm of Pentecostal Power: A Study of the Redeemed Christian Church of God in Nigeria (Trenton, 2008), 185f.

  31. Ukah, Pentecostal Power; see also: Ogbu Kalu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (New York, 2008).

  32. Andrew R. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption and the Search for American Identity (New York, 1990).

  33. Inge Maria Daniels, ‘Scooping, Raking, Beckoning Luck: Luck, Agency and the Interdependence of People and Things in Japan’, in: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9, 2003: 619–38; Laurel Kendall, Shamans, Nostalgias and the IMF: South Korean Popular Religion in Motion (Honolulu, 2009).

  34. Benjamin Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalization and Tribalism are Reshaping the World (New York, 1996), following on from his 1992 article in Atlantic Monthly. ‘The Political and Religious Testament of the Leader of the Islamic Revolution and the Founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Imam Khomeini’ (1989), reproduced in the appendix of H. Fürtig, Liberalisierung als Herausforderung: Wie stabil ist die Islamische Republik Iran? (Berlin, 1996), Arbeitshefte 12, appendix, quoted at 128f.

  36. Minoo Moallem, Between Warrior Brother and Veiled Sister: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Politics of Patriarchy in Iran (Berkeley, CA, 2005).

  37. William H. Martin & Sandra Mason, ‘The Development of Leisure in Iran’, in: Middle Eastern Studies 42, no. 2, 2006: 239–54; Aliakbar Jafari & Pauline Maclaran, ‘Escaping into the World of Make-up Routines in Iran’, in: Sociological Review 62, no. 2, 2014: 359–82; http://www.cosmeticsdesign-asia.com/Market-Trends/Iran-cosmetics-market-begins-to-boom-again.

  38. ‘A Manifesto on Women by the Al-Khanssaa Brigade’, transl. and edited by Charlie Winter, Feb. 2015, for Quilliam, a counter-extremist thinktank, http://www.quilliamfoundation.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/publications/free/women-of-the-islamic-state3.pdf, quoted at 14, 21.

  39. Özlem Sandikci & Sahver Omeraki, ‘Globalization and Rituals: Does Ramadam Turn into Christmas?’ Advances in Consumer Research 34, 2007: 610–15; Rakesh Belwal & Shweta Belwal, ‘Hypermarkets in Oman: A Study of Consumers’ Shopping Preferences’, in: International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management 42, no. 8, 2014: 717–32.

  40. Johanna Pink, ed., Muslim Societies in the Age of Mass Consumption (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2009); Leor Halevi, ‘The Muslim Xbox’ (31 May 2013), in: Reverberations: New Directions in the Study of Prayer, http://forums.ssrc.org/ndsp/2013/05/31/the-muslim-xbox/; and http://www.islamicbookstore.com/publisher-goodword-books.html.

  41. http://www.worldhalalsummit.com/the-global-halal-market-stats-trends/; Jonathan Wilson et al., ‘Crescent Marketing: Muslim Geographies and Brand Islam’, in: Journal of Islamic Mark
eting 4, no. 1, 2013: 22–50.

  42. This paragraph draws on the fascinating research by Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York, 2006); see also: Charles Hirschkind, ‘Experiments in Devotion Online: The YouTube Khutba’, in: International Journal of Middle East Studies 44, no. 1, 2012: 5–21.

  43. Özlem Sandikci & Guliz Ger, ‘Veiling in Style: How Does a Stigmatized Practice become Fashionable?’ in: Journal of Consumer Research 37, no. 1, 2010: 15–36. For critical voices in Istanbul, see Elif Izberk-Bilgin, ‘Infidel Brands: Unveiling Alternative Meanings of Global Brands at the Nexus of Globalization, Consumer Culture and Islam’, in: Journal of Consumer Research 39, no. 4, 2012: 663–87.

  44. Quoted in Carla Jones, ‘Materializing Piety: Gendered Anxieties about Faithful Consumption in Contemporary Urban Indonesia’, in: American Ethnologist 37, no. 4, 2010: 617–37, at 619. Compare: http://www.noor-magazine.com/2014/10/shadow-of-preppy/.

  CHAPTER 15

  1. See www.oceanconservancy.org.: ‘The Ocean Trash Index’ (2012).

  2. For American data, see the reports by the US Environmental Protection Agency, for British figures, those by WRAP: http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/nonhaz/municipal/pubs/msw_2010_rev_factsheet.pdf; www.wrap.org.uk/media_centre/key_facts/index.html.

  3. Vance Packard, The Waste Makers (London, 1961), quoted at 6–9, 236f.

  4. Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York, 1999), 10, 16, 21.

  5. D. C. Walsh, ‘Urban Residential Refuse Composition and Generation Rates for the Twentieth Century’, in: Environmental Science & Technology 36, no. 22, 2002: 4936–42.

  6. Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, at: http://dwb.uni-trier.de/de/; Sabine Barles, L’Invention des déchets urbains: France, 1790–1970 (Seyssel, 2005), 229–31; Ludolf Kuchenbuch, ‘Abfall: Eine stichwortgeschichtliche Erkundung’, in: Mensch und Umwelt in der Geschichte, eds. J. Calließ, J. Rüsen & M. Striegnitz (Pfaffenweiler, 1989); John Hollander, ‘The Waste Remains and Kills’, Social Research 65, no. 1, 1998: 3–8; and John Scanlan, On Garbage (London, 2005).

  7. William Rathje & Cullen Murphy, Rubbish: The Archaeology of Garbage (New York, 1992).

  8. Suzanne Raitt, ‘Psychic Waste: Freud, Fechner and the Principle of Constancy’, in: Gay Hawkins & Stephen Muecke, eds., Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value (Lanham, MD, 2003), 73–83.

  9. Kevin Hetherington, ‘Second-handedness: Consumption, Disposal and Absent Presence’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, 2004: 157–73, at 159.

  10. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1966), 44. Her approach framed the exhibition on dirt and waste at the Wellcome Trust, London, in 2012. The definition of ‘dirt’ as ‘a thing in a wrong place’ was already common among Victorians and was used by Lord Palmerston in 1852. See also: Zsuzsa Gille, From the Cult of Waste to the Trash Heap of History: The Politics of Waste in Socialist and Post-socialist Hungary (Bloomington, IN, 2007); and Gavin Lucas, ‘Disposability and Dispossession in the Twentieth Century’, in: Journal of Material Culture 7, no. 1, 2002: 5–22.

  11. Cited in M. A. Jinhee Park, ‘Von der Müllkippe zur Abfallwirtschaft: Die Entwicklung der Hausmüllentsorgung in Berlin (West) von 1945 bis 1990 ’, PhD thesis: Technische Universität Berlin, 2004), p. 22, my translation.

  12. C. A. Velis, D. C. Wilson & C. R. Cheeseman, ‘Nineteenth-century London Dust-yards: A Case Study in Closed-loop Resource Efficiency’, in: Waste Management 29, no. 4, 2009: 1282–90.

  13. Manuel Charpy, ‘Formes et échelles du commerce d’occasion au XIXe siècle: L’Exemple du vêtement à Paris’, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 24, 2002: 125–50.

  14. Barles, L’Invention des déchets urbains, 32–4.

  15. William L. Rathje, ‘The Garbage Decade’, in: American Behavioral Scientist 28, no. 1, 1984: 9–29.

  16. Quoted from Martin Melosi, Garbage in Cities: Refuse, Reform and the Environment, 1880–1980 (College Station, TX, 1981), 23.

  17. Barles, L’Invention des déchets urbains, 167–9.

  18. See Hildegard Frilling and Olaf Mischer, Pütt un Pann’n: Geschichte der Hamburger Hausmüllbeseitigung (Hamburg, 1994). See further: Heather Chappells & Elizabeth Shove, ‘The Dustbin: A Study of Domestic Waste, Household Practices and Utility Services’, in: International Planning Studies 4, no. 2, 1999: 267–80.

  19. Martin Melosi, Garbage in Cities: Refuse, Reform and the Environment, 1880–1980, (Pittsburgh, rev. edn., 2005), ch. 2; and Daniel Eli Burnstein, Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York City (Urbana, IL, 2006).

  20. Rudolph Hering & Samuel A. Greeley, Collection and Disposal of Municipal Refuse (New York, 1921), 50.

  21. Hering & Greeley, Collection and Disposal of Municipal Refuse, 19, 34; and J. C. Wylie, Fertility from Town Wastes (London, 1955), esp. 200; see also: J. C. Wylie, The Wastes of Civilization (London, 1959).

  22. See Park, ‘Von der Müllkippe zur Abfallwirtschaft’, 24–6.

  23. G. E. Louis, ‘A Historical Context of Municipal Solid-waste Management in the United States’, in: Waste Management and Research 22, no. 4, 2004: 306–22.

  24. Müll und Abfall, Feb. 1973, 35–6.

  25. Johann Eugen Mayer, Müllbeseitigung und Müllverwertung (Leipzig, 1915).

  26. Wylie, Fertility from Town Wastes.

  27. Matthew Gandy, Recycling and the Politics of Urban Waste (New York, 1994), 74.

  28. Bayerisches Statistisches Landesamt, Die Müllbeseitigung in Bayern am 30. Juni 1963 (Munich, 1965), 7.

  29. Anat Helman, ‘Cleanliness and Squalor in Inter-war Tel Aviv’, in: Urban History 31, no. 1, 2001: 72–99. See also: Joshua Goldstein, ‘Waste’, in Trentmann, ed., Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, esp. 337–41 and for further references.

  30. Shanghai Municipal Archive, Annual Report of the Shanghai Municipal Council, 1905: 149–51; 1906: 172–3; 1920: 128A–130A; 1923: 135; 1935: 213.

  31. Geoffrey Russell Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899–1914 (Oxford, 1971).

  32. Commitee on the Elimination of Waste in Industry of the Federated American Engineering Societies, Waste in Industry (Washington, DC, 1921), 30, 97.

  33. See the fascinating film Scrap by the Nassau Recycle Corporation in 1974 from the AT&T Archives at http://techchannel.att.com/play-video.cfm/2011/10/12/AT&T-Archives-Scrap.

  34. Charles H. Lipsett, Industrial Wastes: Their Conservation and Utilization (New York, 1951); and C. L. Mantell, Solid Wastes: Origin, Collection, Processing and Disposal (New York, 1975), 753–5.

  35. Waste-industry experts began to speak of ‘the age of packaging’ e.g. C. Basalo of Paris at the International Solid Waste and Public Cleaning Association conference, cited in Müll und Abfall, 4/1970: 131; see also: Müll und Abfall, 1/1972: 9.

  36. Roland Salchow, Zeitbombe Müll (Hamburg, 1992), 30.

  37. Quoted in Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918, 100.

  38. Nigel Whiteley, ‘Toward a Throwaway Culture: Consumerism, “Style Obsolescence” and Cultural Theory in the 1950s and 1960s’, in Oxford Art Journal 10, no. 2, 1987: 3–27; and Andrea El-Danasouri, Kunststoff und Müll: Das Material bei Naum Gabo und Kurt Schwitters (Munich, 1992).

  39. New York Times, 23 Dec. 2005; New York Times, 14 May 2008; Barbican Art Gallery, London: ‘The Bride and the Bachelors: Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns’, 14 February 2013–9 June 2013. Gallery Gagosian, Robert Rauschenberg: Catalogue, with texts by James Lawrence and John Richardson (New York, 2010); Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-garde (Harmondsworth, expanded edn, 1976), 207f.

  40. The Times, 11 May 1977: 24. Between 1964 and 1977 the number of local authorities involved in waste-paper recycling fell from 744 to 196. See further: Timothy Cooper, ‘War on Waste? The Politics of Waste and Recycling in P
ost-war Britain,1950–1975’, Capitalism Nature Socialism 20, no. 4, 2009: 53–72.

  41. Susanne Köstering, ‘Hundert Jahre Entzinnung von Konservendosen: Ein Wettlauf zwischen Altstoffrückgewinnung und Rohstoffeinsparung’, in: Müll von Gestern? Eine umweltgeschichtliche Erkundung in Berlin und Brandenburg, eds. Susanne Köstering & Renate Rüb, (Münster, 2003), 151–64.

  42. Civic Trust, ‘Civic Amenities Act, 1967, Part 3: Disposal of Unwanted Vehicles and Bulky Refuse’ (London: 1967), 32.

  43. For the reception of Carson’s book, see Priscilla Coit Murphy, What a Book Can Do: The Publication and Reception of ‘Silent Spring’ (Amherst, 2005).

  44. Park, ‘Von der Müllkippe zur Abfallwirtschaft’, 109–11; The Times, 4 Sept. 1974: 19; 20 Aug. 1975: 16; 25 Aug. 1977: 17. See now also the special issue edited by Ruth Oldenziel & Heike Weber, ‘Reconsidering Recycling’, in: Contemporary European History 22, no. 3, 2013.

  45. Council Directive of 15 July 1975 on waste (75/442/EEC).

  46. Quoted in The Times, 12 Sept. 1974: 25.

  47. Rat für Nachhaltige Entwicklung, Ressourcenmanagement und Siedlungsabfallwirtschaft (Challenger Report) (Berlin, 2014).

  48. In Britain, commercial waste has fallen by a quarter since 2002/03; http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/business-sectors/docs/f/11-1088-from-waste-management-to-resource-recovery. In Berlin, the drop in municipal solid waste from 2.1 million to 1.68 million in the decade after 1996 was almost entirely due to the fall in commercial waste: see Zhang Dongqing, Tan Soon Keat & Richard M. Gersberg, ‘A Comparison of Municipal Solid Waste Management in Berlin and Singapore’, in: Waste Management 30, no. 5, 2010: 921–33.

  49. US Environmental Protection Agency, ‘Municipal Solid Waste in the United States: 2009 Facts and Figures’ (Washington, DC, 2010), tables 18–22, 89–93, and 94 for packaging waste. In the above, I refer to per capita figures. Of course, population growth has meant that total waste has skyrocketed in these years, from 88 million tons in 1960 to 250 million tons in 2010.

  50. Eurostat, ‘Waste Generated and Treated in Europe Data, 1995–2003’ (Luxembourg, 2005).