women’s magazines 254, 256, 487, 620
Wood, John 246
wool 58, 60, 64, 537; industry 29, 32; woollen goods 27, 54
Wordsworth, William 210
work see labour and work
Workers Travel Association 533–4
working classes see also labour and work: approach to money and goods 342; clothes 68; co-operative movement see co-operative movement; coffee consumption 165, 166; conservatism 344; ‘delinquents’ 313; ‘depression phobia’ 342; effect of affluence on working class culture 340, 343–4; ‘embourgeoisement’ thesis of British 342–4; emulation of drinking habits of the rich 90; housewives 407–8 see also housewives; kitchens 270; the labourer as a consumer 117; labourers’ earnings divided by the cost of subsistence 72; material aspiration and working class solidarity 340, 343–4; possessions 63, 75; the rich as the new working class 449; and running water 180; spending power 281; and sugar 165, 166; Sunday in 1949, south London 473–4, 475; ‘taste for necessity’ 345; wages and standard of living 72, 72, 99, 115, 149 see also standard of living; wages; and washing machines 259; wives and the cinema 214
workshops 261
World Bank 355, 589; Africa Migration Project 591, 592, 594
world exhibitions 193, 329
World Resources Institute 664–5
world shops 564, 565, 566, 574–5, 576
World Trade Organisation 396, 553, 659
World Wars see First World War; Second World War
wrestling 365
Württemberg 41–3, 76
Würzburg, water consumption 187, 188
Wyster 632
Xhosa 347–8
Xiajia, China 369–70
yachts 15
Yangzhou 21, 48–9, 93
Yangzi 44, 46, 72, 92, 93, 368
Yankee Doodle 196
Yefremov, Avdot’ia 203
Yemen 79, 85, 590, 596
Yeovil 176
Yokohama 187
York 639
Yorkshire 61
Young, Brigham 608
youth and teenagers 494–8; American 312, 613; Christian youth 574–6, 613; clothes 312, 494–5, 498; as consumers 312, 494–8; culture/subcultures 6, 303, 311, 313–15, 327, 333, 496, 498; delinquency 217, 311, 313; in East Germany 333; and ethical consumerism 573, 574–6; fashion 498; fashionable teenage tribes 384; following parents’ religion 613; gangs 217, 310, 312, 498; generational identity 496; Indonesian 620; Japanese 378, 384; juvenile protection laws 311; leisure 216–19; loosening of class and gender hierarchies 313; and nationalism 496; organizations 311; paper collecting 638; poor teenagers 496–7; relationship with parents 313, 314, 382, 383, 496; riots 310, 496; rising wages and freedom from parental control 216; and romanticism 496; sex 217, 311, 313, 333; Soviet 330; spending power 281, 312, 485, 495–6; students see students; on Sundays 475–6; targeted by marketing and advertising 314–15, 494–5; Teddy- Boys 303; teen magazines 312; teenage market 312, 494–8; wild 310–11, 313; youth centres 351, 496; youth clubs 314, 333, 496, 497; youth groups 333, 573, 638; youth movements 323; youth protection 218, 311; youth shows 333
YouTube 465
Yugioh 492
Yunxiang Yan 369
Zam Zam Cola 618
Zambia 656–7, 659
Zanzibar 132, 134, 170
Zelizer, Viviana 487
Zen 613
zero growth 24, 677, 678–9
zero waste 670–71
Zhang Han 48
Zheng He 24
Zhu Guozhen 46
Zimbabwe 614
Zlín 525
Zola, Émile: The Ladies’ Paradise 194–6, 197, 198
Zurich 176
Zweig, Ferdynand 343, 344
Zwickau 331
Illustrations
Renaissance splendor
1. Wedding cassone (chest) from mid fifteenth-century Tuscany, with figures in Burgundian fashion.
2. This maiolica dish (tin-glazed earthenware) was part of a 178-piece dinner service made in 1559 for the wedding of Jacopo di Alamano and Isabella Salviati, of the Florentine banking family.
Catching up with China
3. Porcelain bottle from Jingdezhen (c.1590–1620) depicting a scholar.
4. Simple stoneware bottle from the Rhineland (c.1600), with imperfect cobalt blue decoration.
5. Jasperware teapot by Wedgwood (c. 1790).
Textile revolution
6. English jacket and petticoat (1770s) made from cotton painted and dyed in India.
7. Poor mother’s flowered cotton token left with her daughter at London’s Foundling Hospital in 1747.
8. Fashion doll (66 cm tall), probably French, 1760s, dressed in a cotton gown, with linen underwear, and a collar of pink silk ribbon.
The colonial diffusion of exotic tastes
9. Drinking chocolate becomes a social custom in Europe: la xocolatada in Spain, 1710.
10. Silver maté cup and bombilla (straw) from 19th century South America.
Popular drink
11. Not always a place of sobriety and reason: a satirical print of a coffee-house mob, England, 1710.
12. Old woman making tea; W. R. Bigg, Cottage Interior, 1793.
The look of empire
13. Young Swahili woman in fashionable kanga cotton, printed in Africa; Zanzibar, around 1900.
14. Mix of European and African clothes at the Kumase Mission in Asante (Ghana), 1903.
15. English glass bowl promoting ethical consumption in the fight against slave-grown sugar, 1820s.
16. Living like the English: the coconut plantation owner Mr. William Augustine Peiris and family in Ceylon (Sri Lanka).
Now you see it, now you don’t — exotic luxuries turned into national mass products
17. Poster advertising coffee from French colonies and the Dutch East Indies, by Edward Ancourt, c. 1890.
18. The ‘Paula girl’ (1926), promoting ‘Finnish coffee’ for the Paulig company, in traditional Sääksmäki costume, since 1920.
Shopping spaces
19. Aerial view of the Bon Marché in Paris, 1887.
20. The grand hall of the Bon Marché in the early 1920s.
21. Co-operative shop in 1899 Newmarket, England.
Shopping experiences
22. Central Market Hall, Berlin Alexanderplatz –one of the many covered market halls appearing in cities in the late nineteenth century.
23. Strong man advertising the miraculous power of his patent medicine at Tianqiao market, Beijing, c. 1933–46.
24. Uncle Paul’s Pawn Shop, Augusta, Georgia, c. 1899.
Shining bright and breaking down: urban networks
25. 1882: the first electric arc light in Ginza-dōri, Tokyo, in an 1883 engraving of the scene by Utagawa Shigekiyo.
26. 1898: husbands fetching water with buckets in London’s East End during the ‘water famine’, when constant supply collapsed.
Putting the thrill into pleasure
27. Luna Park at night, with the ‘shoot-the-chutes’ amusement ride on the left, Coney Island, New York City, 1904.
28. Blackpool, England, and its ‘flying machines’, c. 1910.
Domestic interiors
29. 1912: basic comforts amidst sweated labour – a family making artificial flowers in an overcrowded one-room tenement on Thompson Street, New York City.
30. 1913: the kind of stuffed bourgeois interior loathed by the architect Bruno Taut and fellow modernists, in a photograph from Radautz in the Austro-Hungarian empire (today: Radivtsi, Ukraine). The owner’s note proudly points to the electrically operated petroleum lamp.
31. 1921: the clean lines of modern living championed by Taut, exemplified by the Atelier Berssenbrugge in The Hague.
Brightening up home life
32. Henkel men advertising washing powder, Germany 1914.
33. Telefunkensuper radio, Germany 1933.
New fuel, new life
34. Horse-drawn van advertising gas-heated baths, Norwich, Easter Monday, 1908.
/> 35. German electricity fair, 1953.
36. Mr and Mrs Pickens’ first electric cooker, Norwalk, California, 1938.
37. Japanese board game extolling the benefits of gas, c. 1925–43.
Boycotts and buycotts
38. ‘White Label’ for goods approved by the National Consumers League, 1910s, USA; this one came from a swimsuit.
39. Caricature of an Indian ‘Baboo’ aping the West, by Gaganendranath Tagore, 1917.
40. By the 1930s, Gandhi’s austere vision of self-reliance was supplanted by more colourful swadeshi fashions, like this one.
Totalitarian promises
41. Holiday programme of the Nazi leisure organization Strength Through Joy (Kraft Durch Freude), 1938.
42. Soviet advertisement: ‘In America, a bottle of ketchup stands on every table in a restaurant and in every housewife’s cupboard’, 1937.
43. The Soviet stand of appliances at the 1959 Moscow exhibition, where Nixon and Khrushchev had their ‘kitchen debate’.
The limits of Americanization
44. 1958 brochure of the eighth Italian song festival at Sanremo.
45. Domenico Modugno taking off with the winning song ‘Nel blu dipinto di blu’ (Volare), inspired by two Chagall paintings, at Sanremo, 1958.
46. Rural nostalgia: a 1997 stamp celebrating Finnish Tango.
47. Commercial reality: the annual festival of Finnish Tango, 2013.
Asian consumers
48. Shanghai modern: a calendar with a Scandinavian beer advertisement, 1938.
49. South Delhi market, India, 2010.
50. Pachinko gambling parlour, Tokyo, 2014.
51. China Consumer Association playing cards, 2006, alerting consumers to watch for misleading claims about products, with the famous Monkey King, from the classic Journey to the West, smashing fake and poor quality goods.
Credit and saving
52. Before the credit card: an embossed metal ‘charga-plate’ for the department store Thalhimers in Richmond, Virginia, c. 1938.
53. Benjamin Franklin thrift bank, United States, 1931.
54. Save – and appliances and a trip to Paris will follow, according to this Finnish savings poster from the early 1950s.
55. A Japanese housewife proudly shows her savings book, in a poster celebrating eighty years of postal saving and financial planning, 1955.
Youth cultures
56. Mugshot of the violent Scuttlers in Manchester, 1894, with their trade-mark neckerchiefs and ‘donkeyfringe’ hairstyle, cut short in the back and with angled fringe in the front.
57. Poster for a youth dance in socialist East Germany, 1973, with rum-cola, grilled chicken and chips and Ukrainian solyanka.
58. Latino Zoot Suiters on their way to LA County Jail, 1943.
Elderly consumers, arise!
59. Fit and active in old age: morning fitness in Sun City, the retirement community in Arizona.
60. Shanghai, People’s Park, 2006.
61. Sun City aerial view, c. 1970.
Public and private
62. The 110-foot ‘municipal plunge’, the South Pasadena City Pool, built in 1939 with a grant from the Public Works Administration.
63. bottom Fast food: 19 cent Hamburger outlet, 1952, Culver City, LA. Open 11 a.m.– 1 a.m. every day, and Friday to Saturday until 2.30 a.m.
Company life and leisure
64. Electric Edison baseball team, California, 1904.
65. Edison Girls’ basketball team, California, 1932.
66. The shoe-manufacturer Bata’s 1947 football competition between French and English company teams, with the winning team from Vernon, France.
67. Housing, leisure, library and social services at Henkel, the German laundry detergent producer, 1937.
The values of waste
68. Chiffonier (rag picker) and his donkey, Lozére, France, c.1900.
69. Boys picking garbage on ‘the Dumps’, Boston, 1909.
70. Manhattan self-storage advertisement, 2012.
71. E-scrapping of old computers, Guiyu, Guangdong province, China, 2005.
72. Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram, 1955–9.
About the Author
FRANK TRENTMANN is a professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and directed the £5 million Cultures of Consumption research program. His last book, Free Trade Nation, won the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize. He was educated at Hamburg University, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Harvard University. He has been the Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, as well as a visiting professor at Bielefeld University, the University of St. Gallen, the British Academy, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. In 2014 he was awarded the Moore Distinguished Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com
Credits
Cover design by Milan Bozic
Cover photograph © Richard Kuiper
Copyright
EMPIRE OF THINGS. Copyright © 2016 by Frank Trentmann. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Originally published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by Allen Lane.
FIRST U.S. EDITION
ISBN: 978-0-06-245632-8
EPub Edition MARCH 2016 ISBN 9780062456335
16 17 18 19 20 OFF/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON M4W 1A8, Canada
www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand
Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive
Rosedale 0632
Auckland, New Zealand
www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF, UK
www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
www.harpercollins.com
Empire of Things Page 123
