Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  This book breaks with this approach in four fundamental ways. It, firstly, widens the time frame. The 1950s and ’60s saw unprecedented gains in disposable income in the West, but this does not mean that people’s lives before this period had been barren. Rather than a new beginning, the post-war boom is better viewed as a late chapter in a longer story of the global expansion of goods. When precisely this expansion began has been the subject of heated debate. Thirty years ago, the historian Neil McKendrick confidently dated the ‘birth of consumer society’ to eighteenth-century Britain.16 He set off a race to discover its origins in ever more distant periods, some finding its first signs in the new taste for beer and beef in late-medieval England. The great wave of historical research that followed has been a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it amply documented that new clothes, domestic comforts and tastes for exotic tea, coffee and porcelain were already arriving before the Industrial Revolution. Contrary to conventional wisdom, mass consumption preceded factory-style mass production; indeed, Western demand for Indian cotton and Chinese porcelain was one factor that would stimulate innovation in European industry. While not starting from zero, the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries saw a blossoming of material life in Renaissance Italy and late Ming China, and then in the Dutch Republic and England. This book begins with the different dynamics and qualities of consumption in these societies.

  On the other hand, the attempt to pin down a particular moment for the birth of consumer society had unfortunate side-effects. In particular, it distracted historians from the larger task of charting the evolution of consumption across time and space. ‘Birth’ was an unfortunate metaphor, because, unlike a baby, consumption was not set on a natural, almost universal path of growth and development. In the course of modern history, it was moulded by states and empires and responded to changes in culture and society, with resultant shifts in lifestyles, tastes and habits, prompting new identities and relationships.

  The book’s second shift in perspective is geographical. In the Cold War era of affluence, the United States appeared to be the Ur-consumer society, exporting its way of life to the rest of the world. The flow was largely in one direction: part of ‘America’s advance through twentieth-century Europe’, as a recent historian has put it.17 What the thesis of the ‘birth’ of consumer society did was to make eighteenth-century England the nursery of an Anglo-Saxon model of choice and markets. Today, in the early twenty-first century, this Anglocentric story stands in radical need of reassessment. With the rapid growth of China, and material advances in India, Brazil and other so-called emerging nations, it is hard to treat consumption as a uniquely Anglo-American export. Though a billion and a half people continue to live at the edge of starvation, it is clear that the bulk of the world’s population is living with more. They have not, however, simply followed in American footsteps. Of course, the British empire and its twentieth-century successor, the United States, were active in spreading their material civilization across the globe. But other societies were not empty vessels: they had their own cultures of consumption. African kingdoms that succumbed to European colonizers in the nineteenth century brought pre-existing tastes and habits to the imperial encounter. In the twentieth century, Japan and West Germany joined the club of affluent societies with a ticket stamped ‘savings’, not cheap credit. Instead of suspecting everywhere a creeping monoculture, we need to appreciate the continuing hybridity and diversity amidst shared trends in rising comfort and ownership of consumer goods.

  Nor are all consumers liberal capitalists. Fascist and communist societies consumed, too. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy were materialistic as well as militarist regimes. They promised their chosen people not only greater living space but a higher standard of living within it. That they left behind destruction and genocide instead does not make their material ambition any less important. In the case of socialist countries, there was less choice and more shortage than in capitalist ones. Consumption always remained subordinated to production, even after Brezhnev and Honecker made concessions to the demand for greater variety, fashion and comfort. Still, it would be wrong to write these societies out of a history of consumption simply because they were not capitalist and their cars and televisions took longer to be delivered and were more prone to break down. Doing so would only make sense if free choice and market exchange were the only criteria of judgement. No society before 1900, not even Britain, the cradle of industrial capitalism, was able to match either the volume or the throughput of goods in socialist Europe.

  Widening the story in time and space in this way has a third implication for the approach taken in this book, and this concerns its cast of characters. The conventional picture of shopping and choice is crowded with advertisers, brands and malls. This book does not deny their contribution, but consumption has been framed not only by market forces. It has been shaped by states and empires, through war and taxes and the often violent transplantations of people and goods from one part of the world to another. Ideas of the ‘good life’, and the goods and services needed to make it a reality, have come not just from marketing gurus on Madison Avenue but from social reformers and city planners, moralists and churches, and, at crucial moments, from consumers themselves, who have rallied together, using the combined force of their purchasing power to improve their own lives and, sometimes, those of others.

  Politics, broadly defined from the top and from below, is therefore a running theme in these pages. This is partly to give attention to how, in addition to reflecting disposable income and time, people’s lifestyles have been the subject of political conflict and intervention. (Some of these were macro-changes, such as tightening or freeing credit and the availability of mortgages, while others were micro-interventions in the very fabric of daily life, down to the size and layout of homes and the wires and switches provided for appliances.) Partly, it is to find out how consumers’ own ambitions have changed over time. What has living with more done to politics?

  But I am also interested in those bits of consumption which are directly sponsored by states and public policy. Here, I think, the narrative of affluence, with its twin forces of choice and markets, has a blind spot that is particularly troubling, from the point of sustainability as much as history. The consumer boom of the 1950s and ’60s was not entirely a market phenomenon. These were the same years that saw the unprecedented expansion of social services which funded or subsidized a growing share of housing, education and health-related expenses, in addition to channelling some income directly to the poor, the elderly and the unemployed. These boom years were the very decades when developed societies were becoming more equal than ever before. This historic era of greater income equality has been reversed since the 1970s – with Turkey a rare exception – but even after recent austerity cuts, the amount of public social spending on benefits, housing and pensions remains huge. In the rich countries that make up the OECD, government social spending peaked at 21.9 per cent of GDP in 2009 and has fallen only slightly since the ‘Great Recession’, to 21.6 per cent of GDP in 2014. Britain, Germany and a few other countries have reduced their social spending-to-GDP ratios by 2 per cent since 2009, but that still leaves public social spending at levels unparalleled in any previous century of human existence; in fact, Japan, Finland, Denmark and Spain increased their social spending by 4 per cent in this period.18 Without the coupled rise of welfare services and social equality, ‘mass consumption’ would have been less massive. To exclude the contribution of social services and transfers in accounts of consumption simply because they are not bought in a market is a mistake. I have, therefore, included a chapter that looks beyond the marketplace at the role states and companies have played in raising material standards and expectations. Rising levels of consumption cannot just be put at the feet of neo-liberals and blamed on the rich setting off a cascade of excess, shopping binges and debt that trickles down to the rest of society.19 States, including social democratic ones, have played a significant role, too. Th
e fate of Greece and other countries since the recession shows what happens to private consumption when the public belt is tightened. States – and the people benefiting from services and transfer payments – may not be the biggest beneficiaries of a high-consumption system, but they are nonetheless implicated in it. Any discussion that seriously tries to come to grips with the material intensity of our lives needs to address this.

  Finally, the book takes a larger view of what is consumed and why. Studies of consumption draw on powerful views of human behaviour and what lies behind the appetite for more. Mainstream economists imagine an individual consumer who has rational preferences and seeks to maximize pleasure and minimize pain; these preferences might change with age, but the model presumes that the individual knows about this ahead of time. Whether people are always this rational is a matter of debate,20 but for our purpose perhaps the greatest shortcoming is that this approach tells us very little about change over time. An alternative view is more psychological and takes in social motivation, seeing the root cause of consumption in the human desire to feel superior. Here, consumption is relational rather than an individual preference (rational or not), part of a social positioning system that tells people where they stand. Particular kinds of clothes and other goods simultaneously signal that an individual belongs to one group and keep others at a distance. This is a very old view, going back to the ancients, but perhaps its most influential version today is the notion of ‘conspicuous consumption’, a term made famous just over a century ago by Thorstein Veblen in his critique of the American rich and their flashy display of luxury.21 Since people want to be loved and admired, such luxury enjoyed by the few causes envy and emulation by the many, triggering a race in which no one wants to be left behind.

  This view of human behaviour remains the single most dominant strand in popular debates about affluence, shopping binges and debt. It is also, as I have said, a partial view of humanity and the dynamics of consumption. Showing off and status seeking does occur, but this does not mean it is the only or the main force quickening the material metabolism. Here a fixation with shopping can be especially distracting. A lot of what we consume happens outside shopping malls and follows a different logic. People consume many goods and services simply as they go about their daily lives, to express duty and affection to each other, and to accomplish tasks of many different kinds. The family meal is a classic example. It involves the purchase of food, its preparation (using energy and stoves or microwaves), dishes served in a particular sequence, gender roles and rituals of eating and sociability. Some goods, of course, can play multiple roles – a new kitchen might be bought to impress or to satisfy the hobby chef as well as to bring the family together. A car can be a symbolic status good, but also a hobby that demands time and expertise, as well as a practical means to commute or drive the children to their music lessons. A lot of goods and resources are used for domestic comfort, such as heating and cooling. And, frequently, they are a means to some other end – for example, the pursuit of leisure activities, hobbies and entertainment. Skiing, playing tennis and fishing require a lot of kit. But skis and fishing rods are rarely purchased for display on a wall, although playing one sport may carry more prestige than another. A radio can be a status item, but its main use is for listening to, often while eating or doing the washing-up. The world of consumption is full of these more inconspicuous items and practices, which do not follow the logic of individual choice and behaviour so dominant in economics and psychology. We are mainly dealing here with social habits and routines, not expressions of individual motivation or desire.22 The arrival of gas and water, the washing machine and the radio, and the growing pull of leisure activities were all important catalysts for rising levels of consumption.

  A better understanding of habits and routines matters for two connected reasons. One is social. The attention given to conspicuous display, while often inspired by a progressive concern with improving the condition of the poor, has inevitably led writers to focus on the very rich and on luxury goods. Emulation and imitation is assumed to explain the demand among the majority of the population. This can sometimes look pretty patronizing. Since it is taken as given that most people ape those richer than themselves, it is not necessary to find out much more about their own habits and motivations. If only they stopped hankering after bigger cars and extravagant accessories and focused on their ‘real needs’! Yet it is far from clear whether most people always ‘look up’ like this. In many situations they look sideways, taking their cues from their peers rather than those wealthier than themselves.23 A good deal of change has been widespread and taken place in daily life with the diffusion of materially more intensive forms of comfort and convenience such as lighting, heating, air-conditioning and home entertainment. Giving greater attention to such inconspicuous aspects allows us to see more of the texture of society.

  A second reason is to aim at a more measured evaluation of consuming and its consequences. ‘Conspicuous’ consumption is easily treated as ‘wasteful’, as squandering resources that could be put to much better use for society at large; this was what made Veblen such a passionate critic. It might be easier to feel outrage at a £2,000 handbag or a 400-foot luxury yacht complete with swimming pool and hand-cut crystal staircases than at an ordinary bathtub, central heating or a pair of trainers. The former suggest excess and extravagance whereas the latter may seem modest and useful. But, from an environmental perspective, the moral equation of private excess with public waste is too convenient. Carbon-dioxide missions from hot showers and baths, heating and cooling the home to ever higher standards of comfort, rushing from place to place, are far greater than those from luxury yachts and accessories – although diamonds throw up a lot of mining waste and pollution. The problem, then, is not that critics of conspicuous consumption go too far but that they do not go far enough. The environmental challenge is out of proportion to their diagnosis. To put it differently, ‘waste’ does not just stem from morally suspect forms of consuming. A lot of it comes from practices that are considered ‘normal’. It is precisely the usefulness of such habitual forms of consumption and their ‘normality’ that makes changing them so difficult. This does not mean we should not try, merely that the point of intervention needs to be social practices – what people do that uses up things and resources – not individual morality or motivation.24

  This book tells the story of the global advance of goods. It does so in two parts which complement each other. The first is historical and takes readers from the blossoming of the culture of goods in the fifteenth century to the end of the Cold War in the 1980s and the resurgence of Asian consumers since. While it is broadly chronological, it is also thematic, following how the essential building blocks took shape in different regions. It traces the impact of empire on material desires, comfort and identities; looks at how modern cities shaped leisure and infrastructures, and vice versa; examines the transformation of the home; considers how modern ideologies (fascism, communism and anti-colonialism as well as liberalism) seized on the promise of a higher standard of living; and explores how Asian consumers came to join their cousins in the West. Part Two moves in the opposite direction. It takes central topics of concern today and places them in a historical context. These chapters ask about excess and credit; whether we have become a ‘harried’ society addicted to quick and superficial stimuli; how consumption has transformed generational identities (for the elderly as well as for teenagers and young children); how it has changed religion and our ethics, sense of fairness and connection to distant others – all the way to how we get rid of stuff: have we become a ‘throwaway society’?

  The last thirty years have seen a veritable boom in consumption studies, with thousands of specialist books and articles, divided by region and period, by particular products and practices, right up to studies of individual department stores and consumer movements.25 Comparisons are few and far between and, where they exist, tend to focus on Western Europe.26 For all the insigh
tful detail, this has left behind a bewildering fragmentation of knowledge, with so many trees obscuring a view of the forest. This book attempts to put together these scattered pieces and fill in holes to create a synthetic picture. Instead of focusing only on points of origin or on contemporary affluence, it seeks to understand how we got from the fifteenth century to the present.

  Inevitably, a book of this scope cannot cover everything. My intention has been to follow major themes across time and space, not to try to be encyclopaedic. This has required difficult decisions about what to include and what to exclude. In general, I have started by identifying core questions and problems, rather than proceeding from a settled belief in certain causes or consequences. Uncertainty is a useful friend of the historian. Many chapters, indeed many sections, could have grown into books of their own. But this would have defeated the overall purpose of creating a synthetic picture in a single volume. The kinds of examples and case studies I have drawn on in each chapter are not random but are carefully chosen to illustrate larger developments and to signal divergence as well as parallels. Behind them lurk many others which could have been drawn upon for similar effect.

  The book is not a global history in the strict sense of covering the entire world, nor does it offer portraits of individual countries. I have tried, rather, to take topics out of their usual habitats and follow them across other parts of the world. In addition to the United States and Britain, which have dominated past accounts, I roam across Europe and Asia, with shorter excursions to Latin America along the way. I would have liked to say more about contemporary Brazil, but here, as in other omissions, I hope that readers with an interest in a particular country will find at least some compensation in the thematic consideration I offer on topics of shared concern, such as the lifestyles of the new middle classes, where I chose to concentrate my energies on China and India. My main focus is on what is called the developed world, but this does not mean it is exclusively on the rich North. I consider the effect of imperialism on colonial Africa and India as well as the impact of migration and remittances on changing lifestyles in not so rich parts of the world. People in the South are not just producers and objects of moral concern for affluent consumers in the North. They are consumers, too, including of fair-trade products.