Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  This can be read as a betrayal of revolutionary principles. For many consumers, however, it was empowering. A cultured lifestyle required cultured shopping. Soviet people, too, had a right to be served courteously. Only discerning customers would be able to navigate the affluence that socialism would bring and force shopkeepers to raise their game. In theory, then, the absence of competition made consumers more, not less important. Soviet reformers returned from trips to American and European cities fascinated by customer service and convenience. In Berlin, people ate ice cream in paper cups and sausages off paper plates, easily disposable. Ingenious! At Macy’s in New York, sales personnel were polite and attractive, advising customers on how to dress to their advantage; even teaching them how to play tennis or golf. The store offered home delivery and had an in-house barber and post office. Marvellous! The future lay with Western department stores, not the traditional Russian co-operative. Back home, they launched Soviet hamburgers, cornflakes and ice creams. The period saw a campaign to transform the shopping experience. Opening hours were lengthened and shops pressed to have better displays, plants, and chairs for tired customers. Salespeople were taught to wash their hands and keep shelves clean. Complaint books were introduced and promoted as a civic exercise in socialist criticism, although some shops hid them. In 1936, a series of customer conferences was launched, encouraging housewives to tell retailers and producers what they needed, what worked and what did not; some quite openly challenged sales staff about scarce goods and tactless treatment.64 Consumers, like workers, were responsible for building socialism. The parallels to the New Deal are apparent. In Russia, as in America, an expanding state turned to the consumer to advance its social project.

  These initiatives had limited success. Between 1932 and 1937, the sale of radios in the USSR did go up eightfold to 195,000 a year, gramophones to almost 700,000. There were 328 Gastronom shops operating in forty regions. Still, in a population of over 150 million, these were small numbers. A lot of fashion and electrical goods were symbolic, barely reaching beyond Leningrad’s Nevsky Prospect or Moscow’s Central Department Store, which occupied the old site of Muir and Mirrielees, where the Tsarist elite had once shopped. The typical Russian shop was a world apart from Macy’s. In Odessa, for example, the problem was not that shop-window displays were dull but that they did not have a shop window in the first place. There was no glass; there were no shop signs, no packaging materials; some shops had no weights or measures.65 Rural areas were not completely cut off from consumer culture. There were travelling cinemas, and half of all radios were sold in shops in the countryside, but most of them had no space for storing goods and many lacked soap. Kulturnost was easier said than done.

  Stalinism was a type of internal imperialism. It tried to do with Soviet workers and peasants what European imperialists had attempted with the heathen in the colonies: impose external state control through the self-control of clean shirts and bodies. In the inter-war years, colonial nationalists were turning this ‘civilizing’ process back on their masters. Foreign goods were burnt in demonstrations as far apart as Egypt, China and India. Boycotts proliferated as substitutes for state power. Goods were a target that could be hit without guns and armies. Clothes, in particular, dominated the agenda. Clothes weave a thread between private and public, between the material self and global regimes of production. They are an extension of our body and signal who we are yet at the same time reflect fashion and group identity. In societies with high illiteracy and limited freedom, campaigns for national clothes were an attractive way to promote national identity. If clothes make the man, new clothes would make new citizens. Empires might control imports and exports, but what people chose to wear proved more elusive, although in India the British tried to outlaw items like Gandhi’s cap. As simultaneous markers of difference and uniformity, however, goods also raised thorny questions for colonial nationalists. Was the goal to throw out imperialists and keep the goods? Or, were the goods themselves too contaminated by imperial power?

  Mohandas Gandhi was a sartorial fundamentalist. As a young man, he had first set out for England in 1888 with a white flannel suit, carefully packed away during the crossing. When he disembarked on English soil in late September he found to his chagrin that he was surrounded by a sea of dark suits. In the next few decades, he would shed Western dress as he discarded layers of imperial civilization. In South Africa in 1913, he donned the mourning dress of indentured labourers to protest against the shooting of Indian workers. A few years later, back in India, he adapted the Kashmiri cap into a new national style. By 1921, he had settled on the dhoti, a waistcloth slightly longer than a loincloth that he would wear for the rest of his life.66

  The dhoti had been sported by protesters in an earlier boycott of British goods over the division of Bengal in 1905; American revolutionaries had worn home-spun dresses in the 1760s. Gandhi tied such traditions to spiritual and political emancipation. Coarse clothes signalled a break with an unjust society, a refusal to consume akin to a hunger strike. They gave individuals a chance to purify themselves. As early as 1909, Gandhi had targeted material passions in his plea for self-government, Hind Swaraj, a slim book written on his return voyage from London to South Africa. In the past, people had been enslaved by force. ‘Now they are enslaved by temptations of money and of luxuries that money can buy.’67 Modern civilization had removed all checks on self-indulgence. Appetites had become insatiable. All this undermined community, taste and self-control. Political home rule and self-rule lay along the same path: a return to the ‘proper use of our hands and feet’.68 It was as if Rousseau had met Marx and Christ. India was poor because the British empire drained it of resources – here Gandhi followed earlier Indian ‘drain theorists’ – but also because the lust for things bred inequality and selfishness. For Gandhi, it was as sinful to covet imported cloth as to covet a neighbour’s wife. Imperial exploitation was underpinned by self-exploitation and a disregard for others. Consumers were violent creatures.

  Gandhi’s answer was khadi. By spinning and weaving the coarse, unbleached khadi cloth with their own hands, Indians would liberate themselves. Like the Mughal emperors who had built imperial networks through gifts of elaborate textiles,69 Gandhi aimed to use khadi to unite the nationalist elite with the poor. It was ‘the soul of India’.70 Swadeshi – the movement for indigenous goods – sought to rebuild society in the image of an ideal village. Swadeshi marriage songs renounced the suffering wrought by foreign clothes. Once spinning, weaving and finishing cotton were reunited, community spirit would revive. Instead of wanting more and more stuff, people would want only what everyone else had. Here was the starting point for future movements for simple living. Gandhi’s genius was to turn an economics of autarchy into an ethics of global brotherhood. People who wore khadi showed their ‘fellow-feeling with every human being on earth’ by renouncing anything that did harm to others.71 Gandhi appropriated the motto of free traders and turned it on its head: every ‘revolution of the wheel spins peace, goodwill and love’.72

  The wheel was slow to spin. Gandhi himself had at first confused the loom with the spinning wheel, and when he moved into the Satyagraha ashram in the Bombay Presidency in 1917 to start khadi, the nearest spinning wheel was in another state. But by 1920, the Indian National Congress had endorsed swadeshi and non-cooperation. Four years later, it adopted the ‘spinning franchise’: no khadi, no vote. Every member had to contribute 2,000 yards spun by themselves and have a charkha (spinning wheel) in their house. Khadi became the anti-colonial uniform.

  Few in the nationalist elite or society at large, however, were prepared to join Gandhi’s fundamentalist revolt against things. Gandhi himself urged a minimum of thirty minutes of spinning a day. In the Congress Party, many middle-class leaders were happy to adopt khadi as a symbolic token but had no problem with fashion as such; Sarojini Naidu, the poet and president of the Indian National Congress in 1925, liked her fine clothes, and Nehru asked for high-end, fine-spun cloth to
be brought to him in prison. Others doubted whether hand-weaving was really the ticket out of poverty. In the population at large, khadi clashed head on with caste and class cultures. In Madras, white, coarse cloth was traditionally worn by widows living at the margin of society. Mothers complained that it was impossible to marry off their daughters in such ugly clothes. By the mid-1920s, khadi was being diluted, largely thanks to the marketing drive of Gandhi’s nephew Maganlal. Colourful patterns, regional styles and fancy fabrics were launched (see Plate 40). There were exhibitions, posters and publicity. By 1930, the Swadeshi League advertised clothes mass-produced at Indian-owned mills.73 It was no longer necessary to spin by hand in a self-sufficient community. Purchasing a shirt or sari with a nice design was fine, as long as it carried a certified label. Swadeshi could be bought.

  Across the world, most nationalists came down on the side of consumerist modernity, one with patriotic and increasingly ethnic overtones but consumer friendly nonetheless. There were good historic reasons for this. Nationalism and marketing had evolved alongside each other, both using icons to construct shared communities, from the cult of Washington to that of Bismarck and Garibaldi. Gandhi’s anti-consumerism was rather atypical in that it drew from a European reaction against industrial society; he had absorbed Ruskin and Tolstoy. Elsewhere, nationalists wanted to gain control over consumer industries. They understood what Marx had not: goods did not only alienate, they could also unite. With the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, after the First Opium War, China lost the power to set its own trade barriers. Consumer boycotts were an attractive substitute: people took it into their own hands to keep out foreign goods. In 1905, Chinese communities across Asia boycotted American goods in response to the United States’ exclusion of Chinese workers. The transfer of German rights in Shandong to Japan during the First World War added to the sense of ‘national humiliation’. In December 1919, around one thousand students paraded through the Chinese part of Shanghai, searched shops and ‘burnt any goods which they considered to be of Japanese origin’.74 ‘Boycott Bad Goods’ societies burnt bundles of Japanese cotton and other goods. In 1925, British goods were boycotted in protest at killings by British soldiers in Shanghai. In Egypt, the arrest of Wafdist nationalists in 1921 similarly sparked a wave of boycotts. In 1932, law students at Cairo University lit bonfires of fine European suits: ‘The silk garment is from your enemy, take it off and trample it. Light the fire and burn his old clothes in it.’75

  National products would rise from the ashes. National-product exhibitions like the one at Hangzhou’s West Lake attracted some 18 million visitors. Women were assigned a new civic role. Just like soldiers on the battlefield, they were fighting for national survival in the marketplace.76 In Egypt, shoppers were called on to be patriots and build ‘Egypt’s economic mosque’. Buying a national product meant that ‘what you spend from your private budget returns to the budget of the nation (your big family)’, as one advert put it in 1933.77

  National products united consumers and producers. But what exactly made a sock or a dress ‘national’? In China, the National Products movement made common cause with modern fashion and hygiene, urging ‘compatriots’ to use locally made Three Star toothpaste and add Three Star cologne to their bath. Fashion shows included Western-style suits and wedding dresses. In semi-colonial societies such as Egypt, national dress was a hybrid of Western and local modernity. If there was anything like a national dress, it was the tarboosh. The red felt cap was the centre piece of the Piastre Plan organized by students in the 1930s, which asked people to pledge a piastre – a hundredth of an Egyptian pound – to develop national textile industries. The tarboosh itself, however, was a modern creation and had been introduced by the military reforms of the 1820s, when Sultan Mahmud II banned turbans. A century later, middle-class men wore it with Oxford shoes and a two-piece suit. The drive for national industries promoted European-style socks, hosiery and silk stockings. Egyptian hosiery factories advertised themselves as successors to the pharaohs and showed young men posing in front of the Giza pyramids holding an Egyptian flag and a pair of socks. Artificial silk was rebranded as an Egyptian fibre. Territorial origin mattered more than national style. What was crucial was where a suit was made, not its particular cut.

  Initially, European- or Jewish-owned stores such as the Cicurel department store lent their support to national products. By the 1940s, it was the shops themselves that had to be ‘national’. Goods had to be sold by Muslim Egyptians, not just be produced by Egyptian hands from Egyptian materials. Egyptian ownership could even trump product origin. The al-Bayt al-Misri department store marketed itself as Egyptian even though its inventory included shoes and shirts made in Britain. During the Cairo Fire in January 1952, which erupted in protests against the killing of Egyptian policemen by British occupation troops and helped accelerate Nasser’s military takeover in July of that year, rioters burnt the Jewish Cicurel and Orosdi-Back department stores as well as British shops, hotels and bars.78

  In today’s age of ‘fair trade’, it is tempting to see organized consumers as benign agents of internationalism who reach out to poor producers in distant lands. Historically, though, their contribution to nationalism was at least as important. Consumer boycotts had an ethnic as well as an ethical side. National products promoted a more exclusive nationhood, repelling not just imperial intruders but also compatriots without the right ethnic or religious credentials. Nor were they always anti-imperial. Empires played the same game, urging metropolitan consumers to buy colonial coffee and fruit to strengthen the imperial race. Again, such campaigns were especially popular where imperial groups were denied the more direct weapon of a tariff, as in Britain in the 1920s. Here, during Empire shopping weeks, Christmas-cake competitions and stalls for tasting Kenyan coffee, British housewives were urged to use their shopping basket to help their kith and kin in the empire. Why buy sultanas that had been trampled on by ‘dirty’ Turks, if it was possible to have ‘clean’, sweet ones grown, dried and packaged by Christian cousins in Australia?79 Consumption was, indeed, a civic responsibility, but this could mean imperial or nationalist brotherhood as well as democratic citizenship.

  MAKING FRIENDS

  The Cold War was a second round in the ideological battle over affluence. The defeat of Nazism changed the rules of the game at two levels. One was geopolitical. The question of whether America or the Soviet Union offered a superior material civilization was now fought over by two rival blocs. As one bloc tried to outproduce and out-consume the other, the material race accelerated. The second was domestic. Europeans had to come to terms with the Iron Curtain, but also with high growth. After the war, one cake became two cakes within fourteen years. Nothing like this had been seen before. Was such turbo-growth sustainable? Europeans worried. Indeed, was it desirable? The Nazi downfall brought back to power many conservatives and liberals who had looked at mass consumption with disdain. Was Nazism not the inevitable result of a devilish materialism? The miracle years were a period of conflict and anxiety.

  The story was dramatic by any count. France gives a sense of just how rapidly consumer goods were spreading. In 1954, still only around 7–8 per cent of households had a fridge or a washing machine, 1 per cent a TV. By 1962, more than a third had a fridge and a washing machine, a quarter a TV. By 1975, it was 91 per cent, 72 per cent and 86 per cent, respectively. Eastern Europe was lagging behind, but only by a few years.80 In developed societies, consumption grew by around 5 per cent per year in the period 1952–79; slightly faster in Japan (8 per cent); more slowly in the United Kingdom (3 per cent).81 The figures for the USSR in the 1960s–’70s are comparable (c.6 per cent),82 although it started from a lower point. And there was more leisure time in which to spend rising incomes. In West Germany in the 1960s, wages doubled and free time rose by an hour to three hours forty minutes a day, with free Saturdays and a rise in paid holidays from fourteen to twenty days.83 On the other side of the Berlin Wall, in the socialist GDR, people had to work lo
nger but nonetheless they, too, gained an extra hour of leisure a day between 1974 and 1985.84 Travel, mobility and communication grew by leaps and bounds. The first charter flights for Spain and Corsica took off in the early 1950s. The same period saw the democratization of the car. In 1950, fewer than 5 per cent had an automobile in Western Europe. Thirty years later, most families did.85

  If anything, such statistics underplay the dynamism of these years. Aspiration often predated acquisition. The 1957 Italian movie Susanna tutta panna, a cheesy comedy of errors about what happens when lust for women and lust for cream cakes collides, opens with the shapely daughter (Marisa Allasio) of the local pastry baker climbing out of a foamy bathtub, when few Italians had either foam or hot water. Later, she follows a family of petty thieves to their hovel, where they have a fridge, an electric range and a TV, cleverly hidden away from spying neighbours.86 Even in the poorest pockets of Europe, such as Calabria, the young were busy watching movies like this one.87 In Germany, only 5 per cent of the poor had a fridge at the time, but it was at the top of everyone’s wish list.88 In the Soviet Union, as elsewhere, magazines encouraged a craving for fashion and style: which shirt would go best with what suit?89 Mascara ruled. There never seemed to be enough perfume or high heels.

  The transformation of everyday life was especially dramatic in rural communities. In a typical French town such as Douelle, on the River Lot, fifty of the 163 houses already had a radio at the end of the Second World War but only two or three had a fridge, a cooker and central heating, and none a washing machine; only ten had an indoor toilet. By 1975, virtually everyone had all of these.90 This, then, is the context of the changing language with which contemporaries came to discuss these developments. Consuming was no longer just one activity among others but defined an entire social system. It was a way of life: a ‘consumer society’, a ‘mass consumption society’, or a Freizeitgesellschaft, a leisure society.