Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  There has been a tendency to see consumption as an all-powerful solvent of community, so it is worth stressing how at times it has functioned as a cement. The Xhosa who migrated to the city of East London in South Africa in the 1950s reproduced the rural division of ‘Red’ and ‘School’ factions. The more traditional Red (amaqaba), who smeared their bodies with red ochre, looked upon consumer culture with suspicion. Credit and spending money on leisure were frowned upon; ‘calves in the postal savings account did not die,’ went one of their sayings. Reds lived in communal quarters, cooked together and, after work, joined in tribal iseti drinking groups and shared memories of the homeland. The School Xhosa, by contrast, arrived Christian and literate and embraced consumer culture with open arms. Most joined sports clubs. Dance halls thrived. Some jived and played rugby, others preferred ballroom dancing, bars and the cinema. Going to the cinema, Reds said, had made School Xhosa thieves. When possible, School Xhosa moved into their own private quarters, bought consumer goods and decorated their homes with Western-style furniture and ornaments. A consumer lifestyle was a way to preserve their distance from the Reds and at the same time impose their own gradations on what had been a virtually classless rural society. In the end, it was not consumer culture that weakened tribal culture but urban planning and forced removal, which scattered Red Xhosa across new satellite towns.32

  AMERICANIZATION?

  The Americanization thesis can be thought of as a geographic extension of the idea that consumer culture flattens distinctions. The standardizing force attributed to America is not surprising. The age of affluence coincided with America’s triumph as the new great power after 1945. Supermarkets, American marketing and Hollywood dream couples – all these were easily viewed by sceptical Europeans as vanguards of an imperialist monoculture. The decline of America as a superpower affords an opportune moment to look back and ask to what degree lifestyles really have converged. To do this we need to consider practices as well as products: that is, what people did as well as what they bought.

  The supermarket epitomized what the US historian Victoria de Grazia has called America’s ‘irresistible empire’. It promised choice, convenience and cheapness. With its neon-lit aisles, freezers and pre-packaged foods in cheerful, air-conditioned surroundings, the supermarket was an icon of a futuristic modernity. Its origins, however, lay in the dark days of the Depression in the 1930s. Bigger shop floors and self-service increased volume while cutting overheads. Discounts attracted priceconscious shoppers. By 1939, one quarter of every dollar spent on food in the United States was spent in a supermarket. Twenty years later, it was 64 cents. By then, self-service had blossomed into a form of self-fulfilment. Pastel interiors, soothing background music and colourful packaging were introduced to make shoppers try something new and treat the trip to the supermarket as a journey of self-discovery.33

  In Europe, Americans picked Italy and Belgium as the first bridgeheads. With the help of a low-interest government loan, Nelson Rockefeller’s corporation (IBEC) opened its first Supermarkets Italiani store in Milan in 1959. It was no commercial D-day, however. American retail technologies were not easily transplanted – the imported shopping carts, one director noted, had been designed for Americans loading up Cadillacs, while most Italians could not yet afford a Fiat 500.34 Frozen food made little sense without a fridge. Across Europe, there was a mix of obstacles, from restrictive planning laws, small buildings and limited opening hours to the political clout of shopkeepers and co-operatives. Advance was slow and uneven. By 1971, when Britain had over 3,500 supermarkets, there were only six hundred in all of Italy, and those were mainly in the north. A decade later, Italians still bought only 3 per cent of their food in supermarkets; in France, it was 14 per cent. Expansion was much more rapid in Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, where, by the early 1990s, around 60 per cent of the grocery market was controlled by big supermarket chains.

  The real wave of concentration came in the 1980s and ’90s and was the result of domestic forces rather than American invasion. For example, until 1966, Denmark prohibited chains from opening more than one outlet in any municipality unless they also had a manufacturing side (like the co-ops). Opening hours were extended to 8 p.m. only in 1994. When discount superstores took off, the Danish co-operatives made the most of it. In France, the 1973 Royer Law put shopkeepers on local zoning committees to slow the progress of supermarkets. Consequently, French chains looked abroad and opened stores in Spain and Latin America; half of Carrefour’s earnings come from foreign operations.35

  Nor did commercial exchange flow in only one direction, from America outward. Innovations travelled back and forth, and circulated. Along with urban megastores, the giant Swiss co-op Migros pioneered small self-service stores and travelling vans, which would be copied in Turkey and Brazil. It was Migros which first added electronic check-out to self-service, catching the interest of American retailers. On the ground, American models had to be modified to fit local space and habits. The result were local–American hybrids. Swiss supermarkets, for example, put quality ahead of choice. Instead of stocking 4,000 articles, as American stores did, they carried a selected assortment of brands. Standardization was kept in check by attention to local tastes and products. Book corners provided an aura of cultural respectability.36 South of the Alps, Italian supermarkets found that it was easier to exploit existing habits than import foreign ones. Daily lotteries, gift promotions and the display of fresh, unpackaged food targeted Italians used to shopping daily rather than weekly. Unlike American stores, Swiss and Italian supermarkets had to set up their own supply chains from scratch, and ended up producing many of their products or importing them directly.37

  Phobias of Americanization were inspired by older fears of what rationalization did to work, community and freedom. Small stores and artisan’s workshops stood for a vibrant community; large self-service stores for soulless anonymity. In the 1962 Italian novel La vita agra (Bitter Life), the supermarket appears as a dehumanizing evil born of the boom. Disguised as ordinary shoppers, employees mingle among hypnotized women, encouraging them to fill their trolleys. Everyone buys the same thing. No one speaks a word. The meat counter resembles an assembly plant, where women mechanically seal slices of meat and cold cuts in cellophane. At the check-out, cashier girls sit like automatons, ‘identical blue caps with the name of the shop on their heads, looking at the figures with dilated pupils, never blinking . . . their complexion fading, their necks ever more wrinkled like so many little tortoises’.38

  The experience of ordinary shoppers was rather different. After some instruction about how to use wire baskets and shopping carts, most people took to the supermarket, even finding it liberating. The warm, friendly glow of the small shop had often been more ideal than real. Encounters in the local shop involved class, dependence and, sometimes, humiliation. Working-class housewives left the butcher with a thicker cut of meat than they had asked for or could afford rather than lose face in front of the neighbours. Gossip was rife: why did the single young woman from next door suddenly buy twice her usual? In addition to convenience and longer hours, the supermarket had a democratic air, especially attractive to working women, singles and minority ethnic groups. Men, too, found supermarkets easier to navigate, and novelty products gave them a feeling of competence; in the 1960s, a third of the clientele was male. Supermarkets presented themselves as pillars of democracy: ‘Choice is the same for everyone,’ to use the slogan of the Italian Esselunga. It was the better-off who initially turned up their noses. After all, superior status was demonstrated through the personal attention they were given. In Britain, the wife of a judge swore violently at Alan Sainsbury at the opening of one of his first self-service stores when she found out that she was expected to be her own shop assistant. Self-service disrupted the age-old balance of power between customer and retailer.

  It would be wrong, however, to conclude that the supermarket sparked a revolutionary switch from intimate human encounters to anonymous
mountains of merchandise. Even where self-service spread fastest, as in Britain, most people kept up parallel shopping, buying some items in supermarkets, others in small shops. After years of decline, France still had some 600,000 small shops in the 1980s, not counting bakeries. The number of corner kiosks has gone up in Finland, not down. Other than for food, small retailing remains big business in most European countries. Not all chain shops, moreover, were necessarily soulless. Early supermarkets realized that they needed to overcome a sense of cold anonymity and, in response, introduced personal greeters and over-the-counter service. Oral histories of dozens of British shoppers about their first experiences with self-service suggest that customers often remained on familiar terms with shop assistants, at least in smaller supermarkets and smaller communities. One woman recalled: ‘You still know the people, so there’s still a bit of chatter . . . because you know them, the same as you did in the counter-service ones.’ 39 In big urban supermarkets, that was more difficult. Still, this does not automatically make these stores places of lonely individuals. To this day, shoppers sometimes take their chatting and community with them into the store. In supermarkets in China today, in-store announcements are drowned out by the conversational noise of couples shopping together. In Taipei, Seoul and Hong Kong, teenagers have turned McDonald’s into youth centres, even holding reading clubs there.40

  What is remarkable is not that the United States has spread its wares but how uneven its influence has been. The dominance of Hollywood is matched by the resilience of local music cultures in many parts of the world – not unimportant, given that listening to music is the most popular form of cultural consumption. Scale matters. It costs far less to produce a record than a movie. Anglophone music came to rule in the Netherlands and Germany, but national styles, artists and record sales remain significant in France, Greece, Norway and Italy. Across Europe, American jazz and, later, rock’n’roll sparked innovation and diversification. In the 1950s, the Italian singer Domenico Modugno (‘Volare’) blended influences from Southern Puglia and Sicily with crooning and swing (see Plate 45). In 1959 France, Georges Brassens (‘La Mauvaise Réputation ’) was more popular with the young than Paul Anka, the Canadian crooner who dominated the American charts with ‘Diana’ and other hits at the time.

  Post-war reconstruction also involved cultural reconstruction. Regional music and folklore gained their own dedicated TV and radio programmes. Hamburg got its Haifischbar; Naples its Neapolitan song parade. Superimposed were national music festivals such as the Festival di Sanremo, launched in 1951 and inspiring joy and bemusement ever since. These were vital vehicles for new national cultures, especially in societies sharply divided by region. The Eurovision Song Contest built on this model. Sanremo illustrates the kind of exchanges lost in an exclusive focus on Americanization. The festival did have American guest stars, for example Louis Armstrong in 1968, but in the same year the winning entry was a joint Italian–Brazilian hit, ‘Canzone per te’ by Sergio Endrigo and Roberto Carlos, which turned the standard romantic formula on its head: ‘the loneliness that you have given me, I cultivate like a flower.’ 41 The military coup in Brazil in 1964 led to an exodus of Brazilian artists. Gilberto Gil moved to London, Chico Buarque to Rome. Lucio Dalla’s ‘4/3/1943’ owed its Portuguese touch to the latter, who later turned it into a Brazilian hit (‘Minha História’) which was also successful in Japan. These years saw the birth of the cantautore, a new breed of singer-songwriter (Tenco, Giorgio Gaber, Fabrizio de André, Gino Paoli) who owed as much to the French chansonniers Georges Brassens and Charles Aznavour as to Bob Dylan and Nat King Cole.

  Latin American influences have extended as far as the Arctic Circle, where, inspired by travelling musicians, Finns developed their own type of tango, performed in a minor key, blending Argentinian rhythm with a folkloristic nostalgia for nature and the homestead (see Plate 46). With its own stars, festivals and competitions for Tango King and Queen, it has become as central to Finnish culture as the sauna. In the 1960s, the rivalry between pop and tango was cast as a battle for the Finnish soul, and for the survival of a rustic lifestyle in what was becoming an increasingly urban society – the proportion of Finns living in urban areas almost doubled, from 32 per cent to 60 per cent between 1950 and 1980. In the vanguard of pop music were the English Beatles and the Rolling Stones; American influences were more marginal, and it was not until April 1966 that an American singer had a Top 5 hit – Nancy Sinatra with ‘These Boots are Made for Walkin’’. Defenders of Finnish tango worried about the moral decay and gender confusion created by long-haired musicians and their fans. Tango lyrics reinforced an image of the city as a cold and lonely place. Pop musicians, in turn, ridiculed tango as backward, loved by peasants cut off from modernity. ‘I say, brave is the band,’ one musician wrote in 1967, ‘that dares to travel north of Jyväskylä [in central Finland] without tango covering 90 per cent of their repertoire . . . in Ostrobothnia a band was threatened with a knife because it didn’t play enough tango.’ 42 Things have relaxed a little since, and tango has also found admirers in Helsinki and Turku in the urban south. More generally, the fusion of hybrid styles has continued in recent genres, for example post-punk Suomi-reggae, with the inimitable hit: ‘Hän haluaa huussin’ (‘He Wants a Dry Toilet’).43

  The resilience and vitality of national and regional music styles has in some cases been nurtured by cultural protection. France is a pronounced example. In 1986, it passed a law (Loi Léotard), which has since required 40 per cent of all radio time to be devoted to French songs and regional languages. French musicians singing in English or another foreign language did not benefit. Public TV stations had to spend at least 2.5 per cent of their turnover on producing French films. On television, 40 per cent of all films had to be French. Up to the present, France has refused to bow to American pressure and let free-trade agreements extend to its national treasures of music and film.44

  It might be contended that even if people in the developed world cherished different music, food, and so on, affluence has nonetheless spawned an identical lifestyle in the way we consume. This is a tricky question, because research on Americanization and globalization has looked mainly at goods, not what people did with them. Still, some insights can be gleaned from time-use data that countries started keeping in the 1960s. One research team has recoded national data to allow a comparison of eating and reading patterns in the United States, France, Britain, the Netherlands and Norway. Between 1970 and 2000, eating out went up everywhere, but at significantly different rates. By the end of this period, Britons and Americans spent an average of twenty-five and thirty minutes a day eating out. Norwegians, by contrast, rarely went to restaurants or diners (fourteen minutes a day). The French were eating out more – and continue to do so – but they were also spending a good hour and a half each day eating at home, whereas the American figure for eating at home had plummeted to under forty minutes. Affluence, then, has not led to a convergence of daily habits and rhythms. French, Swiss and Italians sit down to a meal together and take their time. Americans snack, often alone, while doing other things.45

  These are, of course, averages, and we must ask next how practices are distributed across the population. Are people devoting their leisure time to TV, sport, reading, and so forth in an increasingly similar pattern? On the eve of affluence, habits were highly uneven. In 1946, for example, two thirds of Britons were routine movie-goers, but one third never went to the cinema at all. Americanization, if it had been pervasive, should have created an increasingly shared monoculture as standards of living rose. Research on reading has painted a more complicated picture. In Norway and the Netherlands, reading books and magazines remains a leisure activity shared by most. In the United States, on the other hand, reading has become a minority pastime, but those who do read (‘participants’), read more and more – eighty-seven minutes a day in 1998 (compared to forty-seven minutes devoted to reading by the Norwegians and British).46 It is debatable whether the internet and oth
er new media is killing reading as a pastime. Magazine-reading has declined, but books are more popular than ever. In the Netherlands and Britain, heavy internet users tend to be more (not less) active readers.47

  This snapshot of reading habits prompts an interesting hypothesis. It may be that people’s leisure patterns are converging in continental Europe, whereas in the United States (and to a lesser extent in Britain) they are diverging. In other words, affluence has made Americans specializers, Europeans generalizers. In America, you either read a lot or you do not read at all; you either do a lot of sport or none at all. In the Netherlands and Norway, by contrast, most people do a bit of both. Consumption is more shared. If Americanization has a particular dynamic, then, it might be internal diversification, not conformity. Everyone lives on their own lifestyle island. One possible reason for the contrast might be that affluence in continental Europe has been conditioned by social democracy, where inequality is less sharp, education more homogeneous and the state has an established role in cultural provision. Britain, tellingly, lies mid-Atlantic, between these two consumption zones. Whether homogeneity is preferable to differentiation is another question.

  8

  Asia Consumes

  Up to this point, the story of consumption has been about more. In contemporary Asia, more became most. The boom that began in Japan in 1955 was the first of a series of waves that lifted up Taiwan and South Korea in the 1970s, China since 1979 and, most recently, India. Between 1990 and 2002, according to the World Bank, 1.2 billion people have moved of poverty; almost 1 billion of them were Asians. Since 2012, growth has slowed. Still, never before in the history of the world did so many people join the ranks of shoppers in such short time. In Western Europe during the post-war miracle, it took ten to fifteen years until half the households had a TV, twenty to twenty-five years until a fridge crossed their doorstep. South Korea managed this in a single decade in the 1970s; China in the 1980s in even less. Washing machines, stereos and VCRs – goods that in the West had arrived one after another over several decades – entered Chinese homes virtually simultaneously, among poor and rich alike.1