Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  Superlatives come easily, especially for China. In 2009, it became the greatest polluter in the world, the biggest purchaser of cars, and had the largest proportion of home-owners.2 The global consequences of China’s rise have attracted widespread commentary. There has been a curious mismatch, however, between the attention paid to production and that to consumption, between a broad concern with sweated labour and ecological meltdown, on the one hand, and a much narrower focus on ‘consumerism’ that takes its cues from luxury malls and the members of the Shanghai Porsche club.

  History is not a crystal ball, but it can place the current transformation in a longer perspective and help us understand how and why Asian societies came to consume the way they did. Placing Japan, China and India alongside the unfolding of consumption we have traced in this book, we can immediately see one major difference: several successive stages have been compressed into one. The rise of the middle class, aculture of domestic comfort, urbanization, a boost in discretionary spending and increasing home ownership – these were processes that took four centuries in Europe and the United States. In the booming societies of Japan in the 1950s–’80s, and in China and India since, these transformations happened more or less in parallel.

  A second and no less crucial difference concerns the place of consumption in the sequence of historical change. When tea, china and cotton took off in the precocious Netherlands and Britain, these were already urban societies. The Industrial Revolution came after. In addition, in many parts of the West, consumer power drew on traditions of citizenship that invoked political rights, as we have repeatedly seen. Asia is a reminder that history does not like to proceed in a uniform series of steps. In China and Japan, the sequence was reversed. Both started industrialization as predominantly rural societies. They were modern before they were urban. The recent surge of consumption came as part of a great migration, as hundreds of millions set up homes in cities often built from scratch. This would have profound implications, not least for the role of the home. The stages of citizenship, similarly, were reversed. In the West, political rights came first and then expanded into social rights. The Far East skipped the first step. Citizenship meant duties, not rights. In exchange for protection and some social support, a citizen had a duty to support the state. This made for a political habitat fundamentally different from that in the liberal West, where citizen-consumers linked a demand for individual rights to one for social welfare. India took a democratic road, but here, too, the newly independent state asked citizens to be producers and subordinate their personal desires to the collective interest of an independent nation.

  As before, the pages to follow do not try to offer encyclopaedic country files, nor do they wish to paint a monochrome picture of East versus West. Rather, with the help of selective and thematic comparisons, they seek to outline principal developments and to identify differences as well as parallels. As the key changes did not happen simultaneously in the Asian countries, we sometimes need to view different time periods alongside each other, that is, to compare Japan in the 1950s–’80s with China in the 1990s–2000s.

  Three main questions arise. First, to what degree was the recent, material leap forward a break with the past? Second, is a fast-growing society like China veering towards an American ‘throwaway consumer lifestyle’, as one China expert has warned?3 Finally, there is politics. In Britain, France and the United States, the rise of consumption was tied up with the rise of civil society, citizenship and social democracy. What kind of political animal is consumption outside a liberal and republican habitat, in regimes characterized by strong states and weak individual rights?

  CRESCENDO

  For any story, the starting point shapes the moral. GDP growth of over 10 per cent a year in Japan (1955–73), in China (1979–2011) and close to it in India (8.7 per cent in 2003–8) has been so extraordinary that it is no surprise that most commentators take their respective starting points as the Japanese miracle, Deng Xiaoping’s opening of China and India’s liberal reforms in 1991. Clearly, the mass purchase of TVs, cars, AC units and much else was made possible by phenomenal growth, a rise in spending power and greater choice.4

  The issue is whether the recent drama appears as an equally sharp break once we take a longer view. In fact, it was Maoism in China and Nehru’s vision for India that were short, if deep, deviations from a longer path of commercial development. Mao turned merchants and shoppers back into peasants. At the birth of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, for example, Beijing was thriving, with a good 10,000 restaurants and fast-food snack stands. By 1979, a mere 656 were left. Shortages affected not only goods but the services necessary to maintain them. Shops, knife sharpeners and bicycle-repair men all but disappeared from the urban landscape.5 India, meanwhile, at the stroke of the midnight hour on 14 August 1947, made its tryst with destiny and turned its back on the world. To Nehru, independence demanded self-sufficiency, building factories and power stations, not shopping. Consumption carried the stain of empire. Once at the crossroads of global exchange, the Indian Ocean came almost to a standstill; India’s share of world trade fell from 2.4 per cent to 0.4 per cent between 1947 and 1990.6 Liberalization since needs to be seen as a return to an older, historical trajectory.

  Getting and spending, then, are not recent, alien imports from the ‘modern’ West into an austere and ‘traditional’ East. Visions of abundance had deep, indigenous roots. The Arthashastra, the ancient Indian ‘Wealth of Nations’ (c.300 BCE–150 AD), defined a wise king as one who ‘endears himself to his people by enriching them and doing good to them’.7 Dharma (spiritual well-being) and kama (pleasure), it said, depended on material well-being. There was nothing wrong with either abundance or pleasure as long as they did not spin out of control. In Chinese, ‘boy’ and ‘fish’ have the same sound as an ‘abundance of things’ and are symbols of good fortune. We have noted earlier how fashion and domestic comfort had already left their mark on late Ming China and colonial India. Around 1900, there was a step change with the arrival of branded goods and new technologies that promised a modern life. Some of these came straight from the West, such as German beer, Sheffield cutlery and Swedish matchsticks. Others were local creations, for example Double Pearl toothpaste in China or Kaiser Beer, a Japanese lager that tried to cash in on the popular preference for fermented German-style beer over flat English ale.

  Modern consumer culture had its greatest reception in Japan. Shops, restaurants and accessories such as combs and fans were already widespread in eighteenth-century Edo. Innovation gathered pace after Commodore Perry’s opening of Japan in 1854 set in motion a revolution in transport and communication. New styles began to circulate faster and wider. The Japanese state’s drive to modernize was accompanied by a push to reform lifestyle. Japan picked the best of the West: American baseball and German beer. The fascination with the German model of industrial power and military might in the 1890s and 1900s left its mark on Japanese tastebuds. Army officers, students and businessmen returned from Berlin with a thirst for lager. To be modern one had to drink as well as think like a German: a potent mix. In Kyoto, university professors campaigned for beer on tap. When the members of the ‘Berlin Beer Association’ gathered in Tokyo, they each reportedly downed three litres: impressive even by German standards.8

  Western goods and tastes, however, were rarely imported wholesale. They were adapted to fit indigenous fashions and habits. Modernity was made on the ground. The kimono, for example, had undergone its first modern customization in the eighteenth century with the addition of wide sashes (obi). By 1900, silk-cotton mixes added new fabrics, and light shawls and overcoats started to be worn on top. In the inter-war years, some women added fox-fur collars to their kimonos. Others converted their unused ones into Western-style clothing. Male clerks put on Western-style suits but naturalized them with pins and other accessories; once home, many swapped back into Japanese clothes. Western products such as soap and aspirin became household articles, as did curry-r
ice and other imported hybrid foods. By the 1920s, department stores, Western-style restaurants, beer halls and baseball parks were well established.

  We must not exaggerate the transformation. It was piecemeal and patchy, by class as well as region. ‘Modern lifestyle’ was more often talked about than acted out. In 1925, Kon Wajiro, an architecture professor, surveyed hundreds of women in the Ginza entertainment district and found that a mere handful wore Western dress. The ‘flapper’ was largely a figment of the imagination. In the rural north, most people had barely any possessions, let alone foreign ones; they even lacked a futon to sleep on. Nonetheless, between 1904 and 1939, personal consumption expenditure grew by 2–3 per cent a year, well short of the 8 per cent in the 1950s–’60s but perfectly respectable for its time. These percentage points translated into more meat on the table and a more varied, higher quality diet all-round. White rice, once an urban luxury, started to be a common necessity, served three times a day. There was more discretionary spending on alcohol, sweets, furniture and entertainment, in dance halls and in cinemas. The pocket watch ceased to be a collector’s item, imported from Switzerland, and became a popular accessory, mass-produced in Japan by Seikosha and the Osaka Watch Company. By the end of the 1930s, a radio played in a third of Japanese homes and the share of food in the household budget had fallen below the 50 per cent benchmark. These changes reached beyond the professional elite. In 1927, statisticians found that clerks and workers alike spent 7 per cent of their earnings on alcohol, tobacco and sweets, another 11 per cent on recreation and parties. Workers, as well as Kyoto professors, could afford to drink beer rather than sake.9

  Across Asia, change was most visible in big cities like Tokyo and Hong Kong, and on Shanghai’s Nanking Road. Neon lights and dance hostesses made Shanghai the Paris of the East. The icon of style and confidence was the ‘modern woman’, celebrated in novels, movies and on poster calendars (see Plate 48).10 Eileen Chang, the author of Love in a Fallen City (1944), spent the money from her first commission on lipstick.

  By the inter-war years, drops of this urban consumer culture were trickling through to provincial towns and the surrounding countryside. In the Punjab, in India, steel-plated cutlery from Solingen (Germany) carried greater prestige than local knives, a bar of Pears more than home-boiled desi soap.11 In Sichuan, China, itinerant traders peddled Japanese mirrors and Austrian enamelware. Farmers started to wear Western-style suits, leather shoes and hats.12 Olga Lang, who observed China on the eve of Mao’s revolution, felt that the countryside was undergoing momentous change. Rich peasants had ‘clocks and watches, wash with Western-style soaps, [and] dry themselves with Turkish towels’. Photographs and calendars of branded goods looked down from the walls. In the homes of landlords, ‘one can find foreign mirrors, razors and hair clippers and sometimes even battery radios.’13 Everyone wore galoshes. Often Western goods were turned to local use, such as the ubiquitous cans of Standard Oil that were converted into buckets, stoves and roofing material. In the vanguard were cosmetics, drugs and hygienic products. The face cream White Snow (Baixue) and Peacock toothpowder promised health and beauty to rural as well as urban consumers. In China, this cosmetic revolution was facilitated by the 1911 revolution, which did away with sumptuary laws forbidding make-up. The phenomenon, however, was a general one, reflecting the pull of a modern ideal of consumption that combined personal hygiene and self-fashioning with a promise of rational efficiency. Peasants, too, were entitled to a bar of soap and a touch of rouge. By the 1930s, the dream of capturing 400 Million Customers for Western merchandise in China was born.14

  Part of the confusion about what happened in the transition from traditional to modern consumer societies stems from a simple misunderstanding. Traditional consumers are presumed to be frugal, meeting their fixed, basic needs and saving a penny for a rainy day. Their modern successors, by contrast, are imagined to have unlimited wants and to compulsively spend their additional income and future earnings (via credit) on more and more stuff. In the words of one eminent sociologist, ‘only the modern consumer typically’ uses ‘surplus income to satisfy new wants . . . the traditional consumer being more inclined either to save or to translate his extra wealth into leisure’, that is, to work less.15 This is a neat contrast that can be traced back to the Enlightenment belief that material desires rouse people out of lazy self-sufficiency. It has led scholars to focus their attention on how people have been coaxed out of their modest world of frugality on to a hamster wheel of getting and spending (and debt). But we have already seen that it is not necessary to have surplus income to have expanding wants. In the late eighteenth century, ordinary Britons were pinched by declining wages yet bought more goods; they simply worked longer. The Asian experience in the twentieth century affords further insights into just how misleading this model is for understanding how people came to consume more.

  How ‘traditional’ were Asian consumers before the miracle years? A 1934 survey gives a fascinating snapshot of the everyday lives of Shanghai labourers.16 Their pay and material conditions were as different as day and night from those of more affluent workers in the United States. Labourers in Shanghai spent 53 per cent of their wages on food, compared to Americans’ 38 per cent. Many lived on the edge of hunger. And yet they devoted a quarter of their earnings to ‘miscellaneous’ items, the same as their American comrades, and far more than workers in London, Paris and Berlin. ‘Miscellaneous’ was a catch-all category to cover everything that was not food, housing and clothes. Amongst Shanghai labourers, the average family spent $112 a year on it. The biggest items were wine and cigarettes ($19) and gifts and presents ($10). Religious offerings ate up another $5, sanitary and beauty items $8, including hair-dressing and tooth-powder. A further $2.40 went on the theatre and gambling. It was the distribution of these expenses that struck social reformers in their fight against ‘superstitious practices’ as so irrational. Shanghai labourers starved themselves rather than cut back on weddings and funerals. Yet they were no longer ‘traditional’ either. Instead of working less or saving for a rainy day, additional earnings were spent on wine, cigarettes and entertainment. Together, the demands of the old and the temptations of the new pulled these labourers deeper and deeper into debt. None of them lived within their means. The average family paid $8 interest to pawnbrokers and credit sharks. In short, they lived a mixed life as customary and modern consumers.

  And customary and new spending habits could spiral upwards together. This seems to have been especially true in rural areas, where life was improving, as in the 1920s in the Punjab, India’s granary. In the course of his work as registrar of co-operative societies, Malcolm Darling, the Eton-educated son of an Anglican clergyman, met 10,000 Punjabi peasants. He recorded how village life was ‘stirring with a new spirit’. Everywhere life was getting better. Comforts were on the rise, and so were aspirations. In the canal colonies in Western Punjab, golden ornaments were taking the place of silver. ‘In the old days . . . even among the well-to-do, many women were glad enough to get their husbands’ cast-off shoes. Now some are not content till they can trip about in the zenana [the inner apartment of a Muslim home] in a pair of fancy slippers.’ Only a generation ago, people did not own a shirt. Now almost everyone wore ‘some machine-made cloth, and all boast shirt, waistcoat, chaddar and coat. In the old days men had to be content with two meals a day; now they have three. The thatched huts of their fathers . . . are replaced by clean, mud-plastered houses.’17 A wedding used to cost Rs50, Darling noted. Now it was not uncommon to spend Rs3,000 on the celebration and another Rs2,000 on jewels.

  Rather than seeing a sharp break between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ consumers, one cannot but be struck by the links between the two. Personal possessions and comforts surged alongside spending on communal festivities and rituals. The group driving the process was the Rajput, proud members of an old warrior tribe, who had suffered a decline in status. Conspicuous consumption was a way to reassert their izzat (social standing
). They made the most of the new cheap credit from America and the Far East; in central Punjab, the interest rate was 6–12 per cent, low by local standards. Whereas in Shanghai debt was a sign of poverty, in the Punjab it was a mark of rising aspirations. The Punjabi peasant did not start to consume more because he earned surplus income. Rather, the multiplication of wants was fuelled by easy credit and status competition. In the pursuit of better homes and bigger weddings, many peasants ended up pledging their land to creditors. The Punjabi peasant of the 1920s was closer to the over-indebted American of the 2000s than to any ‘traditional’ consumer.

  Japan pioneered a new model: save and spend. Looking back at the twentieth century, learning to save was probably as important for the global rise in consumption as learning to want more. It was vital for the Japanese miracle after 1955 and that of Korea and Singapore from the 1970s. Saving generated the investment necessary for industrial development.

  The foundations were laid in the decades before the Second World War. Japan had already established postal savings banks in 1875, copied from the British. In the inter-war years, savings promotion grew into an ambitious programme to reform people’s lifestyle, both in Japan and in its Korean colony. Stop wasting money on luxurious festivities, housewives were told, and instead keep an account book, plan ahead, prioritize expenses on domestic comforts and conveniences, and save for the future. At the same time, retailers and manufacturers introduced instalment plans to ease purchases. In the 1930s, these accounted for almost 10 per cent of all sales. Japan was developing into an ‘instalment plan nation’, in the words of one historian.18 But it was also turning into a super-saver. Consumption was fine, as long as it was ‘rational’, the result of personal discipline and financial foresight.