Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  The idea that rising consumption was born out of the growth model adopted after the Second World War, by contrast, takes too short a view. Zero-growth advocates continue to orbit in the mental universe of J. K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. The ‘affluent society’, as we have seen, was a brilliant thesis and constituted a major political intervention. But even at the time it was dubious history. Now, half a century later, its weaknesses are clear. The high-growth years of the postwar boom amplified and intensified consumption: they did not prompt a sudden take-off. Almost all the forces driving up consumption were in place by the time Western states embraced sustained growth in the 1950s: the rise in domestic comfort, fashion and novelty; shopping for pleasure; a taste for articles from faraway lands; rising levels of water and energy use; the cult of domestic possessions and hobbies; urban entertainment and pleasure; credit and debt; and the notion of the ‘material self’, which recognized that things are an inextricable part of what makes us human.

  In this book, we have followed the history of these strands and how they came to be woven together. To attribute the rise in consumption to postwar growth or to neo-liberalism is both historically wrong and politically wrong-headed. The yearning for more goods and services was not the child of standardized mass production. Demand for fashionable cotton, comfortable bedding or an exotic cup of tea or cocoa, for example, were rising before the Industrial Revolution gathered steam in the late eighteenth century. Compared to the booming West in the 1950s and 1960s, early modern Europe and late Ming China were low-growth societies, but this does not mean their material appetites were stagnant. Commerce and culture fed their expansion, thanks to new tastes and habits as well as lower prices. How zero-growth today would automatically curb such expansion is difficult to see in the light of this longer history.

  Slow or no growth also tends to lead to unpleasant distributional conflicts. It is unlikely that any resulting reductions in the use of material resources would be distributed fairly, either within nations or across the globe. Why would powerful elites in the rich West give up their fair share of goods and services? And why would groups on low incomes embrace zero growth as likely to increase their share of a diminishing cake? For poor and developing countries, similarly, such a paradigm shift in the West would hardly be attractive: how would the standard of living of the global South rise without demand for their goods from the affluent North? The Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz and other economists have repeatedly warned how rising inequality since the 1970s has come at a high price: it represses growth.3 Conversely, low growth threatens to cement inequality, both within the West and between the affluent West and the less fortunate rest. It also makes it more difficult to turn dirty growth into green growth. Countries that are stagnant or growing slowly resemble vehicles that are standing still: they are much harder to move and steer in a new direction than those on the move.

  This book, then, offers a dose of historical realism. Whether we like it or not, we need to face up to the considerable power and resilience that consumer culture has demonstrated over the last half-millennium. In addition to stressing the long duration of this process, the preceding chapters have revealed several characteristics that have tended to be ignored or misunderstood.

  Many commentators speak of ‘consumer society’ in the singular, a tendency that harks back to the early twentieth century, when the concept was associated with the United States and the American way of life, with its then unrivalled level of material comfort and consumer spending. In reality, consumer societies have taken on a variety of guises and arrived via different pathways. What sets them apart is how high levels of consumption have been created, funded and distributed, not their material metabolism as such. Germany, Japan and Finland, for example, took the road of saving (instead of credit) to develop into high-consumption societies. The United States continues to rely disproportionately on private consumer spending. Scandinavia and France, by contrast, afford a different model, where the state makes up for lower private consumer spending with pensions, benefits and other kinds of public support.

  The label ‘consumer society’ also disguises considerable variation within countries. If a country has a huge credit-card bill, it does not automatically follow that its inhabitants are excessive and wasteful all round. Rising consumption is not some sort of virus that transforms the entire social body equally. Germans save and use credit cards with extreme caution, for example, but it does not mean they do not also produce a lot of waste; they throw away as much as Americans. Similarly, variations apply to social groups. Highly educated professional elites pursue multiple, highly active and resource-intensive leisure activities that set them apart from their less privileged neighbours, with their more settled pastimes.

  As a way of life and as an ideal, consumption has shown remarkable adaptability over time. It has been difficult to see this because of the fixation with the United States, and the associated belief that consumption was a testimony to the superiority of Anglo-Saxon markets and liberal democracy. The decline of the American empire and the resurgence of China since the 1980s have shaken up this seemingly self-evident truth. Chinese state capitalism is only the latest in a global series of political systems that have embraced consumption. Markets certainly expanded the scope for new tastes and products in the past but, as we have repeatedly seen, they were rarely acting in a political vacuum. Empires, totalitarian states and social movements spread material norms and expectations of the good life, in addition to interfering with supply and demand. By one route or another, all modern regimes ended up promising their subjects more goods. This included socialist as well as fascist societies. Of course, the track record of delivering the goods differed. What is remarkable, though, from a world-historical perspective, is how the vision of high and rising levels of consumption managed to install itself as the undisputed cultural ideal. Ideals of frugal self-reliance have been no match, or have been limited to short-lived and self-destructive experiments like that of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, between 1975 and 1979.

  What accounts for this extraordinary fitness to adapt and spread? Older radicals and Marxists pointed the finger at corporations and advertisers for manipulating people’s desires. Liberals defended markets for giving people what they wanted. Neither of these views offers a particularly satisfactory account of change over time in a variety of settings. In addition to markets (and advertisers), two institutions deserve greater attention: states and consumer movements. Both were especially crucial for mass consumption in the twentieth century. Consumer movements gave consumption political legitimacy. They established consumers as citizens with rights and duties, widening the scope of politics and public life, especially for women, who did not have a formal vote in most countries in the early twentieth century. We can debate how successful consumer movements have been, but the point here is to stress how consumption successfully entrenched itself in political life, continuing to this day with fair trade, boycotts and other ethical initiatives.

  Private consumption, however, would be in a much weaker position had it not received help from the public hand. This has ranged from subsidized mortgages in the United States to public housing in Europe, Canada and Singapore. Some of the assistance has been indirect and came in the shape of transport infrastructures and water and energy networks, which laid the basis for greater private material use, in the home and on the road. Other sources were more direct, such as public pensions, social transfers and benefits and cash allowances. Where these are ‘progressive’ and distribute money from the richest to the poorest – as they continue to do in Scandinavia, Britain and Australia – they boost mass consumption. But even where they are not – as in the case of public pensions in Greece and Italy – they still increase the propensity to consume by reducing the need to save for a rainy day. Today, the comparatively high saving and low consumption rate in China, where the communist state has drastically scaled back earlier welfare services, indicates how crucial the welfare state was for m
ass consumption in the West after the Second World War. To recognize this is also to question the old tale of inequality as a stimulus to competitive spending. Greater equality, not inequality, propelled mass consumption after the war. Today, inequality is a brake on growth in the West and East, and so, too, on consumption. The historical record suggests that there is no reason why we should assume that greater equality would suddenly temper people’s material appetite for more things.

  We have stressed the contribution of states, ideologies and social movements. This does not mean that consumers have been passive bystanders, merely that these institutions shaped the context in which they lived their lives. In the last analysis, consumption is so strong because it affects so much of our lives, from eating and drinking to fashioning who we are, from our hobbies and most precious possessions to social norms of comfort and pleasure. It is, ultimately, how people use goods (such as the radio in the interwar years, or mobile phones since the 1990s) that makes consumer culture what it is. Critics tend to single out shopping binges and frivolous luxury as a distraction from the good life, but a focus on such extremes misses those situations where things have given people a new identity, a better quality of life and, indeed, a sense of liberation. The rise of teenage culture is well known. This book has also highlighted the elderly generation as a major beneficiary of greater consumption in the last half-century. Just because some objects or leisure pursuits may strike some people as shallow does not mean that a lot of consumption is not deeply meaningful to those doing it, and often for good reasons. To have any chance of success, proposals that hope to create more sustainable lifestyles need to appreciate the personal and social meaning people take from their things.

  The greater historical realism advocated by this book has implications for how we assess our current situation and evaluate the prospect of moving in a materially lighter and healthier direction. Some of it calls for scepticism, even pessimism, but, as we shall see, a better sense of the past also leaves us with a glimmer of hope for the future.

  According to a number of recent commentators, we are already living in the twilight years of the empire of things. They announce the coming of ‘dematerialization’ and ‘post-consumerism’, marked by a growing interest in experiences, emotions and services, a revival of repairing, and the spread of leasing initiatives and sharing networks enabled by the internet.4 By 2015, almost a thousand repair cafés had sprung up in the richest corners of consumer societies in Western Europe and North America. In the ten years since its birth in 2003, the non-profit Freecycle network, which recycles stuff for free to keep it out of the rubbish bin, has grown into a global movement with over 7 million members. People lend their sofa to travellers (couchsurfing), turn food waste into meals for strangers and hire evening dresses for a party rather than buying new. We should certainly support this growing trend: as consumers, we can (and should) make much better use of our existing possessions and extend their lives. Governments, too, could do more, for example by exempting repair services from VAT: in some countries this measure is already in place to help cobblers and bicyclerepair shops.5 The question is whether such initiatives are part of a larger trend and will become widespread enough to tackle the scale of the empire of things and its material legacy.

  The main evidence marshalled in support of dematerialization is the growing significance of services in the world economy. In value-added terms, services contributed 30 per cent to world trade in 1980. By 2008, this had risen to 40 per cent, while the share of goods was falling.6 What we are seeing here, however, is a relative shift in value, not an absolute fall in the volume of goods. All that has happened is that services have grown slightly faster than goods. Goods have expanded, nonetheless – indeed, in gross terms, they still make up 80 per cent of world exports in 2008 (83 per cent in 2000). The latest available figures for merchandise trade offer little evidence of dematerialization. In the fifteen years between 1998 and 2013, world merchandise trade (which does not include services) doubled, in spite of the significant dip of the 2009 recession. A good chunk of that growth was made up of oil, gas and iron, coal and grain. But even just looking at other dry cargoes, the increased material flow on the oceans is astounding: it grew from 717 million tons in international seaborne trade in 1970 to 3,784 million tons in 2013. By that year, four times as many containers travelled back and forth between Europe and Asia as in 1995.7

  These are traded materials, but the picture does not get much rosier if we turn to material consumption. In the OECD – the club of the thirty-four richest societies – domestic material consumption grew by a third between 1980 and 2007. The world’s material appetite was, predictably, depressed by the 2009 recession, but already by 2012 it was once again bigger than in 2008. True, in Europe, domestic material consumption has fallen since the 1980s, but this is partly because a lot of production is now outsourced and the heavy materials (such as coal and pig iron) used in the manufacture of cars and gadgets for Europeans have disappeared from their national statistics. We may have seen a relative decoupling of material use from growth – that is, fewer materials are now needed to create the same amount of value as thirty years ago. Still, in the OECD as a whole, there has been no absolute fall in material appetite. The outlook gets more worrying when we quantify all the resources that are being used in the process of creating our material world – from oil, coal and aluminium all the way to the cement needed to build not only apartments but the shops and service centres of our allegedly ‘dematerialized’ lifestyles. In 2010, the latest available data, total material consumption in the OECD was 45 gigatonnes, the equivalent of 100kg per person per day.8 That is a lot of stuff.

  The immediate challenge is not a scarcity of materials as such, but the pollution, conflict and environmental damage that currently goes hand in hand with their mining, production, transportation and disposal. Aluminium, for example, is the third most abundant element in the crust of the earth (after oxygen and silicon). It is, perhaps, the element par excellence of our current consumer lifestyle, finding its way into everything from packaging, refrigerators and soft-drinks cans to car wheels, mobile phones and snowboard bindings. But its mining is often dirty, spilling out ‘red mud’ with polluting alkaline. Smelting and casting produces greenhouse gases. Aluminium production is responsible for 1 per cent of all man-made greenhouse-gas emissions – the growing demand for so-called rare-earth elements (used in computer hard drives, loudspeakers and hybrid cars) carries the additional risk of radioactive waste. Since 1960, global aluminium production has increased eightfold. This is not a simple story of mindless waste. The truth is more inconvenient. As industrial countries have developed and got richer, they have built up stocks of aluminium and other metals. It is estimated that three quarters of all aluminium mined in the course of the twentieth century is still in use today – a quarter of this sits in our electrical appliances. Even in high-income countries, though, aluminium production has not fallen but merely levelled off. Consequently, the OECD predicts that, without major efficiency measures in production and a switch to renewable energy, ‘absolute global emissions from aluminium production are expected to continue to rise.’9

  Not every consumer society has the same material metabolism – some are more efficient than others, some are endowed with more natural resources and churn through them more hungrily than others. Averages, therefore, need to be used with caution. What do these very large figures mean for the number of products and appliances people in rich societies consume in their daily lives? Let us look briefly at one country which has a track record both as an environmental pioneer and as a model of welfare and equality, until the social democrats lost power in 2006: Sweden. For many Anglo-Saxon commentators, the country was the healthy Nordic alternative to Anglo-American ‘consumerism’. Thanks to the government’s Waste Minimization Programmes for 2014 and 2020, we know in detail how many goods and products Swedes have been consuming. On the bright side, Stockholm did manage to lower its consumption of fossil fu
els by 25 per cent between 1996 and 2012 – although there was no reduction in Sweden as a whole. In all other respects, however, the appetite for more has been unabated. In the 1990s, the average Stockholm resident bought 6kg of clothing each year. By 2007, it was 12kg, in 2011 over 19kg. The number of skin products and perfumes purchased has multiplied fourfold in the last twenty years. Meat consumption has risen by a quarter. In 1995, the 750,000 burghers of Stockholm bought around 1,000 large and a 1,000 small household appliances. Twelve years later, it was 2,200 and 5,000 respectively. The best that can be said is that the demand for appliances reached a plateau in 2007 and has levelled off since. The number of electronic devices, by contrast, has continued its steep ascent and tripled between 1995 and 2014.10 If there is a trend from stuff to fluff, it has not reached Sweden.

  It is a mistake to assume that services and the internet are ethereal. Leisure and communication require equipment, infrastructure and energy. In France, for example, information and communications technology (ICT) accounts for 15 per cent of the service sector’s electricity consumption. In 2007, the French travelled 52 billion kilometres to do their shopping, 42 billion to pursue their hobbies and another 12 billion to eat and drink in cafés and restaurants – those staffing the service sector added another 90 billion travelling to work.11 That is a lot of tarmac, vehicles and fuel for supposedly ‘light’ services.