Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  31. Linda Chao & Ramon H. Myers, ‘China’s Consumer Revolution: The 1990s and Beyond’, in: Journal of Contemporary China 7, no. 18, 1998: 351–68, 354, table one. For the shift to state-led growth, see Yasheng Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State (Cambridge, 2008).

  32. China Statistical Yearbook 2009, http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/ndsj/2009/indexeh.htm.

  33. Hsiao-Tung Fei, Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley (London, 1939), 119.

  34. Lang, Chinese Family and Society, 239–44, 279–80, quoted at 338.

  35. Yunxiang Yan, Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949–99 (Stanford, CA, 2003); and Yunxiang Yan, The Individualization of Chinese Society (Oxford, 2009). See also: Anita Chan, Richard Madsen & Jonathan Unger, eds., Chen Village: The Recent History of a Peasant Community in Mao’s China (Berkeley, CA, 1983), 219, 252–4; and Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz & Mark Selden, Revolution, Resistance and Reform in Village China (New Haven, CT, 2005), 227–32.

  36. See 61, 179 above.

  37. In 2006, Rajkot and Indore, for example, had only 45 minutes of water a day; National Institute of Urban Affairs, Report on Water Services (2006).

  38. See the case studies in Rama Bijapurkar, We are Like That Only: Understanding the Logic of Consumer India (New Delhi, 2007).

  39. Jos Gamble, ‘The Rhetoric of the Consumer and Customer Control in China’, in: Work, Employment and Society 2, no. 1, 2007: 7–25. For Carrefour’s stores in 2013, see http://www.carrefour.com/sites/default/files/PARCGB 31122013.pdf.

  40. Souichirou Kozuka & Luke R. Nottage, ‘The Myth of the Cautious Consumer: Law, Culture, Economics and Politics in the Rise and Partial Fall of Unsecured Lending in Japan’, in: Consumer Credit, Debt and Bankruptcy: National and International Dimensions, eds. J. Niemi-Kiesilainen, I. Ramsay & W. Whitford, (Oxford, 2009); and Horioka, ‘Are the Japanese Unique?’, in: Garon & Maclachlan, eds., Ambivalent Consumer.

  41. Jeff Kingston, Japan’s Quiet Transformation (New York, 2004).

  42. In converted US dollars; World Bank, 2005 ICP Global Results (Washington, 2005), table 5.

  43. Marcos D. Chamon & Eswar S. Prasad, ‘Why are Saving Rates of Urban Households in China Rising?’ in: American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, (2010) 2(1): 93–130; and Elizabeth Croll, China’s New Consumers (London, 2006), 85. For the tiny share of public spending on education and health by international comparison, see OECD, Challenges for China’s Public Spending: Toward Greater Effectiveness and Equity (Paris, 2006), ch. 2.

  44. Unofficial estimates raise it to 41%; see The Economist, 26 May 2012, 15–17.

  45. Xiaohong Zhou, ‘Chinese Middle Class: Reality or Illusion?’, in: Christophe Jaffrelot & Peter Van der Veer, eds., Patterns of Middle-class Consumption in India and China (Los Angeles, 2008), ch. 5; P. K. Varma, The Great Indian Middle Class (Delhi, 1998); McKinsey Global Institute, ‘The “Bird of Gold”: The Rise of India’s Consumer Market’ (San Francisco, 2007); NCAER, The Great Indian Market (New Delhi, 2005); Ernest Young, ‘Great Indian Middle Class’; David S. G. Goodman, ed., The New Rich in China: Future Rulers, Present Lives (New York, 2008); and Cheng Li, China’s Emerging Middle Class: Beyond Economic Transformation (Washington, DC, 2010). See also 434–9 below on luxury.

  46. Jun Wang & Stephen Siu Yu Lau, ‘Gentrification and Shanghai’s New Middle Class: Another Reflection on the Cultural Consumption Thesis’, Cities 26, no. 2, 2009: 57–66; and Xin Wang, ‘Divergent Identities, Convergent Interests’, in: Journal of Contemporary China 17, no. 54, 2008.

  47. Deborah Davis & Wang Feng, Creating Wealth and Poverty in Post-socialist China (Stanford, 2008). For the proximity of the new middle class to the Party, see Li Jian & Niu Xiaohan, ‘The New Middle Class in Peking: A Case Study’, in: China Perspectives, Jan.–Feb. 2003.

  48. Hindu woman quoted in R. Ganguly-Scrase & T. J. Scrase, Globalization and the Middle Classes in India: The Social and Cultural Impact of Neo-liberal Reforms (London, 2009), 98, no age given.

  49. Steven Kemper, Buying and Believing: Sri Lankan Advertising and Consumers in a Transnational World (Chicago, 2001), 200–5.

  50. S. L. Rao & I. Natarajan, Indian Market Demographics: The Consumer Classes (Delhi, 1996), 162.

  51. Bill Adams, ‘Macroeconomic Implications of China Urban Housing Privatization, 1998–1999’, Journal of Contemporary China 18, no. 62, 2009: 881–8.

  52. Quoted in Junhua Lü, Peter G. Rowe & Jie Zhang, eds., Modern Urban Housing in China, 1840–2000 (Munich, 2001), 241.

  53. In 2004, quoted in Choon-Piew Pow, ‘Constructing a New Private Order: Gated Communities and the Privatization of Urban Life in Post-reform Shanghai’, in: Social & Cultural Geography (2007) 8/6, 813–33, at 826.

  54. China Business Weekly, 7–13 Aug. 2006, 9.

  55. http://residence.net.cn/main.htm.

  56. 2004, quoted in Deborah Davis, ‘Urban Consumer Culture’, in: China Quarterly, 2005: 692–709, 706. See also: Deborah S. Davis, ed., The Consumer Revolution in Urban China (Berkeley, CA, 2000).

  57. Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Globalized World in the Twenty-first Century (London, 2005).

  58. Shunya Yoshimi, ‘Consuming America, Producing Japan,’ in: Garon & Maclachlan, eds., Ambivalent Consumer, 64.

  59. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, esp. chs. 2–3.

  60. Shunya Yoshimi, ‘Consuming America, Producing Japan’, in: Garon and Maclachlan, eds., Ambivalent Consumer, ch. 3. See also: Shunya Yoshimi, ‘Made in Japan: The Cultural Politics of “Home Electrification” in Post-war Japan ,’ in: Media, Culture & Society 21, no. 2, 1999: 149–71.

  61. For this, see Chua Beng Huat, Life is Not Complete Without Shopping: Consumption Culture in Singapore (Singapore, 2003).

  62. Koichi Iwabuchi, ‘Return to Asia? Japan in Asian Audiovisual Markets’, in: Kosaku Yoshino, ed., Consuming Ethnicity and Nationalism (Richmond, Surrey, 1999), ch. 8.

  63. Chua Beng Huat, ‘Transnational and Transcultural Circulation and Consumption of East Asian Television Drama,’ in Jaffrelot & Veer, eds., Middle-class Consumption in India and China, ch. 10. Euny Hong, The Birth of Korean Cool (New York, 2014).

  64. Quoted from Wilhite, Consumption and Everyday Life, 134.

  65. S. Radhakrishnan, ‘Professional Women, Good Families: Respectable Femininity and the Cultural Politics of a “New” India’, in: Qualitative Sociology (2009) 32: 195–212, 205.

  66. Margit van Wessel, ‘Talking about Consumption: How an Indian Middle Class Dissociates from Middle-class Life’, Cultural Dynamics 16, 2004: 93–116.

  67. W. Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India, (Durham, NC 2003), 277.

  68. Dipankar Gupta, Mistaken Modernity: India between Worlds (New Delhi, 2000).

  69. E.g., Carol Upadhya, ‘Rewriting the Code: Software Professionals and the Reconstitution of Indian Middle-class Identity’, in: Jaffrelot & Veer, eds., Middle-class Consumption in India and China, ch. 3.

  70. Vamsi Vakulabharanam, ‘Does Class Matter? Class Structure and Worsening Inequality in India’, in: Economic & Political Weekly, XLV/29 (17 July 2010), 67–76.

  71. Nicholas Nisbett, ‘Friendship, Consumption, Morality: Practising Identity, Negotiating Hierarchy in Middle-class Bangalore,’ in: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13, 2007: 935–50. See further: Chandra Bhan Prasad, ‘Markets and Manu: Economic Reforms and Its Impact on Caste in India’, in: CASI Working Paper Series, no. 08-01, Jan. 2008. For the loosening of caste in Nepal and efforts by the middle classes to balance local and global identities, see Mark Liechty, Suitably Modern: Making Middle-class Culture in a New Consumer Society (Princeton, NJ, 2003). See also 143 above.

  72. Haruka Yanagisawa, ‘Growth of Small-scale Industries and Changes in Consumption Patterns in South India, 1910s–’50s’, in: Douglas Haynes et al. (eds), Towards a History of Consumption in South A
sia (Oxford, 2010), 51–75; and Yogendra Singh, Culture Change in India: Identity and Globalization (Jaipur, 2000).

  73. Filippo & Caroline Osella, Social Mobility in Kerala: Modernity and Identity in Conflict (London, 2000), esp. 119–22.

  74. Report on the Working and Living Conditions of the Scheduled Castes Workers in the Selected Occupations at Indore, 1993 (Labour Bureau, Government of India, Chandigarh/Shimla, 1997), tables 3.11 A–C.

  75. Rajesh Shukla, Sunil Jain & Preeti Kakkar, Caste in a Different Mould (New Delhi, 2010).

  76. Patricia Uberoi, ‘Imagining the Family: An Ethnography of Viewing Hum Aapke Hain Koun . . . !’ in: Rachel Dwyer & Christopher Pinney (eds.), Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India (Oxford, 2001).

  77. Ronald Philip Dore, City Life in Japan: A Study of a Tokyo Ward (London, 1958), 62–80.

  78. White Paper on the National Lifestyle, Fiscal Year 1995, ‘Looking Back on 50 years . . . and Forward, in Search of an Affluent and Diversified National Lifestyle for Japan,’ Economic Planning Agency, Government of Japan, http://www5.cao.go.jp/seikatsu/whitepaper/h7/life95s0-e-e.html.

  79. Lonny Carlile, ‘The Yoahan Group’, in: Kerrie L. MacPherson (ed.), Asian Department Stores (Richmond, Surrey, 1998), 233–52.

  80. Jeff Kingston, Japan’s Quiet Transformation (New York, 2004).

  81. John L. McCreery, Japanese Consumer Behavior: From Worker Bees to Wary Shoppers (Richmond, Surrey, 2000).

  82. White Paper on the National Lifestyle, Fiscal Year 1995, Government of Japan.

  83. Seung-Kuk Kim, ‘Changing Lifestyles and Consumption Patterns of the South Korean Middle Class and New Generations,’ in: Chua Beng Huat, ed., Consumption in Asia: Lifestyles and Identities (London, 2000), ch. 3.

  84. Nelson, Measured Excess.

  85. The above draws on Inge Daniel’s ethnography of thirty homes in the Kansai region in central Japan conducted in 2002–3: The Japanese House: Material Culture in the Modern Home (Oxford, 2010). Her findings question the picture of a throwaway society, e.g., John Clammer, Contemporary Urban Japan: A Sociology of Consumption (Oxford, 1997), 79–80.

  86. Robert W. Hefner (ed.), Market Cultures: Society and Morality in the New Asian Capitalisms (Boulder, CO, 1998).

  87. Elizabeth Croll, ‘Conjuring Goods, Identities and Cultures’, in: Kevin Latham, Stuart Thompson & Jakob Klein, eds., Consuming China: Approaches to Cultural Change in Contemporary China (London, 2006), 22–41; and Robert Well, ‘Divided Market Cultures in China’, in: Hefner, Market Cultures, ch. 2.

  88. China Statistical Yearbook, 2014. W. McEwen et al., ‘Inside the Mind of the Chinese Consumer’, in: Harvard Business Review, March 2006; 84(3): 68–76.

  89. For this and general discussion, see Beverley Hooper, ‘The Consumer Citizen in Contemporary China’, in: Centre for East and South-east Asian Studies Working Paper 12, 2005.

  90. Arthashastra, 86, 245–8.

  91. ‘Cases filed, disposed and pending’, data compiled by Centre for Consumer Studies, IIPA, New Delhi, 2008.

  92. Pradeep S. Mehta, ed., Competition and Regulation in India (CUTS/Jaipur, 2007), #0715.

  93. (1994) 1SCC243, quoted in IIPA, Housing and Consumer (Delhi, 2006).

  94. In 2008, 17% of complaints filed were about defective goods, compared to 27% about electricity, mainly billing and disruption. Data compiled by CCS, IIPA, Delhi, 2008.

  95. 7 SCC 688, Charan Singh vs. Healing Touch Hospital, quoted in S. S. Singh & Sapna Chadah, Consumer Protection in India (New Delhi, 2005), 26.

  96. Awaken, Consumer Club Bulletin of Kamala Nehru College, 3 (Aug. 2008), 9.

  97. V. Prabhu, in E. Rajaram, K. Durai, M. Jeyakumaran & E. Yavanarani (eds.), Consumer Protection and Welfare (Chennai, 2008), ch. 22.

  98. Quoted, e.g., on the homepage of the Centre for Consumer Studies, Indian Institute of Public Administration, which oversees the government programme of consumer awareness and training. The quote, too, hangs on the walls of many business offices. I am grateful to Suresh Mishra and everyone at the IIPA for discussion and information. Gandhi’s 98 volumes of works are now on line, at http://www.gandhiserve.org/cwmg/cwmg.html.

  99. Water and Sanitation Program, Engaging with Citizens to Improve Services (2007), ch. 6. For Piplod, see also the account at http://www.cuts-international.org/psr-04.htm.

  100. Sanjay Srivastava, ‘Urban Spaces, Post-nationalism and the Making of the Consumer-Citizen in India’, in: New Cultural Histories of India, eds. Partha Chatterjee, Tapati Guha Thakurta & Bodhisattva Kar (New Delhi, 2014), ch. 13.

  101. E.g., ‘Bhagidari: Good Intention, Bad Implementation?’ by the liberal Centre of Civil Society, http://www.ccsindia.org/ccsindia/interns2003/chap7.pdf.

  102. Patricia L. Maclachlan, Consumer Politics in Post-war Japan: The Institutional Boundaries of Citizen Activism (New York, 2002); and Takao Nishimura, ‘Household Debt and Consumer Education in Post-war Japan’, in: Garon & Maclachlan, eds., Ambivalent Consumer, ch. 11.

  103. Cabinet Office of Japan, White Paper on the National Lifestyle: Prospects for Consumer Citizenship (2008), intro.; http://www5.cao. go.jp/seikatsu/whitepaper/h20/06_eng/index.html.

  104. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge, 1999).

  105. The full text is at http://www.cca.org.cn/english/EnNewsShow.jsp?id=38&cid=983.

  106. ‘Class Action Litigation in China’, in: Harvard Law Review 111, no. 6, 1998: 1523–41; Hooper, ‘The Consumer Citizen in Contemporary China’.

  107. China Consumers’ Association, Annual Report 2004, 2005; Haidian CCA, ‘The Dynamics of Consumption’, monthly magazine, 47 (2003), 35.

  108. In 2002, the regime set up the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC). In 2008, the promotion of national brands was incorporated into the government’s National Strategy. See Gerth, As China Goes, ch. 5.

  109. Chinese Consumers’ Association, ‘A Guide to Scientific Consumption 2008’, at http://www.cca.org.cn/english/EnNewsShow.jsp?id=184&cid=982.

  110. Luigi Tomba, ‘Of Quality, Harmony and Community: Civilization and the Middle Class in Urban China’, in: Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 17, no. 3, 2009: 592–616.

  CHAPTER 9

  1. John De Graaf, David Wann & Thomas H. Naylor, Affluenza: The All-consuming Epidemic (San Francisco, 2001); Clive Hamilton & Richard Denniss, Affluenza: When Too Much is Never Enough (Crows Nest, NSW, 2006); and James, Affluenza. Avner Offer diagnoses a rise in instant gratification and the decline of ‘commitment devices’ from the 1950s onwards, Offer, Challenge of Affluence.

  2. Lydia Maria Francis Child, The American Frugal Housewife (Boston, 1835, 16th edn), p. 89 – it was dedicated to ‘those who are not ashamed of economy’.

  3. King James Bible, 1 Timothy 6:10; Jacques Le Goff, Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages (New York, 1988); Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy (1308–21), Inferno, Canto XVII, third round of the seventh circle; and Rosa-Maria Gelpi & François Julien-Labruyère, The History of Consumer Credit: Doctrines and Practice (Basingstoke, 2000).

  4. Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanac (Philadelphia, 1732), 25; Franklin, The Way to Wealth (London, 1758), 13.

  5. Helen Bosanquet, ‘The Burden of Debts’, in: Economic Journal, 6/22 (June 1896), 212–25, quoted at 220, 223.

  6. Daniel Horowitz, The Morality of Spending: Attitudes towards the Consumer Society in America, 1875–1940 (Chicago, 1992); Horowitz, Anxieties of Affluence.

  7. Seung-Kuk Kim, ‘Changing Lifestyles and Consumption Patterns of the South Korean Middle Class and New Generations’, in: Beng Huat, ed., Consumption in Asia: Lifestyles and Identities, 71–3.

  8. Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1998), 68, 117–18. For a continental European example, see S. Ogilvie, M. Kuepker & J. Maegraith, ‘Household Debt in Early Modern Germany: Evidence from Personal Invent
ories’, in: Journal of Economic History 72, no. 1, 2012: 134–67.

  9. Julius Pierstorff, ‘Drei Jenaer Handwerke’, in: Schriften des Vereins für Socialpolitik LXX, no. 9, 1897, quoted at 50.

  10. Bureau of Social Affairs, The City Government of Greater Shanghai, ‘Standard of Living of Shanghai Laborers’ (1934), 108 and tables 15, 16.

  11. 1924–25 (153) Report by the Joint Select Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons on the Moneylenders Bill [H. L.] and the Moneylenders (Amendment) Bill, 78: Dorothy Keeling of the Liverpool Women Citizen’s Association. See further: Paul Johnson, Saving and Spending: The Working-class Economy in Britain, 1870–1939 (Oxford, 1985).

  12. Camille Selosse & Lorna Schrefler, ‘Consumer Credit and Lending to Households in Europe’, (European Credit Research Institute, 2005), fig. 6.

  13. http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/economics/oecd-factbook_ 18147364.

  14. J. Logemann & U. Spiekermann, ‘The Myth of a Bygone Cash Economy: Consumer Lending in Germany from the Nineteenth Century to the Mid-twentieth Century’, in: Entreprises et histoire, no. 59, 2010: 12–27; Sean O’Connell, Working-class Debt in the UK since 1880 (Oxford, 2009), ch. 2; and Lendol Calder, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit (Princeton, NJ, 1999), ch. 4.

  15. National Bureau of Economic Research, The Pattern of Consumer Debt, 1935–36: A Statistical Analysis, ed. Blanche Bernstein (1940).

  16. Calder, Financing the American Dream, 184–99.

  17. Isabelle Gaillard, ‘Télévisions et crédit à la consommation: Une approche comparative France–Rfa 1950–1970’, in: Entreprises et histoire, no. 2, 2010: 102–11.

  18. Calder, Financing the American Dream, 175, and ch. 3 for the following.

  19. O’Connell, Working-class Debt in the UK since 1880, 58–66.