Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920 (review)

Consumers Imperium explores the international influences that shaped American domestic life during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Examining American culture—and in particular, American women's culture—the book offers a counterpoint to traditional interpretations of U.S. foreign relations. Instead of focusing on diplomatic events, military maneuvers, or economic expansion, the book studies how American consumers related to other nations through their purchases of international furnishings, food, and fashions. Rather than seeing America solely as an exporter of goods and values, Kristin L. Hoganson suggests that cultural influences flowed in two directions.

The book's first chapter focuses on the many exotic home furnishing fads popular during the late 19th and early 20th centuries—from cosey corners to oriental rugs to Chinese laquer ware. International styles were not limited just to items of household decor, however, for, as the second chapter notes, during the same period, fashion writers promoted foreign—and particularly French—styles of dress. American cookery, the subject of Chapter 3, was also influenced by international trends. Hoganson demonstrates that many cooking experts and magazine writers attempted to spread international cuisine across America, offering both recipes and geographical information about other places and peoples.

In what is perhaps the most groundbreaking chapter, Chapter 4, Hoganson examines how middle-class women joined travel clubs which engaged in armchair sightseeing. Members read about different countries, their cultures, traditions, and landmarks, and then made presentations to each other about these destinations. Such clubs, Hoganson argues, were yet another indicator of the increasingly cosmopolitan outlook of middle-class women at century's turn. In its final chapter, the book turns to the "immigrant gifts" movement, popular during the Progressive era. During a period when many supported the contrary idea of cultural assimilation, the movement sought to preserve the traditions and folk art of recently arrived immigrants.

The book offers important additions and qualifications to the prevailing interpretations of turn-of-the-century America. It shows that American domestic life, although idealized as an insulated haven from the larger world, was in reality shaped by international currents. Such foreign influences had even larger significance, for they indicate that America was not merely spreading its own culture abroad but was instead receptive to at least some of the traditions, foods, and fashions of other peoples and cultures. Hoganson shows that middle-class Americans' willingness to adopt foreign styles and foods did not always represent enlightened open-mindedness, however. The consumer behavior that fashion writers, decorators, and cookbook authors promoted had a power dynamic inherent in it. Hoganson suggests that consumers might have learned from such advice that the world was their own bazaar, designed for them to sample from at their pleasure. Shoppers might buy foreign wares, but they did so from a position of economic and geopolitical privilege

If the book has a weakness, it is its tendency to make claims about consumers' perceptions, judgements, and feelings, which it does not fully support. Repeatedly it suggests that by creating cosey corners, purchasing oriental rugs and French fashions, and even reading recipes that used ingredients with exotic names, women gained a new understanding of the world. Hoganson suggests that shopping transformed their consciousness. For instance, she writes "Cosey corners … revealed a desire to enjoy the satisfactions of the ruling class in an imperial world order" (p. 54); suggests that "To buy into the fashion system centered in Paris thus meant to distinguish oneself from penurious, colored, and colonized people" (p. 81); and argues that the exotically named "French artichokes, Russian turnips, Brussels sprouts, and Spanish olives.… heightened geographic consciousness by suggesting distant origins" (p.110). By making such claims, the book suggests it is getting inside of the heads of consumers, and showing how international products reshaped patterns of thought. It is only rarely, however, that the book supplies actual evidence of what shoppers thought about their developing cosmopolitan tastes. With the exception of the fine chapters on...