The Logistics Revolution: The Rise of Logistics in the Mass Consumption Society by Richard Vahrenkamp (review)

Transport and logistics is an oft-neglected factor in explanations of the strong economic growth in the industrialized countries over the last century. The Logistics Revolution, which is an English translation of a book published in German in 2011, the crucial roles of railways, trucks, and forwarding agents are given due prominence. In a more or less chronological presentation spanning more than a century, Richard Vahrenkamp presents the ways in which logistical improvements have facilitated the changing structure of both business—in particular retailing—and production. The book provides a very good introduction to the myriad of tasks performed by the often “invisible” agents within “logistics”—agents that on a daily basis perform the critical task of linking producers and consumers. Vahrenkamp provides an interesting account that links mass production, mass distribution, and mass consumption, with an emphasis on the middle part. The book is based on a substantial amount of thorough and new research, and as such provides a welcome addition to the transport history literature. However, it is likely to disappoint many readers, for three different reasons.

First, the structure of The Logistics Revolution is in my opinion clearly unsatisfactory, with an imbalance among the chapters. There are three chapters of more than thirty pages, presenting developments in German retail trade, the role of the road network, and postwar railway logistics in West Germany. Here, Vahrenkamp provides detailed analyses of the relevant topics and manages to construct a debate around a series of well-developed arguments. More than half of the chapters in the book, however, are less than ten pages long. There are even four “chapters” of only four pages each. These provide only a basic introduction—in some instances, a few interesting questions are sketched before the account abruptly ends, without any serious attempt at analysis. The author succeeds in whetting the appetite of the reader, before he rapidly jumps to another topic. This is particularly evident in the last part of the book, where the second half of the twentieth century is discussed.

The second problem is that the weighting of the various chapters appears haphazard. According to its blurb, this book links “the political and economic factors which have led to the rise of logistics in Europe” with the development of the mass consumption society. In the blurb, “Europe” is mentioned four times, “Germany” not once. However, in the book itself, the author’s working definition of “Europe” appears to be “mainly Germany, sometimes the rest of the Continent, once or twice the periphery.” The first 150 pages deal primarily with Germany, with infrequent one- or two-sentence comparisons with other countries hardly justifying the European credentials. There are some small subchapters on Spain, Italy, and Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic, but other European countries mainly surface in a couple of tables, if at all. Given the alleged emphasis on “logistics in Europe,” it is strange that the “chapter” called “The European Domestic Market as logistics promoter” makes up four pages, while the chapter “The rise of delivery service by trucks in Germany 1900–1938,” at 28 pages, is seven times as long. The German cases are clearly both interesting and illustrative. For instance, Vahrenkamp’s discussion of retail innovation and Jewish ownership is fascinating material, but is it “European logistics”?

Let me mention another shortcoming in coverage. The cover page of this book has the ubiquitous picture of a fully laden containership, a staple of all books on logistics. However, the maritime dimension of logistics is more or less wiped out from the text itself. If there is one thing that has characterized mass consumption in Europe over the last thirty years, it is the inflow of cheap consumer goods produced in Asia. This process, closely linked to the containerization of shipping, is awarded three pages in Vahrenkamp’s book—half of the attention awarded to the Bonn-Cologne...