American Commodities in an Age of Empire

In American Commodities in an Age of Empire, Mona Domosh explores how U.S. companies established an "informal" empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as they expanded into international markets and used images of foreign people and places to promote their products to domestic consumers. Domosh focuses on the experiences of five of the largest American international companies during this period: Singer Manufacturing Company, McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, H. J. Heinz Company, Eastman Kodak Company, and the New York Life Insurance Company.

In individual chapters on Singer, McCormick, and Heinz, Domosh considers how these companies created visual and textual images that associated their products with ideologies of civilization and progress. In the chapter on Singer, Domosh examines magazine advertisements and a series of promotional trade cards that feature people in different countries using Singer sewing machines. The cards emphasize the ways that people around the world are similar to Americans and have the potential to become "white" through the acquisition and use of American commercial products, but set limits on this idea by reasserting geographical difference in order to keep others at a safe distance.

Domosh's chapter on McCormick offers critical readings of the company's illustrated catalogs, which associate foreign spaces with premodern farming techniques and link McCormick equipment with progress. Domosh argues that the catalogs relocate the U.S. frontier narrative to foreign lands in order to show that foreigners may be able to emulate the conquest of the West in their own countries through the use of American technology.

From the 1880s on, H. J. Heinz Company emphasized the purity of their commercially prepared food and represented the company as a patriarchal family concerned with the well being of its workers and the people who consumed its pickles and sauces. In order to reinforce its family image, Heinz presented its factory as a domestic space, and encouraged American consumers to tour the factory to witness the sanitary and hospitable conditions for the workers, largely girls and women (the "girl in the white cap" in Heinz advertisements). Domosh draws on reports of corporate travels to show how Heinz naturalized their expansion into international markets by positioning foreign consumers as members of their extended corporate family. In this scenario, the Heinz representatives sent abroad to peddle their goods were imagined as friendly visitors who enabled people around the world to share in the progress represented by their prepared foods.

Domosh connects these case studies as examples of "flexible racism," arguing that "because American companies set out to 'civilize' through consumption and because these new consumers remained, spatially and discursively, outside the bounds of political citizenship, they could be represented as historical agents in their own right, able to become white through consumption" (189). Domosh thus points to the potential for commodities to erase difference and demonstrates that racial identity and stages along the "civilizational hierarchy" were not fixed (194). Domosh's provocative and engaging study will be especially valuable for scholars interested in race and empire, the circulation of commodities, and the history of capitalism.