Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann
We live in a world where material delights can be delivered, seemingly continuously, to ever-increasing portions of the population. Trentmann delivers the definitive history of its evolution, embracing both a longer time-scale than typical histories of this sort and a level of detail that astonishes. I did not know that around 1900 a typical Brooklyn tenement dweller used thirty-nine gallons of water a day. Nor that in 1910 there were 21,000 small shops in Hamburg, one for every forty-four residents. Nor that New Yorkers threw away more trash in 1939 than at any time since. These and thousands of other data points are now at your fingertips (since you can find them in the three-column, sixty-page index). In constructing his narrative around these data, the author loves to burst our bubbles (did you know that Europeans have surpassed Americans in the amount of trash that they generate?), as he constantly jams more stuff into this history of stuff.
But is our world of stuff delightful, filled with delight? Or are we confirming Plato's claim that the end of a society preoccupied with luxuries would be the ruination of both selves and society? At first, Trentmann eschews the "moralism" typical of other consumer histories in favor of a "history too rich to fit either extreme model." The book succeeds in showing that simply being for or against "consumerism"—or claiming that suddenly, at some recent point, the disease of consumerism has newly appeared on the scene—is not credible. Yet cumulatively, the weight of the material of so many material things is too fraught for such neutrality to hold, even for the author himself. He rather obviously admires leisure (though not of the retail-therapy sort) and worries that our insatiable consumption is endangering the planet. Truly shocking for me, an American single person, was the claim that average singles do two to five loads of laundry . . . per week! [End Page 314]
Trentmann's closing call for "serious public debate" about things like frequent clothes-changing and showering is welcome; his own antimoralism at the opening of the book, however, stands in tension with it. For on what would such a debate draw? It might call on the earlier traditions of China and Italy, which Trentmann masterfully shows had the same desire for things that we do and similar skills in fine making and marketing and yet restrained them through public ideals that discouraged novelty and through public institutions that put limits on the expansion of markets into every corner of time and space. Such restraint requires standards of private virtue and ideals of common public action that limit the empire of things. Yet that virtue and those ideals are the very items that our material things disincline us to maintain or pursue. The current occupant of the White House is evidence enough of Plato's prescience. But perhaps saying so is "moralistic"?
David Cloutier is associate professor of theology at the Catholic University of America and author of The Vice of Luxury: Economic Excess in a Consumer Age and Walking God's Earth: The Environment and Catholic Faith.
