Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (review)

This collection of eleven essays gathers some of the most innovative work in the modern history of consumption published today. Its editors, specialists in modern British and comparative European history, offer a clear alternative to the predominantly American historiography in this field by challenging a number of common assumptions. This includes the template of Americanization over diverse models of consumption, the focus on the act of purchase over use and linkages to production, expression of values without analysis of the ethics of consumption, and the general neglect of power and the state in the consumption process.

Frank Trentmann finds the 18th century “consumer revolution” in England and the US did not lead to a public consumer identity, but rather that very particular political and ideological convergences produced such a consciousness, for example, in Victorian England around free trade and conflicts arising over private provision of water. Adam Arvidsson offers a rich historical analysis of modern “brand management” in showing how marketing specialists from the mid 1950s developed new ways of fostering brand identity by encouraging consumers to “produce” lifestyles around brand goods. Robert Batchelor’s challenging study of trade in early modern Chinese porcelains offers an alternative to the classic thesis of the “birth” of consumer society (in the west) with an analysis of the complex exchanges of taste and production across the globe. Especially evocative is anthropologist Richard’s Wilk’s readable and well-researched study of binge consumption among extractive industry workers in the Caribbean, explaining the origins of “imprudent” spending in the unpredictable work culture of these marginal young laborers. David Anderson and Neil Carrier explore how the ancient custom of chewing of khat (a mild natural stimulant similar to amphetamine) in Muslim Somalia and Yemen has been challenged not only by western definitions of drug abuse, but how that condemnation has colored the discourse on khat in those regions where it has long been accepted. Michael Redclift shows how chewing gum emerged as a unique American-driven, but ultimately global consumer good at the end of the 19th century and how it transformed the Yucatan.

The collection then shifts to policy issues. Historian Sheldon Garon’s comprehensive study of the Japanese policy and attitudes toward consumption since World War II challenges still another misconception—that Japan embraced American-style consumption by the 1960s. Instead, not only did the legacy of thrift and the export-driven economy that dates from long before the war and the austerity enforced by war and recovery (unaided by the Marshall Plan) remain in Japanese consciousness long after these events, but Japanese of many stripes resisted the American cultural model. The goal instead was a “balance” of saving and spending. One of the more thoughtful essays is by the Italian sociologist Roberta Sassatelli who explores the motivations of the modern consumer in Europe as a moral and political subject. She finds a large market for green and otherwise alternative goods (whose production and use can be ethically defended). This phenomenon is both the culmination of “individualization,” as “social actors are increasingly reflexive about everyday identity” and “sub-politicization” as consumers look for personal and concrete ways of expressing moral and political opinions outside of the electoral process (P. 223). The collection closes with two comparative articles. The first by Sheryl Kroen analyzes how Americans sold their vision of consumer-capitalist democracy differently in France, West Germany, Britain after the war; the second by Bronwen Morgan is a study of how different political cultures in South Africa and New Zealand produced contrasting results in the struggle between consumers and private water companies.

Obviously, this is a wide-ranging set of essays that brings together an equally broad assortment of scholars. This is very much to its credit. What they all share in one way or another is a desire to challenge some aspect of the “conventional wisdom” about the history and present of consumption. In this, they hardly represent a new school of...