European colonial ventures in the Americas depended on Native American trading routes and economic practices, even as they transformed them. Europeans initially sought to extract valuable resources, but this endeavor always intersected with the day-to-day business of men and women alternately competing and cooperating to sustain their communities. European traders and settlers thus fit into networks crossing imperial and cultural boundaries that were simultaneously economic, familial, and political. Trading networks soon connected the violence of Indigenous land dispossession for the purposes of food cultivation and the export of staples such as sugar, tobacco, and rice with the violence of the Atlantic slave trade, which transported tens of thousands of captives each year from Africa to the Americas by the end of the seventeenth century. Over time, colonial settlers increasingly struggled against imperial governments for control over land, trade, and profits, with revolutionary political consequences in the eighteenth century.

Between 1730 and 1775, the quantity of consumer goods bought and sold and the number of people purchasing them significantly expanded in British North America. This economic activity created shared tastes and habits across regional, ethnic, and racial divisions and encouraged the development of shared experiences and identities based on the emulation of British culture. Groups often marginalized in political and cultural discourses found in consumerism new ways to assert their identities and influence. During the Anglo-American crisis, the rejection of British imports became an important means of rallying support for the Patriot cause, politicizing activities formerly considered to be domestic and private. The American Revolution disrupted the economic and cultural ties that had linked American and British markets, but by the late eighteenth century Americans had resumed many of the consumer habits in which they had indulged before independence.

Seen from Europe and America, exhibitions reinforce our understanding of World War I as watershed, marking a turn from the confident embrace of industry and empire to a world of economic anxiety, colonial ambivalence, and modernist experiment. Japan shared in these too, but the evidence of exhibitions also points to continuities, of municipal aspiration, ongoing commercialization, and colonial development. This chapter shows how ongoing urbanization and continental empire increased the demand for exhibitions from private companies, local governments, and colonial authorities, both to tie themselves to the nation and to find a distinctive place for themselves on the imperial map. They were also eager to cater to the emerging middle-class demand for the things that would provide them with a cultured but moral urban life. The demand, in turn, provided employment for a new breed of showmen (rankaiya), who were able to provide the attractions and advertising to make sure the visitors would come.

This chapter treats the marketing of transatlantic passenger shipping companies from the post-Famine period to the emergence of amphibious aviation at the end of the Free State era. It explores the use of evolving advertising, marketing and public relations techniques, collectively commercial propaganda, in the USA on the transatlantic passenger shipping trade. It compares and contrasts the commercial propaganda of American shipping lines with that of their British and Irish counterparts to determine the degree to which American marketing techniques influenced domestic marketing, shaped consumer tastes and stimulated desire for an American life experience that was grounded in participatory civic consumerism. The chapter suggests that the reverse flow of knowledge and practices, stimulated by temporary and permanent reverse migration, and correspondence with Irish-America, led to the post-Famine modernisation of commercial promotional activity, with attractive communications from America copied by shipping lines and agents in the Irish market to create a domestic, Americanised form of marketing, more sophisticated and polished than previously seen.

This chapter examines the built environment of the Vietnam War and its relationship to soldier morale for American, Army of the Republic of Vietnam, and revolutionary forces. In the early 1960s, American officials relied on improvisation and adaptation to create spaces from which to manage nation-building initiatives. With the shift to combat operations in the mid-1960s, the United States increasingly relied on new construction, building hundreds of bases from which to project violence into the countryside. The American standard of living in many of these spaces, coupled with the indiscriminate violence of search-and-destroy, both exposed and exacerbated South Vietnamese poverty, driving Southern support for the insurgency. At the same time, Vietnamese revolutionaries emphasized austerity as an exemplar of traditional values, casting opposition to the insurgency as distinctly un-Vietnamese. US investment in South Vietnam was simultaneously too much and not enough – too much military hardware, material abundance, and violence to defend South Vietnam without altering it irrevocably, but not enough to defeat the revolution altogether.

Historians have tended to view postwar labor migration, including the Turkish-German case, as a one-directional story whose consequences manifested within host country borders. This chapter complicates this narrative by arguing that Turkish migrants were mobile border crossers who traveled as tourists throughout Western Europe and took annual vacations to their homeland. These seasonal remigrations entailed a three-day car ride across Central Europe and the Balkans at the height of the Cold War. The drive traversed an international highway (Europastraße 5) extending from West Germany to Turkey through Austria, socialist Yugoslavia, and communist Bulgaria. Migrants’ unsavory travel experiences along the way underscored East/West divides, and they transmuted their disdain for the “East” onto their impoverished home villages. Moreover, the cars and “Western” consumer goods they transported reshaped their identities. Those in the homeland came to view the Almancı as superfluous spenders who were spending their money selfishly rather than for the good of their communities. Overall, the idea that a migrant could become German shows that those in the homeland could intervene from afar in debates about German identity amid rising racism: although many derided Turks as unable to integrate, they had integrated enough to face difficulties reintegrating into Turkey.

The introduction presents Rogers as a figure straddling major divides in American history. He was a Cherokee Indian seeking suceess in a WASP society, and a cowboy from the rural republic of the nineteenth century who becomes a wildly popular humorist, writer, and movie star in the urban society of the twentieth century. In particular, it frames him as a historical figure reflecting four important shifts in this era: the end of the frontier, the development of a consumer culture of abundance and personality, the emergence of modern celebrity, and the sharpening of a populist ethos in culture and politics. Finally, it frames Rogers as a historical mediator who helped Americans ease their way from one historical era to another.

Chapter Six explains how Rogers contributed greatly to a media revolution that reshaped American culture in the early 1900s. Beginning in 1922, he reached a vast new popular audience by becoming a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist (first with a weekly column, then a shorter daily one), writing regulary for magazines, making advertisements, cutting phonograph records, and making sporadic appearances in the new medium of radio. He also updated the old tradition of the lecture,regularly traveling throughout the nation to appear before audiences in town halls, lyceums, and churches. Throughout, Rogers deployed his talents as a cracker-barrel philosopher and down-home wit to interrogate America’s move to embrace a new consumer, urban, leisure-oriented culture.

Chapter Seven digs deeper into Roger’s commentary to uncover his attempts to explain the essence of American values. He consistently probed what it meant to be an Americanand did so with wit and insight. Roger stressed several qualities that he believed defined his society: a veneration of ordinay people and a concern for their well-being, a suspicion of social and economic elitism, a respect for the work ethic,and a belief in social egalitarianism and economic opportunity. Rogers’ populist mind-set caused him to locate "the American soul" in common people. He saw the best of American tradition in William Jennings Bryan, the best of modern innovation in aviator Charles Lindbergh, and the ideal combination in industrialist Henry Ford. Ironically, after years of imbibing his humorous reflections, many people concluded that the nature and meaning of America appeared when Rogers looked in the mirror. He became the keeper of the American soul.

During this period consumerism developed apace, so that the society of Debussy’s world closely resembles our own in its fondness for shopping as a form of recreation. This was due in part to growing prosperity, at least amongst the middle classes, and increased leisure time. Fine dining, though hardly new, was also an aspect of growing consumerism. Debussy was a product of his time in his fondness for good food and collecting it. from local dealers. Especially pertinent to Debussy is the manner in which music was consumed as a leisure activity, for he catered for the demand for ‘leisure’ music in his early songs and piano works. Developing rapidly in this period of prosperity and stability was tourism, which Debussy participated in, if not from choice, certainly from the preferences of his wives and mistresses. Understanding this part of Debussy’s environment and appreciating Paris’s centrality on the European map (with many borrowings from Great Britain, including afternoon tea and whisky, both much to Debussy’s taste) throws light on Debussy the man as he negotiated the free time that many periods of inactivity as a musician created.

Focused on metropolitan consumer centres in which new sexual identities were bought and sold, this chapter explores how mass-market businesses stimulated, satisfied, and contained female desires, often at the same time. Consumer behaviours are a nexus of bodily and psychic desires understood through a language of seduction. Since the mid-nineteenth century, businesses have channelled, commodified, and promoted female sexuality to sell new products, shopping spaces, and leisure activities. Cities offered both licit and illicit, sexual and consumer pleasures. Their urban geographies are the living proof of our argument that in modern capitalist societies, sexuality is a commodity, commodities often are erotic, and the spaces and communities in which they are exchanged contribute to the making of consumer and sexual subjectivities. The marketing of eros therefore did not simply emerge with the twentieth-century sexual revolution, but rather was central to the history of modern capitalism. By examining the overlapping histories of the marketing of female consumer and sexual pleasures in diverse places, this chapter explores the role of sex and sexiness in the modern marketplace and challenges liberal assumptions about agency, liberation, and progress embedded in the history of the sexual revolutions of the late twentieth century.

Within a few decades following the end of the Second World War, Germany moved from a country of middling wealth per capita to one of the wealthiest countries in the world. In the meantime, the Japanese, very poor indeed in 1945 in spite of a strong showing in terms of industrialisation and technology, joined that select club only about a decade after the Germans. At the same time, Germans and Japanese became in general more economically equal. This is reflected in the rise of consumerism in both countries, and increasingly the nations’ affluent consumers showed no hesitation whatsoever in purchasing domestically manufactured white goods and many other products. In doing so, they helped power the countries’ respective economic miracles. Moreover, their purchases and savings also made the companies that produced the goods more financially secure while at the same time enabling increasing levels of technological capability. This provided a sound basis for those firms to move ever more aggressively into export markets by the end of the first quarter-century after the war’s end. West Germany forged into these export markets earlier than the Japanese, who were less reliant on export for growth.

Swift’s world was a material one, influenced by his experiences of the institutionalisation of British imperialism, mercantile capitalism, science, medicine, philosophy, the book trade, party politics, and aesthetics. This chapter focuses on a single category of material culture of especial importance in Swift’s writings: consumer goods. The early part of this chapter sets out the essential background on the ‘consumer revolution’ in the early eighteenth century, before addressing its influence on Swift’s writings: in particular the pamphlets concerned with Irish manufacturing, and his fascination with the material culture of women’s dressing rooms.

Looking at London, a relatively prosperous area between the wars, this chapter points to the persistence of ambiguous memories of the inter-war period, with partial achievements in social reform, efforts to halt international conflict, and decent standards of consumption recognised alongside poverty, unemployment, and the slide towards war. This chapter establishes some of the challenges that people faced in passing on stories about the past to younger generations shortly after the Second World War, in a landscape in which different political parties were competing to ‘fix’ the memory of the inter-war decades in place.

The world is undergoing unprecedented change as a result of global population increases, rapid urbanization, and the acceleration of affluence in developing countries, which leads to increased consumption of resources and impactful emissions.

The book’s coda addresses an economic and cultural shift in national focus from production toward consumption that took place in response to the theory that the Depression was a “crisis of underconsumption.” According to this logic, capitalism could best be salvaged by stimulating consumer buying power, and thus by bolstering demand for the emerging commodities associated with what Rita Barnard has called the “culture of abundance.” This book thus concludes by proposing that a Depression-era gravitational shift from a producerist model associated with Fordist industrialism toward the mass consumption that would define the postwar period was paralleled by a displacement of the notion of the writer (or poet) as a producer toward one of the writer (or poet) as consumer. This poetics of mass consumerism can be seen in its offing in the Depression-era work of George Oppen and Mina Loy, but it reaches its fullest expression in the postwar poetry of John Ashbery, as well as the work of more recent poets such as Robert Fitterman and Juliana Spahr.