Publishers Weekly
Although the global reach of McDonald's, Wal-Mart and Starbucks appears to be a recent phenomenon, de Grazia, a Columbia historian, contends that U.S. companies-and consumerism-have been making inroads in Europe for the past hundred years. She argues that an early, and major, U.S. innovation treated foreign territories as extensions of domestic markets. While Old Europe's bourgeois culture emphasized class differences and focused on the luxury of aesthetically pleasing goods, American consumer capitalism concentrated instead on mass-produced items that appealed to the middle-class consumer. By the end of the 20th century, European markets had embraced American consumerism to such an extent that social equality came to mean the ability to participate in mass consumer culture-as it does, she argues, in the U.S. She places the U.S.'s final triumph in 1986, when the first McDonald's in Italy opened next to the mosaics of Rome's Spanish Steps. In a book jam-packed with examples and analysis, de Grazia devotes chapters to the rise of branding and of chain stores, to blanket corporate advertising, to American film as an entertaining introduction to the American lifestyle (and sets of fantasies), to the treatment of European women as a target market and more. While much here has a pedantic quality, de Grazia writes clearly, giving an uncommon perspective on the ways and means by which the U.S. and Europe drew close after WWII. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Foreign Affairs
This wonderful book, written with extraordinary erudition and verve by a social historian, is a study of the way in which the American ethos of mass consumption has "conquered" Europe since the interwar period. De Grazia traces "the rise of a great imperium with the outlook of a great emporium," how it broke down well-established patterns of consumption and class distinction. For each of her themes — from the triumph of American-style mass distribution and marketing to the irresistible sweep of American entertainment — she focuses on one key actor, a device that gives her account great readability. It was President Woodrow Wilson, she shows, who first advocated "a global traffic in values as well as commodities," with little regard for sovereignty, and the Rotary Club that boasted the virtues of "Babbittry" to its European members. The advent of the European Common Market, meanwhile, facilitated American penetration by transforming "local, delimited and familiar groups of clients into international, unlimited and unknown masses of consumers." There is some ultimate irony, however, in the fact that the U.S. government's deliberate export of "salesmanship" has resulted in "salesmanship becom[ing] not an instrument of statecraft but a substitute for it."
Library Journal
Columbia history professor de Grazia, the highly respected author of books on Italian fascism (e.g., The Culture of Consent), has also written more generally about interwar European culture, feminism, and film. Here she ambitiously takes on all of these interests and more in what might have been a sweeping examination of the American influence on Europe from World War I through 9/11. Unfortunately, her prose is of the sort that only similarly trained academics will engage, and her avoidance of standard chronology in favor of very long chapters on a given theme-the fitful inroads of Rotary clubs, the hegemony of Hollywood and its destruction of local and regional cinema, the chain-store displacement of a continent of shopkeepers-results in a book that is brilliantly argued, based on a rich sampling of popular culture, and yet likely to appeal to only a very narrow, scholarly readership. Essential for serious academic libraries, but public libraries need not acquire.-Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., PA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A smart and engaging look at how US consumerism swept aside European cultural conservatism to create a transatlantic, transnational market. Globalism has an American face, writes de Grazia (History/Columbia Univ.), but perhaps not for much longer. While 80 percent of Europe's 519 million inhabitants are by now accustomed to going to supermarkets, just shy of the 85 percent mark in the US, the leading innovator in getting people in China and South America to shop one-stop is now Carrefour, a French firm. (Carrefour, she adds, is even beating out Wal-Mart in China, but facing stiff competition from Taiwanese and Thai chains.) Thus the wheel turns, set in motion by the expansion of the American "Market Empire" throughout the 20th century; the resultant economic and political hegemony "was built on European territory," where American concerns had to combat patterns of production and trade long established by the European bourgeoisie. Overturning the old order was spurred on by both the demands of local peoples for better living standards and by the occasion of two world wars that opened European markets; when the second finished off the ancien regime, programs such as the Marshall Plan were on hand to build a consumer society friendly to US goods from tractors to films to hula hoops. Just so, the European success of firms such as McDonald's has depended on changing local habits to conform to American models-doing away with the extended lunch break, making long commutes the norm, and so on. Yet, de Grazia notes, even the Marshall Plan had competitors, such as England's Beveridge Report, which hinted at ways of rebuilding that lacked the American "overweening confidence in technology, raucouscommercialism, and tolerance for social wreckage as the price paid for progress." The US model is looking shopworn at the beginning of the 21st century-but even if it has a different accent, the Market Empire endures. A lucid, accessible introduction to globalism and its discontents.
