Abstract
American ideals and models feature prominently in the master narrative of postwar European consumer societies. To wit: in her influential book Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (2005), the American historian Victoria de Grazia maintains that a U.S.-style “Market Empire” marched across Europe and swept away the old economic order. By focusing on ideals and models that originated in the United States, de Grazia demonstrates how myriad American interests and actors contributed to the “unique formation of the Market Empire”—and to America’s status as the world’s first regime of mass consumption.1
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Notes
Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 4–10.
The hegemony thesis has recently been reiterated by historian Howard Le Roy Malchow in Special Relations: The Americanization of Britain? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).
See, for instance, Adrian Horn, Juke Box Britain: Americanisation and Youth Culture, 1945–60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009);
Matthias Kipping and Nick Tiratsoo, eds., Americanisation in 20th Century Europe: Business, Culture, Politics, vol. 2 (Lille: Centre d’Histoire de l’Europe du Nord-Ouest, 2001);
John Krige, American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006);
Richard F. Kuisel, The French Way: How France Embraced and Rejected American Values and Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012);
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000);
Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005);
Harm G. Schröter, “Economic Culture and Its Transfer: An Overview of the Americanisation of the European Economy, 1900–2005,” European Review of History 15 (2008): 331–44;
Alexander Stephan, ed., The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism after 1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006);
Jonathan Zeitlin and Gary Herrigel, eds., Americanization and Its Limits: Reworking US Technology and Management in Post-War Europe and Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Mary Nolan, “Consuming America, Producing Gender,” in The American Century in Europe, ed. R. Laurence Moore and Maurizio Vaudagna (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 243–61.
See also Jan Logemann, Trams or Tailfins? Public and Private Properity in Postwar West Germany and the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012);
Klaus Nathaus, ed., “Europop: The Production of Popular Culture in Twentieth Century Western Europe,” special issue, European Review of History: Revue europeenne d’histoire 20, no. 5 (2013).
Victoria de Grazia, “Changing Consumption Regimes in Europe, 1930–1970: Comparative Perspectives on the Distribution Problem,” in Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century, ed. Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 59–83;
Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
Cf. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” in Multiple Modernities, ed. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 1–29. See also Björn Wittrock, “Modernity: One, None, or Many? European Origins and Modernity as a Global Condition,” in ibid., 31–60.
For discussions in the vast literature that has appeared on the subject the last decades, see Richard A. Wolfe, “Organizational Innovation: Review, Critique and Suggested Research Directions,” Journal of Management Studies 31 (1994): 405–31;
Rosanna Garcia and Roger Calantone, “A Critical Look at Technological Innovation Typology and Innovativeness Terminology: A Literature Review,” The Journal of Product Innovation Management 19 (2002): 110–32.
Cf. Johan Schot and Adri Albert de la Bruhèze, “The Mediated Design of Products, Consumption, and Consumers in the Twentieth Century,” in How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology, ed. Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 229–45;
Ruth Oldenziel and Adri Albert de la Bruhèze, “Theorizing the Mediation Junction for Technology and Consumption,” in Manufacturing Technology, Manufacturing Consumers: The Making of Dutch Consumer Society, ed. Adri Albert de la Bruhèze and Ruth Oldenziel (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2009), 9–39.
Alan Brinkley, “The Concept of an American Century,” in The American Century in Europe, ed. R. Laurence Moore and Maurizio Vaudagna (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 7–24.
For a recent critical discussion of the “American Century,” see Andrew J. Bacevich, ed., The Short American Century: A Postmortem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
Robert H. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 15.
David W. Ellwood, The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012);
Mary Nolan, The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna.
Mary Nolan, The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna.
Jeffrey L. Meikle, Design in the USA (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), chap. 4.
Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, eds., Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).
Warren James Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910–1945, new ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997);
Christopher Endy, Cold War Holidays: American Tourism in France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004);
John A. Jakle, Keith A. Sculle, and Jefferson S. Rogers, The Motel in America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
Per Lundin, “Confronting Class: The American Motel in Early Post-war Sweden,” Journal of Tourism History 5 (2013): 305–24.
Adri A. de la Bruhèze, chapter 7 in this volume. Hans Ibelings, Americanism: Nederlandse architectuur en het transatlantische voorbeeld: Dutch Architecture and the Transatlantic Model (Rotterdam: NAi, 1997);
Alan S. Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945–51 (London: Routledge, 1992), 95–7.
See the contributions of Terje Finstad, Stig Kvaal, and Per Østby (chapter 4) and Thomas Kaiserfeld (chapter 8) in this volume. See also Mikael Hård, “The Good Apartment: The Social (Democratic) Construction of Swedish Homes,” Home Cultures 7 (2010): 117–34.
For the Social Democratic modernization project, see Sheri Berman, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006);
Francis Sejersted, The Age of Social Democracy: Norway and Sweden in the Twentieth Century, trans. Richard Daly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
Cf. Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997);
Emily S. Rosenberg, “Consuming Women: Images of Americanization in the ‘American Century,’” Diplomatic History 23 (1999): 479–97.
Matthias Kipping and Ove Bjarnar, eds., The Americanisation of European Business: The Marshall Plan and the Transfer of US Management Models (London: Routledge, 1998);
Jacqueline McGlade, “Americanization: Ideology or Process? The Case of the United States Technical Assistance and Productivity Programme,” in Americanization and Its Limits: Reworking US Technology and Management in Post-War Europe and Japan, ed. Jonathan Zeitlin and Gary Herrigel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 53–75.
Per Lundin, “Mediators of Modernity: Planning Experts and the Making of the ‘Car-Friendly’ City in Europe,” in Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities, ed. Mikael Hård and Thomas J. Misa (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 257–80.
Tom O’Dell, Culture Unbound: Americanization and Everyday Life in Sweden, new ed. (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2012), 137.
Philipp Gassert, “The Spectre of Americanization: Western Europe in the American Century,” in The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History, ed. Dan Stone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 191; Nolan, in this volume.
Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002);
Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption, 1939–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Ulla Rosén, “‘A Rational Solution to the Laundry Issue’: Policy and Research for Day-to-Day Life in the Welfare State,” in Science for Welfare and Warfare: Technology and State Initiative in Cold War Sweden, ed. Per Lundin, Niklas Stenlås, and Johan Gribbe (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2010), 213–32.
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Lundin, P. (2015). Introduction. In: Lundin, P., Kaiserfeld, T. (eds) The Making of European Consumption. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374042_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374042_1
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