| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Victoria De Grazia. Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2005. Pp. 586. $29.95.
This book by Victoria De Grazia explains how American consumerism remade Europe over the course of the twentieth century. It tells the story of the victory of the "Market Empire" over the European "bourgeois regime of consumption," the triumph of American-inspired mass consumption, based on technology, marketing, and social change over the cramped, stratified, protected commerce of Europeans. The struggle between these two systems of consumption was joined in the 1920s and 1930s, and success for the American model came in the 1950s and 1960s. Along the way the Market Empire also had to overcome the resistance of the Nazis' "command consumption" and the Soviet-style socialist alternative. Essential to this narrative is a subtle analysis of the various causes for the expansion of American consumerism (e.g. markets, capital, product branding).	1
The protagonist of this story is American business (and its European counterpart) in all its forms: entrepreneurs, companies, business associations, and marketing experts. The stars are proselytizers like Edward Filene, the genius of retailing, and Richard Boogaart, who introduced supermarkets to Italy. They were aided, whenever the Old World resisted, by the United States government. Consumers—their outlook, buying habits, organizations, and politics—are the primary subjects of this book. Among consumers, special attention goes to women and their role in making the Market Empire.	. . .

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