Ben Waber reviewed Empire of Things by Frank Trentmann
An Amazing Middle Sandwiched by Mediocre History
4 stars
Characterizing this book is hard - the first third is a chronology of commerce in the West, largely devoid of unique insight, while the last third is a standard 2010s era neoliberalism-curious, anachronistic review of the last ~40 years (there's weirdly a large section devoted to "fair trade" products). The middle of this book, however, is an exception, albeit flawed. There Trentmann does a comparative analysis of consumption norms in different developed parts of the world, demonstrating how norms of what constitutes a "decent" level of consumption is highly culturally contingent. He mostly shows his work here, bringing in quantitative metrics to back up observational data (this is mostly absent in the rest of the book, where, when numbers are used, they usually lack context).
Unfortunately there is a strange exoticization of East Asia - e.g. using Japanese words that literally mean the same thing as their English translation - …
Characterizing this book is hard - the first third is a chronology of commerce in the West, largely devoid of unique insight, while the last third is a standard 2010s era neoliberalism-curious, anachronistic review of the last ~40 years (there's weirdly a large section devoted to "fair trade" products). The middle of this book, however, is an exception, albeit flawed. There Trentmann does a comparative analysis of consumption norms in different developed parts of the world, demonstrating how norms of what constitutes a "decent" level of consumption is highly culturally contingent. He mostly shows his work here, bringing in quantitative metrics to back up observational data (this is mostly absent in the rest of the book, where, when numbers are used, they usually lack context).
Unfortunately there is a strange exoticization of East Asia - e.g. using Japanese words that literally mean the same thing as their English translation - which distracts from the overall analysis. In addition, one can count on one hand the number of paragraphs on Global South consumption - in a book that runs at 880 pages, this is a massive oversight. However, if one focuses on that middle of the book (roughly chapter 7 through 11), this is a worthy read. Highly recommend
