Empire of Things by Frank Trentmann review – a world of consumers

This history of consumption is fascinating and broad in scope, from Ming-era China to the pleasures of online shopping. But it is riven by a contradiction

This book addresses one of the most basic questions. To survey the vast terrain, Frank Trentmann, a professor at Birkbeck and formerly the head of a £5m research project on Cultures of Consumption, has delivered a monumental study, sweeping from Renaissance Europe to the burgeoning middle class of modern-day India, by way of 19th-century London, Berlin, Paris, Shanghai and pre- and postcolonial Africa.

Trentmann’s message is subtle and comes in different shades across many chapters. But fundamentally, his aim is to undercut conventional political and cultural critiques of consumer society. Consumption, Trentmann tells us, isn’t merely an empty exercise in social climbing, corrosive of the human spirit. Nor is it reducible to the homogenising anglobalisation of giant mass-producing corporations that JK Galbraith and Herbert Marcuse warned us against. Holding both crude sociology and simplistic economics at arm’s length, Trentmann paints a rich picture of the variegated human impulses that have impelled the history of consumption: the search for “domestic comfort, fashion and novelty”, the pleasures of shopping, the exotic taste for articles from “faraway lands”, “the cult of domestic possessions and hobbies”, and the mediatised inducements of the printed word, radio, cinema, TV, video and the digital age.

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