Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920

by Kristin L. Hoganson

Histories of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era tend to characterize the United States as an expansionist nation bent on Americanizing the world without being transformed itself. In Consumers' Imperium , Kristin Hoganson reveals the other half of the story, demonstrating that the years between the Civil War and World War I were marked by heightened consumption of imports and strenuous efforts to appear cosmopolitan.

Hoganson finds evidence of international connections in quintessentially domestic places--American households. She shows that well-to-do white women in this era expressed intense interest in other cultures through imported household objects, fashion, cooking, entertaining, armchair travel clubs, and the immigrant gifts movement. From curtains to clothing, from around-the-world parties to arts and crafts of the homelands exhibits, Hoganson presents a new perspective on the United States in the world by shifting attention from exports to imports, from production to consumption, and from men to women. She makes it clear that globalization did not just happen beyond America's shores, as a result of American military might and industrial power, but that it happened at home, thanks to imports, immigrants, geographical knowledge, and consumer preferences. Here is an international history that begins at home.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Grad School, American History, Economics

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Kristin Hoganson is a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She specializes in the United States in world context, cultures of U.S. imperialism, and transnational history. She is the author of Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (1998) and Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920 (2007).

Reviews

[Jim Gulley · Rating 1 out of 5]

The conventional historiography of GAPE is that the Industrial Revolution generated an economic boom in the United States that unleashed an Americanization-of-the-world trope. Hoganson attempted to counter this narrative by arguing that in “focusing on the outward thrust of American power, historians have overlooked the extent to which the United States should be seen as a consumers’ imperium.” (10-11)

She organizes the defense of her argument around five topical chapters: interior design furnishings, fashion, foodways, travel, and the immigrant gifts movement. The book is well-written but poorly conceived and poorly argued. Her topics, particularly the chapters on immigrant gifts and travel, do not demonstrate any significance with regard to influencing American society. Each chapter is bootstrapped with anecdotal sources and editorial commentary.

Another criticism of the book is that her argument, if it were compelling, would only be applicable to a small segment of American society: white, upper-class, women in the Northeast and urban Midwest.

[Daniel Foster · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too many lists.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating topic; a bit long (it feels like Hoganson could not limit the number of examples she found in her research); the number of arguments she makes in the work make it a bit confusing to read at times, but that is also a tribute to the number of areas of study she is challenging/commenting upon (consumerism, foreign relations, gender/domesticity, immigration)

[Sheyda · Rating 5 out of 5]

an provocative look at the consumption of imperialism in the years after the civil war and before world war ii. one sometimes feels the author's defensive crouch, but this book is one of the best monographs i've read in a while.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very much enjoyed this. A wealth of detail and very fine-grained analysis about the habits of a certain stratum of American women in the given period. They lived globalization differently than we do, but many of the basic questions, assumptions, consequences are those we share today.