The Transformation of the World (52 page)

The most spectacular innovation of nineteenth-century commerce was the department store. More than any other form of retailing it relied on standardized mass production of many of the goods on offer. Department stores opened up a novel commercial and social space, providing a stage for the world of commodities and enchanting the public with a kind of world's fair in miniature. The first such stores appeared in Paris in the 1850s. The philosopher and cultural historian Walter Benjamin made them a central theme (along with the famous arcades) in his analysis of the culture of French capitalism.
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Paris was not a
port city or international transshipment center like London or Hamburg or a center of industry like New York or Berlin. In France industrial mass production had not yet supplanted artisanal production to the extent it had in the United States; industry and crafts met up in the Parisian culture of consumption.
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The great era of the Parisian arcades was the 1830s and 1840s, whereas the golden age of the department store lay in the Belle Époque between 1880 and 1914. The London department stores, which sprang up a few years after those in Paris, were even more uncompromising in their program of gathering all the necessities of life under one roof: not even a funeral department was lacking. Charles Digby Harrod built his store in the 1880s as a cross between a business and a club.
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In New York the first department stores opened earlier than those in London, so early that a Parisian influence can be discounted. It was in 1851 that Alexander T. Stewart built a five-story Renaissance-style marble palace on Broadway and started an architectural rivalry in which newly founded cities such as Chicago soon took part.
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The universal store did not, however, catch on at once everywhere in the developed world. The years between 1875 and 1885 were the launch period in Germany, when the Wertheim, Tietz, Karstadt, and Althoff families entered the fray, and architectural masterpieces such as the art deco Kaufhaus in the Saxonian town of Görlitz could hold up to comparison with stores in the largest cities. In Vienna, another great European center of consumption, it was only around the turn of the century that the department store overshadowed large stores with a more specialized range of goods.
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In Tokyo, department stores appeared toward the end of the Meiji period. A start was made in 1886, when for the first time one of the old silk stores also began to sell Western clothing. Subsequently, large stores witnessed many innovations: the city's first telephones were installed in them, and female assistants made their debut (traditionally only men stood at market stalls or behind counters). The first great Western-style shopping palace opened its doors in 1908. But there was also another novelty: the multistore covered market known as
kankōba
(“place for the encouragement of industry”), which fused the principle of the Oriental bazaar with that of the Parisian arcades, pointing ahead to the global “mall” of the present day. In the second decade of the twentieth century, however, fully fledged department stores supplanted these covered markets bazaars in Tokyo.
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Another innovation that one associates with the nineteenth century, the restaurant, is not actually a European invention. Rather, the evidence points to polygenesis of this type of commercial catering. Two attributes distinguish the restaurant from the manifold inns, taverns, and guesthouses that have existed since early times in numerous countries. On the one hand, it produced high-quality cuisine—previously a feature only of courts and elite private residences—and made it available to anyone who could afford to pay; it democratized fine dining. On the other hand, the restaurateur was an independent businessman, who offered a product and a service without the ties of a guild or corporation. A world in which food was not a biological need but an artistic passion came into
being where it still has its center today: in Paris. But behind complicated issues of cultural history, there lies a relatively mundane process. The French Revolution destroyed the royal court with all its culinary splendor and threw out of work the private cooks of dispossessed aristocrats who had fled the country. A new supply thus became available to cater to a new market, as an urban bourgeoisie with sufficient purchasing power discovered the culinary arts. In the course of the nineteenth century, this public became increasingly international: one of the great attractions of the French metropolis for the new luxury tourism was its unrivaled gastronomy.
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The rise of outdoor eating did not stop with expensive high-class restaurants but stretched all the way down to diners in working-class districts. Peculiarities of national culture also played a role. Across the Channel there were 26,000 fish-and-chip shops, which used a thousand tons of frying oil a week. The occasion when cod was first combined with potato strips in this way is lost in the mists of time, but it must have been at some point in the 1860s. The meal then developed into the favorite of the British working class, helping to shape its identity and symbolizing the national virtues on a plate.
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Good-quality commercial eateries certainly existed at an earlier date in China, and so the French claim to have “invented” the restaurant rests on shaky foundations. Private gastronomy blossomed in the late Ming period, essentially in the sixteenth century, when new mercantile wealth, together with a boom in foreign trade, led to a kind of embourgeoisement of large parts of urban culture. The burgeoning food culture managed to survive the upheavals of the seventeenth century, and reports and literary sources from the subsequent period testify to a varied culinary landscape that included public restaurants at any level of quality and price, from simple street grills to teahouses and specialized guesthouses to large banqueting halls. In the early modern period, China was much less segregated by estate or hierarchy than European or Japanese society; the boundaries between popular and elite culture were more permeable. Moreover, the urban residences of the rich, with their pavilions and inner courtyards, were more modest than the
hôtels
and mansions of the nobility in Paris or London. Top chefs could therefore enter the public domain earlier than in the West. What happened in France after the Revolution was by then a matter of course in China.

And Japan? There the beginnings of the restaurant date back to the eighteenth century. Until the nineteenth century Japanese society and culture remained strongly marked by status distinctions. The various kinds of restaurant therefore served more blatantly than in Europe, and a fortiori China, as social markers and upholders of distinctness. The first Chinese restaurant, an exotic creature altogether, opened in Japan in 1883, and Western ones were very few and far between. “Fine distinctions” were thus plainly visible in the gastronomic world.
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In sum: the restaurant was a parallel invention in East Asia and Europe; the former was clearly in the lead, but there is no evidence that Europe took to the restaurant from China in the same way that it was inspired by Chinese horticulture in the eighteenth century.

Changed eating and consumption habits went together with new forms of marketing—a field in which the United States was the world leader, closely followed by Germany. The 1880s saw the birth and marketing of the branded product, with strategies planned like military operations. Singer's sewing machine and Underberg's herb liqueur in its characteristic bottle were present at the dawn of brand-centered marketing. It could develop because the serial production of articles of mass consumption was now a technical possibility. Whereas most consumers had previously been in the dark about where a product came from (unless they bought it directly from the producer), they were now surrounded by the names and logos of cigarette firms, soap producers, or canned soup manufacturers. Branding and the patent law were part of the new era of organized mass consumption.
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No commodity embodied this watershed in cultural and economic history more strikingly than the sticky brown liquid that the chemist John Styth Pemberton launched in Atlanta on May 8, 1886 as a cure for hangovers and headaches: Coca-Cola. Sales rocketed from 1,500 gallons in 1887 to 6,750,000 gallons in 1913.
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Coca-Cola belonged to the first generation of industrial food and drink, which emerged in the 1880s in the United States and soon led to the founding of corporations in Europe too. The key products, from Heinz Ketchup to Kellogg's Corn Flakes to Lever's margarine, were all created in the laboratory. Branded goods rapidly spread around the world, so that by the early years of the new century the petroleum lamp burning oil from Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company, along with Western artificial fertilizer and cigarettes, could be found in remote Chinese villages. A further element in the new marketing complex, which was decisive in extending its reach, was the mail-order business. This, too, was an American invention: it seemed an obvious idea, given the size of the country and the isolation of many of its farms. Also essential was the expansion of the railroad, while the delivery of heavy packages by the United States Postal Service after 1913 made things simpler still.
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Does all this add up to a new “consumer society”? In the early 1980s historians rediscovered the consumer and thereby corrected, or fleshed out, a view of history that had focused too narrowly on the
productive
achievements of industrialization. The flywheels of human action, they showed, were oiled by needs and competition, hedonism and fashion. This is not only interesting for cultural history but also important for the explanation of economic progress. For only a sufficient level of demand could (and can) translate impulses to rationalize production into macroeconomic processes of growth. When did the consumer society begin? If by that we do not mean the same as the affluent society (in which nearly
everyone
pursues consumption as an end in itself), if we have in mind only the existence of consumption-oriented social strata beyond a tiny traditional elite, then eighteenth-century England undoubtedly qualifies as a consumer society.
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Again, to be sure, we might ask whether China in the period from roughly 1550 to 1640 might not already be described as such a consumer
society, and if the term might not be appropriate also for early modern Istanbul.
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Clearly there was purchasing power among broad sections of the population outside the imperial court and officialdom. And contrary to the cliché that fashion was an eighteenth-century European fancy unknown in Asia at that time, it might be pointed out that the frequency of conservative-traditionalist complaints about the breakdown of morals is evidence of the extent to which official sartorial codes were eroded time and again.
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Hannes Siegrist has defined the ideal type of “consumer society” as follows: “Relatively high prosperity is not concentrated in a small elite. There is a minimum degree of civil equality and political rights, a broad middle class, social mobility and competition. A certain pluralism of values, diligence, a work ethic, and a striving for goods out of worldly but also partly religious motives are generally customary and understood to be legitimate. There is a division of labor and a degree of rationalization in agriculture, industry, and trade. The family is outwardly oriented in relation to work, professional life, and profit making; there is a well-differentiated institutional and legal system, rational knowledge that permits and fosters calculable and calculating behavior, a cultural apparatus that fosters understanding among the producers, procurers, and consumers of goods and that guides how buying and consuming are interpreted. Money functions as the general means of exchange.”
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Most of the elements in this definition probably apply to late Ming China, although the country did not develop further in that direction and, like so many others, was overtaken by Europe in the nineteenth century. In Europe and North America, on the other hand, a long-term dynamic toward Siegrist's ideal type took shape. The extent to which this accentuated or flattened national cultural differences is an issue that was widely discussed in the twentieth century in relation to so-called Americanization. The most interesting aspect for global history is how far the rest of the world had already adopted Euro-American consumption goals and models in the nineteenth century. The answer to this question cannot be general but must proceed by way of examples.

The Creole elites of the new Latin American republics developed perhaps the strongest consumer orientation to Europe. British textiles flooded the region immediately after independence, and long before the arrival of the railroad, mule trains were carrying British cotton goods from port cities into the tablelands and high valleys of Mexico and Peru. Twenty or thirty years were enough to saturate the Latin American markets with British goods. Few imports passed through the cities to the haciendas and mines of the interior. The affluent elites, however, grew more and more accustomed to a European lifestyle. In the absence of local production, the prestigious symbols of Western progress had to be imported from England and Germany, Italy and France, and increasingly from the United States. The assortment ranged from machinery to French wine and English beer to coaches, spectacles, bicycles, and marble for the magnificent buildings of the rich. Gilberto Freyre considers that in the early nineteenth century, the rich in
Brazil tried to emulate the formerly despised Protestant heretics of Britain by wearing artificial dentures.
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A small minority of Latin American consumers cultivated an ostentatiously European lifestyle, in which Spanish models usually played little or no role. From mid-century on, it became noticeable also in the appearance of a city such as Buenos Aires, with its shopping boulevards, grand hotels,
salons de thé
, and patisseries. The reorientation to European models went hand in hand with a new kind of racism: one switched custom from a baker of African origin to a genuine French pâtissier, and one's piano teacher, hitherto often black, was now brought out from Europe.
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Meanwhile, social modernization passed by the majority of the population. Demand was funded increasingly out of the proceeds of Latin American exports to Europe (coffee, copper, guano, and so on).