cover image IRRESISTIBLE EMPIRE: America's Advance Through 20th-Century Europe

IRRESISTIBLE EMPIRE: America's Advance Through 20th-Century Europe

Victoria de Grazia, . . Harvard Univ., $29.95 (608pp) ISBN 978-0-674-01672-9

Although the global reach of McDonald's, Wal-Mart and Starbucks appears to be a recent phenomenon, de Grazia, a Columbia historian, contends that U.S. companies—and consumerism—have been making inroads in Europe for the past hundred years. She argues that an early, and major, U.S. innovation treated foreign territories as extensions of domestic markets. While Old Europe's bourgeois culture emphasized class differences and focused on the luxury of aesthetically pleasing goods, American consumer capitalism concentrated instead on mass-produced items that appealed to the middle-class consumer. By the end of the 20th century, European markets had embraced American consumerism to such an extent that social equality came to mean the ability to participate in mass consumer culture—as it does, she argues, in the U.S. She places the U.S.'s final triumph in 1986, when the first McDonald's in Italy opened next to the mosaics of Rome's Spanish Steps. In a book jam-packed with examples and analysis, de Grazia devotes chapters to the rise of branding and of chain stores, to blanket corporate advertising, to American film as an entertaining introduction to the American lifestyle (and sets of fantasies), to the treatment of European women as a target market and more. While much here has a pedantic quality, de Grazia writes clearly, giving an uncommon perspective on the ways and means by which the U.S. and Europe drew close after WWII. (Apr.)