Though fraught with inelegant-sounding sentences, Trentmann’s history of five centuries of material culture is impressive in its breadth and scholarship. Anyone with compulsive buying disorder should buy a copy, or two, or three. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching!
Despite the book’s scale, conclusiveness is not one of its goals. Empire of Things is difficult, sometimes elusive, yet almost always illuminating. By the end received wisdom is weakened, though we never become quite sure what to put in its place. But in an academic field—studying consumption—that can seem wary of its own specialty, that turns out to be a refreshing novelty, like window shopping without having to decide on a final purchase.
It's an enormous undertaking, and the size of the book reflects that. It's huge. Thankfully it's also hugely readable. Combining a dizzying array of disciplines — economics, psychology, sociology, ecology, anthropology, religion, geopolitics, and even etymology — Empire deftly juggles a colossal load.
[Trentmann] 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 ... 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 sheer breadth of Trentmann’s panorama is impressive and no one can fail to learn from it. But the scale of the narrative cannot hide the fact that it is riven by a fundamental contradiction. After he has assured the reader over hundreds of pages about the complexity and multivalence of consumer culture and politics, the conclusion strikes a very different note.
