Irresistible Empire

America's Advance Through Twentieth-Century Europe

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by Victoria de Grazia

Harvard University Press

Due/Published April 2005, 544 pages, cloth

ISBN 0674016726

The most significant conquest of the twentieth century may well have been the triumph of American consumer society over Europe's bourgeois civilization. It is this little-understood but world-shaking campaign that unfolds in Irresistible Empire, Victoria de Grazia's brilliant account of how the American standard of living defeated the European way of life and achieved the global cultural hegemony that is both its great strength and its key weakness today.

De Grazia describes how, as America's market empire advanced with confidence through Europe, spreading consumer-oriented capitalism, all alternative strategies fell before it--first the bourgeois lifestyle, then the Third Reich's command consumption, and finally the grand experiment of Soviet-style socialist planning. Tracing the peculiar alliance that arrayed New World salesmanship, statecraft, and standardized goods against the Old World's values of status, craft, and good taste, Victoria de Grazia follows the United States' market-driven imperialism through a vivid series of cross-Atlantic incursions by the great inventions of American consumer society. We see Rotarians from Duluth in the company of the high bourgeoisie of Dresden; working-class spectators in ramshackle French theaters conversing with Garbo and Bogart; Stetson-hatted entrepreneurs from Kansas in the midst of fussy Milanese shoppers; and, against the backdrop of Rome's Spanish Steps and Paris's Opera Comique, Fast Food in a showdown with advocates for Slow Food. Demonstrating the intricacies of America's advance, de Grazia offers an intimate and historical dimension to debates over America's exercise of soft power and the process known as Americanization. She raises provocative questions about the quality of the good life, democracy, and peace that issue from the vaunted victory of mass consumer culture.

Irresistible Empire is a brilliant synthesis of economic and cultural history--magisterial in scope, convincing in argument, written with vigor and grace. Victoria de Grazia breathes new life into the notion of 'Americanization,' providing fascinating details and fresh insights on nearly every page. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the elusive but implacable influence of American consumer culture in foreign settings, throughout the twentieth century and beyond. A powerful, important, and timely book. --Jackson Lears, author of Fables of Abundance: a Cultural History of Advertising in America

Thomas Mann, a Rotarian? This is only one of the many delicious surprises awaiting the reader of Irresistible Empire, Victoria de Grazia's rich and richly ironic exploration of the vexed encounter between American salesmanship and the mercantile cultures of continental Europe. Tacking effortlessly across the White Atlantic, de Grazia tells the story of a near-century-long, transnational seduction--a story that is one part coercive geopolitics and one part coyly improvised dance. --Jean-Christophe Agnew, Yale University