American Commodities in an Age of Empire

American Commodities in an Age of Empire PDF Author: Mona Domosh
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0415945720
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book

Book Description
Selling Civilization is a novel interpretation of the relationship between consumerism, commercialism, and imperialism during the first empire building ear of America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Unlike other empires in history, which were typically built on military power, the first American empire was primarily a commercial one, dedicated to pushing products overseas and dominating foreign markets. While the American government was important, it was the great capitalist firms of America--Heinz, Singer, McCormick, Kodak, Standard Oil--that drove the imperial process, explicitly linking the purchase of consumer goods overseas with "civilization" Their persistent message to America's prospective customers was, "buy American products and join the march of progress."Selling Civilization also explores how the images of peoples overseas conveyed through goods elevated America's sense of itself in the world.

American Commodities in an Age of Empire

American Commodities in an Age of Empire PDF Author: Mona Domosh
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0415945720
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book

Book Description
Selling Civilization is a novel interpretation of the relationship between consumerism, commercialism, and imperialism during the first empire building ear of America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Unlike other empires in history, which were typically built on military power, the first American empire was primarily a commercial one, dedicated to pushing products overseas and dominating foreign markets. While the American government was important, it was the great capitalist firms of America--Heinz, Singer, McCormick, Kodak, Standard Oil--that drove the imperial process, explicitly linking the purchase of consumer goods overseas with "civilization" Their persistent message to America's prospective customers was, "buy American products and join the march of progress."Selling Civilization also explores how the images of peoples overseas conveyed through goods elevated America's sense of itself in the world.

American Commodities in an Age of Empire

American Commodities in an Age of Empire PDF Author: Mona Domosh
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136802770
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Get Book

Book Description
This is a novel interpretation of the relationship between consumerism, commercialism, and imperialism during the first empire building era of America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unlike other empires in history, which were typically built on military power, the first American empire was primarily a commercial one, dedicated to pushing products overseas and dominating foreign markets. While the American government was important, it was the great capitalist firms of America – Heinz, Singer, McCormick, Kodak, Standard Oil – that drove the imperial process, explicitly linking the purchase of consumer goods overseas with 'civilization'. Their persistent message to America's prospective customers was, 'buy American products and join the march of progress'. Domosh also explores how the images of peoples overseas conveyed through goods elevated America's sense of itself in the world.

With Sails Whitening Every Sea

With Sails Whitening Every Sea PDF Author: Brian Rouleau
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801455081
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Get Book

Book Description
Many Americans in the Early Republic era saw the seas as another field for national aggrandizement. With a merchant marine that competed against Britain for commercial supremacy and a whaling fleet that circled the globe, the United States sought a maritime empire to complement its territorial ambitions in North America. In With Sails Whitening Every Sea, Brian Rouleau argues that because of their ubiquity in foreign ports, American sailors were the principal agents of overseas foreign relations in the early republic. Their everyday encounters and more problematic interactions—barroom brawling, sexual escapades in port-city bordellos, and the performance of blackface minstrel shows—shaped how the United States was perceived overseas. Rouleau details both the mariners’ "working-class diplomacy" and the anxieties such interactions inspired among federal authorities and missionary communities, who saw the behavior of American sailors as mere debauchery. Indiscriminate violence and licentious conduct, they feared, threatened both mercantile profit margins and the nation’s reputation overseas. As Rouleau chronicles, the world’s oceans and seaport spaces soon became a battleground over the terms by which American citizens would introduce themselves to the world. But by the end of the Civil War, seamen were no longer the nation’s principal ambassadors. Hordes of wealthy tourists had replaced seafarers, and those privileged travelers moved through a world characterized by consolidated state and corporate authority. Expanding nineteenth-century America’s master narrative beyond the water’s edge, With Sails Whitening Every Sea reveals the maritime networks that bound the Early Republic to the wider world.

The Price of Empire

The Price of Empire PDF Author: Miles M. Evers
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 100939634X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Get Book

Book Description
The United States was an upside-down British Empire. It had an agrarian economy, few large investors, and no territorial holdings outside of North America. However, decades before the Spanish-American War, the United States quietly began to establish an empire across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean. While conventional wisdom suggests that large interests – the military and major business interests – drove American imperialism, The Price of Empire argues that early American imperialism was driven by small entrepreneurs. When commodity prices boomed, these small entrepreneurs took risks, racing ahead of the American state. Yet when profits were threatened, they clamoured for the US government to follow them into the Pacific. Through novel, intriguing stories of American small businessmen, this book shows how American entrepreneurs manipulated the United States into pursuing imperial projects in the Pacific. It explores their travels abroad and highlights the consequences of contemporary struggles for justice in the Pacific.

Empire of Sacrifice

Empire of Sacrifice PDF Author: Jon Pahl
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814768954
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
It is widely recognized that American culture is both exceptionally religious and exceptionally violent. Americans participate in religious communities in high numbers, yet American citizens also own guns at rates far beyond those of citizens in other industrialized nations. Since September 11, 2001, U.S. scholars have understandably discussed religious violence in terms of terrorist acts, a focus that follows U.S. policy. Yet, according to Jon Pahl, to identify religious violence only with terrorism fails to address the long history of American violence rooted in religion throughout the country's history. In Empire of Sacrifice, Pahl explains how both of these distinctive features of American culture work together by exploring how constructions along the lines of age, race, and gender have operated to centralize cultural power across American civil or cultural religions in ways that don't always appear to be “religious” at all. Pahl traces the development of these forms of systemic violence throughout American history and focuses an intense light on the complex and durable interactions between religion and violence in American history, from Puritan Boston to George W. Bush's Baghdad.

Empire's Nursery

Empire's Nursery PDF Author: Brian Rouleau
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479804479
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book

Book Description
How the West was fun -- Serialized Impreialism -- Empire's amateurs -- Internationalist impulses -- Dollar diplomacy for the price of a few nickels -- Comic book cold war.

The Emergence of Brand-Name Capitalism in Late Colonial India

The Emergence of Brand-Name Capitalism in Late Colonial India PDF Author: Douglas E. Haynes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350278068
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Get Book

Book Description
This book examines the emergence of professional advertising in western India during the interwar period. It explores the ways in which global manufacturers advanced a 'brand-name capitalism' among the Indian middle class by promoting the sale of global commodities during the 1920s and 1930s, a time when advertising was first introduced in India as a profession and underwent critical transformations. Analysing the cultural strategies, both verbal and visual, used by foreign businesses in their advertisements to capture urban consumers, Haynes argues that the promoters of various commodities crystalized their campaigns around principles of modern conjugality. He also highlights the limitations of brand-name capitalism during this period, examining both its inability to cultivate markets in the countryside or among the urban poor, and its failure to secure middle-class customers. With numerous examples of illustrated advertisements taken from Indian newspapers, the book discusses campaigns for male sex tonics and women's medicines, hot drinks such as Ovaltine and Horlicks, soaps such as Lifebuoy, Lux and Sunlight, cooking mediums such as Dalda and electrical household technologies. By examining the formation of 'brand-name capitalism' and two key structures that accompanied it- the advertising agency and the field of professional advertising- this book sheds new light on the global consumer economy in interwar India, and places developments in South Asia into a larger global history of consumer capitalism.

Trading Environments

Trading Environments PDF Author: Gordon M. Winder
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317391624
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book

Book Description
This volume examines dynamic interactions between the calculative and speculative practices of commerce and the fruitfulness, variability, materiality, liveliness and risks of nature. It does so in diverse environments caught up in new trading relationships forged on and through frontiers for agriculture, forestry, mining and fishing. Historical resource frontiers are understood in terms of commercial knowledge systems organized as projects to transform landscapes and environments. The book asks: how were environments traded, and with what environmental and landscape consequences? How have environments been engineered, standardized and transformed within past trading systems? What have been the successes and failures of economic knowledge in dealing with resource production in complex environments? It considers cases from northern Europe, North and South America, Central Africa and New Zealand in the period between 1750 and 1990, and the contributors reflect on the effects of transnational commodity chains, competing economic knowledge systems, environmental ignorance and learning, and resource exploitation. In each case they identify tensions, blind spots, and environmental learning that plagued commercial projects on frontiers.

Making Italian America

Making Italian America PDF Author: Simone Cinotto
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823256278
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book

Book Description
How do immigrants and their children forge their identities in a new land—and how does the ethnic culture they create thrive in the larger society? Making Italian America brings together new scholarship on the cultural history of consumption, immigration, and ethnic marketing to explore these questions by focusing on the case of an ethnic group whose material culture and lifestyles have been central to American life: Italian Americans. As embodied in fashion, film, food, popular music, sports, and many other representations and commodities, Italian American identities have profoundly fascinated, disturbed, and influenced American and global culture. Discussing in fresh ways topics as diverse as immigrant women’s fashion, critiques of consumerism in Italian immigrant radicalism, the Italian American influence in early rock ’n’ roll, ethnic tourism in Little Italy, and Guido subculture, Making Italian America recasts Italian immigrants and their children as active consumers who, since the turn of the twentieth century, have creatively managed to articulate relations of race, gender, and class and create distinctive lifestyles out of materials the marketplace offered to them. The success of these mostly working-class people in making their everyday culture meaningful to them as well as in shaping an ethnic identity that appealed to a wider public of shoppers and spectators looms large in the political history of consumption. Making Italian America appraises how immigrants and their children redesigned the market to suit their tastes and in the process made Italian American identities a lure for millions of consumers. Fourteen essays explore Italian American history in the light of consumer culture, across more than a century-long intense movement of people, goods, money, ideas, and images between Italy and the United States—a diasporic exchange that has transformed both nations. Simone Cinotto builds an imaginative analytical framework for understanding the ways in which ethnic and racial groups have shaped their collective identities and negotiated their place in the consumers’ emporium and marketplace. Grounded in the new scholarship in transnational U.S. history and the transfer of cultural patterns, Making Italian America illuminates the crucial role that consumption has had in shaping the ethnic culture and diasporic identities of Italians in America. It also illustrates vividly why and how those same identities—incorporated in commodities, commercial leisure, and popular representations—have become the object of desire for millions of American and global consumers.

Modern Asian Design

Modern Asian Design PDF Author: D.J. Huppatz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474296866
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
Modern Asian Design provides a comprehensive introduction to the development of Asian design in the modern period, both tracing historical threads and offering a theoretical framework within which to chart the history of design in Asia. Rather than a singular “Asian history”, this book presents a series of studies centred on trade routes, colonial relationships, regional networks and cross-cultural exchanges. Modern Asian Design builds on existing resources beyond design history in an effort to map the field, focusing particularly on relations between Asia and the West and also across Asian design cultures. Opening with a brief overview of trade and exchange networks in the 17th and 18th centuries, the bulk of this study comprises analysis of the development of modern design in Asia during the later 19th and early 20th centuries, a period of rapid modernisation. The book's final two chapters bring these central ideas into a contemporary and highly relevant context.