Victoria de Grazia. Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. 586 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-01672-6. Reviewed by: Max Paul Friedman, Department of History, Florida State University. Published by: H-German (June, 2006)
Babbitt vs. Buddenbrooks: A Clash of Civilizations? Victoria de Grazia's Irresistible Empire is a dazzling work that aims to reassess the American impact on Europe in the twentieth century. De Grazia has produced a fine-grained history of key aspects of late modern capitalism. De Grazia depicts the triumph of scientific marketing and distribution techniques as American innovators imposed their "Market Empire" on Europeans, who reluctantly gave up their old-fashioned, inefficient forms of commerce. Based on prodigious research in underused non-governmental archives of businesses and civic organizations in France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the United States, this study--nearly 600 pages of often wonderfully crafted sentences--is in its own way an homage to the European style that de Grazia mourns one as displaced by American effectiveness: culturally rich and aesthetically pleasurable, it may be inefficient but it is beautiful to behold. De Grazia's argument is that the industrialized United States in the twentieth century became a Market Empire, "a great imperium with the outlook of a great emporium" (p. 3). To sell their wares in Europe, American entrepreneurs backed by the U.S. government not only demanded access, but sought to refashion the very structure of the European economic system. Members of voluntary associations, social scientists and businesspeople crossed the Atlantic to supplant European practices with their own. They brought the creed not only of mass production, but of mass consumption, "challenging Europe's bourgeois commercial civilization and overturning its old regime" (p. 5). full: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=235741159818672 -- www.marxmail.org
