Consumers' Imperium

Book cover of Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920

Book description

Histories of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era tend to characterize the United States as an expansionist nation bent on Americanizing the world without being transformed itself. In ""Consumers' Imperium"", Kristin Hoganson reveals the other half of the story, demonstrating that the years between the Civil War and World War…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Consumers' Imperium as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Marc-William Palen

Author

Where to begin. Hoganson’s first book had already transformed our understanding about why the US acquired a colonial empire in 1898 through the politics of gender.

In Consumers’ Imperium she once again flips the script by investigating the domestic side of the Gilded Age capitalist empire. In doing so, wealthy white women are recast as power brokers of American globalization and imperialism through their purchasing habits, exhibitions, and armchair travel clubs.

From Marc-William's list on late-19th-century American capitalism and empire.

Stephen Tuffnell

Author

We are all aware of how modern homes are filled with goods from around the world, but have you ever wondered what this looked like for nineteenth-century Americans? This is the book for you. It’s a tour de force of synthesis and imaginative research. Join Hoganson on a tour of middle-class homes in the Gilded Age and see how decoration, cooking, fictive travel, dinner parties, and other household objects were all part of a strenuous effort to appear “cosmopolitan” and to exert power through consumption of the non-western world. This is the kind of book that makes you proclaim time…

From Stephen's list on the USA and the world in the nineteenth century.