New Left Review 36, November-December 2005

DONALD SASSOON

FROM BUDDENBROOKS TO BABBITT?

The Americanization of Europe is a long-standing theme that has generated a large literature. But no previous work has tackled it with the historical vigour and synthesizing ability of Victoria de Grazia’s Irresistible Empire. The origins of us hegemony as a global order—what de Grazia calls Market Empire—lie, she argues, neither at home nor in the world at large, but in Europe. ‘The Old World was where the United States turned its power as the premier consumer society into the dominion that came from being universally recognized as the fountainhead of modern consumer practices.’ Europe was the key zone for American cultural and commercial expansion, because there it confronted the ‘authority that the European region had accumulated since the age of merchant capitalism as the centre of vast material wealth, astute commercial know-how, and great good taste’. Irresistible Empire is the story of the way the us triumphed over this venerable, alternative model of a ‘material civilization’. If it could not in the end resist, what chance had other, less well-defended parts of the world?

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