Introduction

Abstract

American ideals and models feature prominently in the master narrative of postwar European consumer societies. To wit: in her influential book Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (2005), the American historian Victoria de Grazia maintains that a U.S.-style “Market Empire” marched across Europe and swept away the old economic order. By focusing on ideals and models that originated in the United States, de Grazia demonstrates how myriad American interests and actors contributed to the “unique formation of the Market Empire”—and to America’s status as the world’s first regime of mass consumption.1