America's “empire” in Western Europe might well have been built by invitation, but despite the recent flurry of studies on the ideological roots of European anti-Americanism, relatively few have bothered to do the legwork necessary to figure out the extent to which ordinary Europeans' lives actually changed in response to the alluring (or revolting) intimations coming from across the Atlantic. For that reason alone, de Grazia's monumental study constitutes a rare accomplishment. But in nine beautifully written and eminently readable chapters, she not only sets a new standard for the study of European-American relations; she also teaches a few methodological lessons that all historians, but especially those with “transnational” ambitions, will find at once stimulating and daunting.

The book focuses on consumption as the terrain on which many of the confrontations and negotiations about America's influence in Western Europe took place. But de Grazia does not understand consumption as an isolated activity endowed with its own separate logic of development. Rather, she embeds consumption in broad political practices and cognitive apparatuses, such as normative notions of the social order or statistical ways for societies to understand their place in the world. This embeddedness made sure that many American imports—such as the “service ethics” of Rotary Clubs or the notion of a people's “standard of living”—would be both enthusiastically adopted and significantly reinterpreted in interwar Europe. This is one of the book's major historiographical contributions: through six of the nine chapters de Grazia shows how the consumer revolution that seemed to take Western Europe by storm during the post-World War II economic boom was actually prepared by decades of institutional and cultural changes, which clustered between the end of World War I and the onset of the Great Depression. This was the case with the chain store, a model of distribution peddled with mixed results through the Old Continent by the likes of Edward A. Filene, and with big-brand recognition, a marketing innovation which the promoters of American products managed to sneak into Europe even by way of the Leipzig international fair, the most venerable of Europe's commercial institutions.

As these examples suggest, de Grazia deftly weaves the specific, often told in vibrant detail, into general patterns of change. Indeed, methodologically the book offers two main innovative contributions. First, the contested process through which the United States built its ever new and improved hegemony is made concrete through the reconstruction of specific social networks that connected the two sides of the Ocean. Here the agents of change are not discourses spun by the usual dozen intellectuals who tend to populate the recent literature on anti-Americanism, but rather seemingly ordinary relationships, viewed as spaces where social structure and cultural meanings meet and are reproduced as well as challenged. Thus, in one of the chapters we meet the Kansan who introduced supermarkets to 1950s Italy, as well as the Italian women and men who taught him how to sell big in their cities.

In a second contribution, this attention to lived experience and local meanings allows de Grazia to craft her own highly productive version of transnational history, in which processes large and small come to construct and transform geopolitical categories—America, Europe, the nation-state, locality, globality, etcetera—which are never taken for granted as static or unhistorical entities. Thus, in another chapter, we learn how in the era of the Marshall Plan promises of rising consumption levels were implicated in two competing notions of citizenship. One was linked to the expanding welfare state and founded on social rights, and the other was connected to globalizing markets and legitimated through the claims of consumer sovereignty. In the end, of course, “Europe” emerged as an uneasy hybrid of the two. We should commend de Grazia not only for showing us how we got there, but also for reminding us of the many roads not taken.