In this masterful study of the United States' transformative influence on twentieth-century Europe, Victoria de Grazia traces “the irresistible rise and inexorable decline” (p. 485) of what she calls the “Market Empire” promoted by American businessmen in cooperation with American politicians and diplomats. The agents of the “Market Empire” brought innovations in merchandising to Europe that included chain stores, big-brand goods, and full-service advertising agencies in the interwar years and supermarkets in the post-World War II period. Such changes went hand in hand with new understandings of selling and consuming, including the “service ethic” embodied by U.S. Rotarians, the belief in a measurable standard of living, and the conviction that access to proper consumer choices was central to the security of family and nation. In the process, de Grazia shows, a European bourgeois regime of consumption was forever destroyed.

Readers of the subtitle “How Europeans Traded Rights for Goods” (chapter seven) might suspect that de Grazia's volume is a lament on the demise of European taste, culture, and independence at the hands of American-inspired mediocrity. Rather, what unfolds over nearly 500 pages is an innovative and elegant analysis of the complex interactions between different business cultures and changing regimes of consumption. Drawing on archives as well as a wide range of printed sources in several languages, de Grazia demonstrates how European elites at times cooperated with Americans and at other times were in direct conflict with them. Even during the core years of American innovation and influence from the 1920s to 1970s, Europeans never adopted American models wholesale. Woolworth's German stores, first founded in the 1920s, prided themselves in stocking ninety-eight percent of goods from German suppliers. The company avoided France altogether, because French industries could not produce inexpensive goods in the quantity and quality needed. Instead French department store owners, like their counterparts elsewhere, founded one-price chains. In 1950s Italy, resistance to larger supermarkets transformed what Italian small shops sold. Thus, in numerous instances, “America's advance” proved less “irresistible” than the book's title suggests. As De Grazia reveals, however, even in regimes built in reactionary rejection of the American “Market Empire,” such as fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, U.S. innovations proliferated. Both Italy and Germany developed star systems associated with the movie industry, and Nazi-era illustrated magazines were full of American-style “populist” ads with extensive copy that suggested to consumers the therapeutic qualities of the promoted products. The collapse of the racist Nazi New Order in 1945 opened the way for a new round of U.S. interventions in conjunction with the Marshall Plan. With demand created by the Korean War, Europeans West of the Iron Curtain began to experience a decline in income differentials and by the 1970s their consumption habits, and their models of domesticity and femininity, were much closer to those of Americans. For recent decades, de Grazia's conclusion documents a reversal of fortunes: Europeans have learned so well from U.S. business that they are now among the most innovative enterprises reaching masses of U.S. consumers—with IKEA at the forefront.

U.S. interactions with Germany, France, and Italy form the core of De Grazia's account supplemented with forays into the United Kingdom, Belgium, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Spain, Greece, and Eastern Europe. To negotiate such broad terrain, De Grazia brings key figures into focus such as Edward A. Filene, the Boston merchant, frequent visitor of Europe and tireless promoter of the “gospel of modern distribution” (p. 140); and Paulette Bernège, French advocate of household efficiency. Throughout she traces the “growing internationalization of cultural models” (p. 76): the brilliant chapter on the standard of living reveals the ideological power of setting such a standard, the problems of comparison, and the ways in which such standards were contested within and among countries. With a keen eye for a good story, De Grazia shows how in the absence of clear status distinctions west of the Atlantic, class and taste functioned differently in Europe and the United States, and how fundamentally class relations were transformed in twentieth-century Europe.

De Grazia conceives the relationship that businessmen, marketers, social commentators, and politicians forged between the United States and Europe as a “White Atlantic.” This formulation captures the mindset of many of the protagonists on both sides of the ocean. Despite intense conflict, they believed in fundamental affinity, an affinity that some saw in explicitly racial terms. “White Atlantic” as a play on Paul Gilroy's “Black Atlantic,” however, is perhaps also indicative of some questions the book leaves open. Thus one might like to learn more about precisely how in Europe “the colonial way of life” constituted “a major pillar of the old regime of consumption” (p. 356). The book also says little about a U.S. market where race continues to be a major factor in standard of living disparities, and it does not account for the roles Americans of color have had in spreading and criticizing the American dream. While Europeans contest regimes of consumption, American critical voices remain muted, and thus the book underestimates the anxieties that mass consumption engendered in the United States. These quibbles should not distract from the accomplishments of this landmark volume on Americanization: de Grazia gives us useful vocabulary and important frameworks to think about wide-reaching changes in politics and everyday life in the twentieth century.