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Developing markets abroad was crucial to the success of new consumer goods. This was achieved by aggressively making British commodities fashionable, a form of branding with British national identity. The new goods were endowed with a British style, and this style was sold abroad. British goods dominated the consumer cultures of the American and Caribbean colonies. Consumers in Europe, enthusiastic in the first three-quarters of the 18th century, were thwarted in the later parts of the century by high tariff barriers, war, and blockades. But the taste for English goods was well entrenched; the goods were imitated in their turn. The large middling-class markets at home and in the American colonies combined with Britain's advanced technologies to give those British goods the edge in Europe as well, as soon as trade barriers were relaxed in the years following the Napoleonic Wars.

This epilogue argues that the dependence on credit was the creation, intentional and unintentional, of the sometimes unlikely choices of government, business, and consumers. Over the first half of the twentieth century, government and business fashioned a new legal network of credit institutions and offered most American consumers a choice of whether or not to use this debt in their daily lives. By the end of the century, however, the choice to opt out of the credit system no longer remained. Three corporations assigned every American a credit rating. Their opinions governed consumers' ability to rent and to buy housing, to afford an education, to shop for clothes and food, to commute to work, and even to receive medical care—that is, the basic materials of daily life. Even to get a job, a worker needed good credit. Ultimately, the choice of whether or not to use credit ceased to exist for the American consumer.

This chapter examines the layered worlds of the Italian food business and consumer marketplace in East Harlem. In order to understand the central role of food in the making of Italian American identity, it is necessary to look at how Italian American food entrepreneurs in New York sought to link food with ethnic identity. This chapter first discusses the history of American-made Italian food and food consumption among Italian migrants between 1890 and 1920, along with the development of the U.S. food industry at the turn of the twentieth century. It then looks at the emergence of a new generation of consumers and food businesses during the period 1920–1940. It also considers the marketing strategies of Italian food producers and the response of Italian American consumers in the interwar years in relation to ethnicity and modernity. It shows that the centrality of food created an entrepreneurial ethnic middle class based in the food trade, which nurtured—and in turn supported by—the symbolic connection between the consumption of Italian food and the construction of diasporic Italian identities.

This chapter examines the Ex Oriente Lux mode of communication and how it prospered. It does so by comparing two important men who tried to sell their wares to American consumers: Christopher Oscanyan, a native of Istanbul; and Bayard Taylor of Pennsylvania. Their shared experiences show why mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-Americans preferred to hear about the East—in this case the Ottoman Empire—from fellow Anglo-Americans. Both Oscanyan and Taylor used an Ex Oriente Lux approach to present their personae as men of the East.

This chapter introduces the intrinsic purpose and aim of the book: the imagining of Africa through popular culture. The book focuses on three case studies, each of which has repackaged African visual culture for the American consumer. These cases involve Mattel’s world of Barbie, the 1996 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and the Walt Disney World Resort. The study focuses primarily on the way in which visual culture reinforces, challenges, and represents social relations, especially as they have been articulated around racialized identities in the past twenty years. The first task in this study, then, is the analysis of how three companies used African visual culture, and how they have generated ideological understandings of Africa for an American public. The second task involves the investigation of the way that African visual culture focuses Americans’ understanding of themselves, particularly around black and white racialized identities.

This chapter discusses whether chop suey is Chinese in origin and why Chinese food has largely remained at the lower end in the hierarchy of mainstream American consumption. American consumers in general never developed an appetite for China's haute cuisine, such as shark's fins and bird's nest soup, finding them prohibitively expensive and much too exotic and complex. Most Americans preferred cheap and convenient dishes such as chop suey. As chop suey quickly gained national brand-name recognition, many Chinese restaurants came to be known simply as chop suey joints. By the early twentieth century, the chop suey type of Chinese food emerged as a distinctive cuisine, characterized by some Chinese Americans as “Chinese-American food”.

This chapter shifts the focus to one of the most important markets for Spitalfields silk and the site of some of the bitterest fighting between the empires of Catholic France and Protestant Britain: colonial North America. Moving the story's perspective from England to the colonies shows that Garthwaite was one of the designers of a shared visual and material culture that knit the empire together. Crossing the Atlantic from the metropole to the colonies contextualizes Garthwaite and Spitalfields silk designs as part of the larger British Empire outside Britain itself. In particular, a transatlantic journey foregrounds the significance of Asian and Asian-style textiles, exotic plants, and North American consumers in the history of Spitalfields silk.

This chapter considers the global market as a context for transforming yet another product: water, sourced in Fiji and consumed in faraway New York. Across the globe, Fijian water has brought together complex desires, practices, and meanings. Its success in the U.S. market seems to depend on its remarkably effective denial of connection to actual origins, colonial history, U.S. power, and real people. Perhaps the real success of the product is that buyers do not believe there really is a serious, multiethnic postcolonial Fiji out there, imagining instead an original, natural, empty Paradise. Fiji Water speaks to U.S. cultural desires for naturalness, not just with any pure natural spring water, but native nature, from a native, natural nation. In Fiji, the history of water from the foothills of the Kauvadra range has engaged the cultural politics and meaning of “land-” (and water) “owning” in highly consequential ways. In the context of the global intricacies of the flow of this water, the Pacific romances of U.S. consumers and of Fijian cultural nationalism have intensified and transformed.

This chapter explains the opinions of philosophers on farm animal welfare. Many philosophers use ethical reasoning in their arguments, arguing that there are inconsistencies in how people perceive the suffering of humans, and suffering among different kinds of animals. Animal activists point out that often humans treat animal suffering as significantly less important than that of humans. This perception has been confirmed by several research studies which conclude that animal welfare is of little concern to the average American consumer. In short, Americans either do not care about the lives of farm animals. However, they seek to ensure that farm animals do not undergo excess torment. Thus, the issue is not whether hens and hogs are happier in one system or another but whether they suffer in one system or another.