Drawing on a wide range of studies of Europe, the United States, Asia, and Africa, the contributions gathered here consider how political history, business history, the history of science, cultural history, gender history, intellectual history, anthropology, and even environmental history can help us decode modern consumer societies.

A recent coinage within international relations, “nation branding” designates the process of highlighting a country’s positive characteristics for promotional purposes, using techniques similar to those employed in marketing and public relations. Nation Branding in Modern History takes an innovative approach to illuminating this contested concept, drawing on fascinating case studies in the United States, China, Poland, Suriname, and many other countries, from the nineteenth century to the present. It supplements these empirical contributions with a series of historiographical essays and analyses of key primary documents, making for a rich and multivalent investigation into the nexus of cultural marketing, self-representation, and political power.

This volume brings together historians, economists, political scientists, and anthropologists to present a global perspective on the new forms of lending and borrowing that have become a key feature of twentieth-century mass consumer societies, emphasizing comparative and transnational historical perspectives.

A Cultural History of Shopping was a Library Journal Best in Reference selection for 2022. In the modern consumer age that emerged after the First World War, shopping became a ubiquitous cultural practice. Despite its apparent universality, the historicity and contingency of shopping should not be ignored: its meaning was always inextricably linked to the political, material and economic contexts within which it took place. Gendered female for the most part, shopping continued to evoke different cultural responses, embraced as liberatory by some, condemned as frivolous by others. Business decisions and public policies helped construct the frameworks within which new, often American-led, shopping cultures emerged, from downtown department stores to chain stores to suburban shopping malls. The digital revolution in shopping that began in the last decade of the 20th century has changed the face of cities and towns and led to the closure of many bricks-and-mortar stores but, as this volume explores, the shopper remains very much at the center of Western capitalist societies. A Cultural History of Shopping in the Modern Age presents an overview of the period with themes addressing practices and processes; spaces and places; shoppers and identities; luxury and everyday; home and family; visual and literary representations; reputation, trust and credit; and governance, regulation and the state.

What did the cosmetic practices of middle-class women in the nineteenth century have in common with the repair of men's bodies mutilated in war? What did the New Woman of the Weimar years have to do with the field of social medicine that emerged in the same period? They were all part of a conversation about the cosmetic modification of bodies, a debate shaped by scientific knowledge and normative social models. Conceived as a cultural history, this book examines the history of artificially created beauty in Germany from the late Enlightenment to the early days of National Socialist rule.

This book puts the illegal economy of the German capital during and after World War II into context and provides a new interpretation of Germany's postwar history. The black market, it argues, served as a reference point for the beginnings of the two new German states.

Despite being a universal experience, eating occures with remarkable variety across time and place: not only do we not eat the same things, but the related technologies, rituals, and even the timing are in constant flux. This lively and innovative history paints a fresco of the Italian nation by looking at its storied relationship to food.