Civilization: The West and the Rest

This chapter examines the complex development of consumerism in the West and its spread throughout the world. One of the main ways in which this spread occurred is through Western clothing as basic as blue jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt. The author calls this “one of the greatest paradoxes of modern history”: the homogenization of style and the availability of “infinite choice” (198).

Ferguson also wonders what the adaptation of Western clothing—through popular culture—says about the West itself, whether it is about wanting to be like the West or simply adapting its forms to one’s own environment. Clothing plays a major role in this context because it was the textile industry that was first transformed by the Industrial Revolution in Europe. In general, the Industrial Revolution led to a “quantum leap in material standards of living for a rising share of humanity” (198). Ferguson even suggests calling it the “Industrial Evolution” in the Darwinian vein instead—to accurately portray the “seemingly random mutation, occasional speciation, and differential survival” (205).

One significant overlooked feature of industrialization is the fact that “the worker was at one and the same time a consumer” (198). The newfound ability to produce large quantities of cheap cloth and other items meant that it had to be sold, hence the “rapid development and spread of a consumer society that actually wanted more of these things” (201). Of course, textiles were not the only industry to undergo significant transformation. Iron production and the generation of power by using steam engines transformed society as well. Britain was the first to undergo industrialization, which has been the subject of historical debate when the circumstances were comparable in Northern Europe. Ferguson suggests that it was, perhaps, the abundance of coal in Britain and higher wages than anywhere else that may have played a key role in this transformation. By the late 19th century, industrialization and urbanization spread through the American northeast, Europe, and Russia.

The Industrial Revolution, initially, had many downsides, from higher mortality rates in urban settings to social inequality, in general, and child labor, specifically. One of the greatest critics of capitalism, Karl Marx, observed and examined unrestrained capitalism, and proposed his own theories by borrowing the dialectic from H. G. W. Hegel. Ferguson is critical of the impact of Marx’s theories on the world and of him as an individual whom he calls “odious” (206). Some of Marx’s key historicist predictions were about the suppression of workers’ wages and the concentration of wealth under capitalism.

Ferguson suggests that Marx was wrong about the “adaptive quality of the nineteenth-century state,” that is, the nation-state (211). He reviews the rise of nation-states in Europe, especially Italy and Germany through their respective unifications. The resultant political entities “offered their citizens a host of benefits: economies of scale, network externalities, reduced transaction costs and more efficient provision of key public goods like law and order, infrastructure and health” (215). As a result, the nation-states reduced the desirability of a proletarian revolution, and it occurred in places like Russia, then China—both agrarian countries, contrary to Marx’s prediction.

In Ferguson’s view, one of the most significant developments of the Industrial Revolution was the Singer sewing machine, which was created in 1850. Just a few decades later, there were Singer factories in several countries with Singer becoming “one of the world’s first truly global brands” (217). More uniform Western style of dressing too “swept the rest of the world, consigning traditional garb to the dressing-up basket of history” (219). One example of borrowing everything Western was Japan during the Meiji Restoration era. Japan began industrializing and modernizing. By the early 1900s, it won a war against Russia and began building its own empire by annexing Korea in 1910.

After this, Ferguson moves on to briefly examine the Soviet Union which arose out of Marxist ideas as an alternative to capitalism from a 1917 Revolution led by Vladimir Lenin. Soviet industrialization of a largely agricultural country that began in 1928 was rapid and miraculous but occurred in the context of a highly centralized, bureaucratic state rather than those of private enterprises of the Industrial Revolution in Europe. Despite being an industrial powerhouse “ideally suited for mass production of sophisticated weaponry,” the Soviet Union ultimately failed to produce, in Ferguson’s view, a “far more attractive version of civilian life” (236). The author argues that the more desirable, capitalist American “trajectory seemed attainable” to other societies (238).

This trajectory was best symbolized by “a decent pair of jeans” that the Soviet Union “could not manage to produce” (250). Ferguson refers to this phenomenon as the “jeans genie” that was let out of the bottle (240). He frames the history of the Cold War through this consumerist lens. Jeans were invented in 1873 yet it was not the comfort and accessibility that made them so popular around the world. Ferguson credits pop culture and Hollywood, for instance, Marlon Brando and James Dean films, for making jeans seem so desirable. Overall, the author believes that “the consumer society posed a lethal threat to the Soviet system” because it was “market-based” (249).

Since the end of the Cold War, however, there had been a move away from Westernization in some parts of the world. For example, Turkey, a “[o]nce pro-American pillar of NATO” has been “increasingly turning eastward” (255). This turn is, in part, visible through a return to an Islamic-style way of dressing. A move away from Western models like its consumer culture may be a part of the West losing its dominance in Ferguson’s thought.