Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers by Frank Trentmann review – buying into the material world
JG Ballard's last published novel, Kingdom Come, unfolds in a fictional London suburb called Brooklands, where a vast shopping mall fosters a bovine social docility. In the book's wayward conceit, consumerism is a totalitarian device used to control people and their artificial wants. Fired up by dreams of wealth, Brooklanders indulge in Black Friday-style bargain hunting in their local Metro-Centre.
Ballard was not the first to see shopping as a secular religion. imile Zola, in his 1883 novel The Ladies' Paradise, tells the rise of a department store in late 19th-century Paris and its role in the new mass consumption. With its silk counters and perfume department, the store looks forward to our age of indiscriminate purchase and credit binge. Far from aiding the French economy, Zola's cathedral of commerce heralds a new retail Europe of consumer anxiety, boom and bust.
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