In grand hotels, the classes and nations mixed in higher concentrations than anywhere else in the city. Grand hotels offered spaces for the elite exercise of freedom but under the necessary conditions of staff surveillance and mutual policing on the part of the guests. Interclass equilibrium rested on the existence of a strict, intricate hierarchy for workers and unspoken norms of dress and comportment for guests. Grand hoteliers had to keep their properties free from conflict, after all, and this they accomplished with recourse to a liberal balance of freedom and control. The arrangement lasted until August 1914, when everyone – guests, white-collar employees, managers, workers, owners – went to war. Then, and all of a sudden, violence erupted in grand hotel lobbies. In one blow, World War I shattered the liberal ideal upon which Berlin’s grand hotels were founded. That ideal, dependent upon an equilibrium supported by little more than architecture, regulation, and unspoken rules, had serious weaknesses, it turned out.

Alongside the grand scheme of deodorization, the arrival of a variety of mass-manufactured scents instigated an olfactory revolution in everyday life, feeding new sensory data into Chinese bodies and neurons. Drawing on trade statistics, advertisements, and corporate archives, Chapter 4 restores the materiality of the changing smellscape, exploring both imported scents and domestically produced perfumes, with special attention to state-of-the-art synthetic scents that invaded and contaminated the sensorium. Equipped with industrialism, capitalism, consumerism, science, and nationalism, this revolution’s key battlefield was none other than the human body. The regulation and management of its odours were intended to transform the body into a consumer object. The thrust of my inquiry is the question of how the united forces of olfactory modernity tuned neurons to accept new scents, and how the body was re-educated to internalize a new set of codes, values, and aesthetics.

This chapter examines the relationship between excess and the ways that Romantic novels were envisioned as in – or out of – fashion. As industrial production ramped up in the early nineteenth century, supplying consumers with mass-produced luxuries of all types, so too was the popular novel conceptualized as a consumer good, an object to buy and display as much as a text to read. The chapter begins with Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, analysing the novel’s focus on fashion, advertising, work, and value. Moving forward to the 1810s, it then discusses several novels by Minerva author ‘Miss Byron’, among others, to demonstrate how authors used the idea of fashion to defend the novel and make visible the often-ignored labour of its authors. The excesses of overspending consumers become a metaphor for the glut of the literary market, while the notion of luxury as always created by someone’s work – but also as essentially commodified and interchangeable – implicates the novel in a commercial system that challenges the hierarchies of strictly literary valuations.

The front matter to “Cities of the World Ocean,” the second of three parts of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Plane, recounts the founding of Villa Navidad (“Christmas City”), the first European settlement in the Americas by Christopher Columbus and the Taino people, using wooden planks salvaged from the shipwrecked Santa Maria. The story serves to introduce the importance of humanity’s use of solar energy delivered by the winds and currents of the World Ocean to dramatically expand and merge all of Earth’s urban worlds into Earthopolis, a truly planetary Urban Planet for the first time. This development, a hinge between pre-modern and modern eras, rested on state violence delivered worldwide against city walls by gunpowder cannon; on the theft of massive amounts of land, labor, and wealth involved in the birth of global capitalism; and on the globalization of religious and secular knowledges and consumer culture that had impacts on the natural environment worldwide, including the World Ocean itself.

Chapter 23 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet is the third in a four-part exploration of the Greatest Acceleration from 1945 to the present. Its focus is on spaces of consumption and production, the ocean hopping “value chains” that connect shops with factories, and the growing role of virtual spaces in the global spread of those environments. The proliferation of massive shopping malls, the attraction of urban land, and the global tourist industry are all pieces of this part of the Greatest Acceleration. To produce the goods and increasingly the “experiences” that elicit these desires, manufacturing spaces have exploded in size, notably in East Asia, even as they have declined in many of the “Global North” urban heartlands of the industrial revolution. The chapter visits the largest factory in the world in Shenzhen, China and smaller sweatshops. It also notes that a majority of workers in the global economy do unsung work such as urban transport, construction, and household good sales that makes the growth of cities (and tourist experiences) possible, and in care work in homes, essential to making all other work possible.

This chapter considers how Britain’s developmental, retail-oriented models of planning played out in individual cities across the 1940s and 1950s. It shows that many councils viewed planning as a tool of proactive economic management and enthusiastically bent their powers to the task of promoting valuable new retail development. These activities coincided with a spectacular shops boom in most cities as large retail chains reaped the benefits of full employment and rising wages to embark on major programmes of shop-building and expansion. Councils and retail chains worked in tandem to erect huge new stores all over the country and refit urban centres for the affluent age. At times urban authorities even played the part of commercial developer themselves by putting up shops and collecting business rents. I relate these practices to councils’ energetic pre-war activities in the field of municipal enterprise and show that post-war planning powers offered a new outlet for these long-standing traditions of civic entrepreneurship. The chapter also shows how central government promoted the nascent commercial property sector in British redevelopment from the 1950s.

This broadly conceived introduction discusses recent approaches to the history of capitalism in the United States and Germany and relates them to the findings of economic and business historians of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. It identifies four key tensions between the prominence of Kapitalismuskritik and the tacit spread of capitalist practices and attitudes; a focus on capitalism’s concentrated and organized character and the experience of its bewildering complexity; state intervention and the dynamics of the market; and a national framework of viewing the economy and capitalism’s transnational entanglements. The overarching argument is that Nazism became attractive not least for promising to resolve these tensions. It professed to transcend capitalism while harnessing its energies for a racist and imperialist agenda. These and other aspects are treated in the volume’s four sections on debating, concealing, promoting, and racializing German capitalism between 1918 and 1945.

This chapter considers how Edward Payson Roe’s Barriers Burned Away – the first novel set in Chicago that dealt with the city as an urban environment rather than as a frontier settlement – examined topics that would become part of the Chicago literary tradition. These include the moral implications of a market economy that enriched some but left others in poverty, the role of conspicuous consumption in defining the city’s social hierarchy, and the question of whether those who arrived in the city in search of success could make a place for themselves without sacrificing their principles.

From the late 1870s Ibsen’s international fame started growing. His plays triggered debates and controversies, and the press followed him closely. His work generated immense public interest, as did his person and personal life, and by 1890 he was firmly established as a European literary celebrity. Nineteenth-century celebrities were – like modern celebrities – first and foremost media personalities. Their fame was promoted and maintained by newspapers, periodicals and magazines and, importantly, by new visual techniques like lithography and photography. This chapter describes how an iconic Ibsen was constructed in cartes de visite and cabinet cards produced in European photo studios during the latter part of the nineteenth century. As Ibsen’s fame grew, his portrait photos, originally meant for promotional use, entered the public sphere and began a life of their own. Eventually, they became collectors’ items to be kept in elaborate albums. After sketching the construction of the icon, the chapter traces its circulation in popular visual culture around 1900. Within the emerging consumer culture, portraits of Ibsen – like those of other celebrities – were printed on postcards and trade cards and used to promote a range of luxury commodities.

During the late colonial period, as successive waves of decolonisation swept regions from Ireland in the 1910s to the Pacific islands in the 1970s, a number of writers took inspiration from the cultures of colonial port cities, where they reflected critically on the ideals inscribed into their architectural landscapes. This introductory chapter outlines the historical connections between colonial urbanism and modernist fiction, introducing key theoretical ideas and outlining the comparative method.

Tracing its roots back to Romanticism and invoking a counter-realism associated with postmodernism, North American magical realism invites a variety of communities to resist inequity and oppressive rhetoric and culture and to revise historical, social and religious traditions. Its canon includes North American writers as diverse as Toni Morrison; Latina authors Cristina García, Ana Castillo and Julia Alvarez; feminist magical realists Laurie Foos and Aimee Bender; Canadian writer Robert Kroetsch; and indigenous authors Louise Erdrich, Thomas King and James Welch. A new wave of writers drawing upon magical realism – including Kelly Link, David Levithan, Micah Dean Hicks, Anna-Marie McLemore and Leslye Walton, and often using young adult literature – continues to redefine 'American-ness'. Magical realism carves out space for developing better understandings of established and new (or newly acknowledged) communities, allowing mainstream and disenfranchised authors alike – bound by geography, race, gender or other collective categorizations of identity – entry into the main discourse.

Beer in the late Ottoman Empire became a highly symbolic product used by contemporaries to either affirm or reject Europeanization. It was associated with individualism, a positive outlook onto the future, and mixed sex sociability. Its opponents rejected it as a product alien to local culture and social practices, and considered beer drinkers to be vainly glorifying European culture and displaying antisocial behavior. In Thessaloniki however, social inclusion or exclusion was negotiated along the possibility to enjoy and profit from beer.

In the early 1800s, beer was practically unknown in the Ottoman Empire outside of some expat communities. As of the 1830s, its production increased, but was restricted to small artisanal breweries and was the subject of NIMBY protests. By the 1860s and more so the 1880s, it gained popularity in mainstream society and as of the 1890s was produced in industrial quantities. Tax cuts succeeded in making the Ottoman market less dependent on imported beer and to establish local brands as market leaders.