""Shopping for Pleasure" is an impressive, engaging and important book. Erika Rappaport has taken on the challenge of drawing together the currently diverging fields of cultural, gender and urban history, and she has succeeded splendidly."--Geoffrey Crossick, University of Essex.

""Shopping for Pleasure" is an exciting blend of social, economic, and cultural history that shows an inventive use of sources and a clever juxtaposition of different domains of historical inquiry. Rappaport is tackling a set of topics that, astonishingly, have remained unexplored in British historiography. . . . With great and superb detail, the book tells an original story about middle-class women's urban culture and its relation to feminism."--Judith Walkowitz, Johns Hopkins University

"["Shopping for Pleasure"] contributes significantly to feminist scholarship, partly because it shows why this aspect of everyday life deserves serious analysis and because it offers such deft analyses of women's contributions to the commercial success of London in this period."--Mary Poovey, New York University

"An innovative and imaginative work. The originality lies partly in the juxtaposition of new materials, such as the institutional histories of Selfridge's and Whiteley's, the women's clubs of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, and the West End musical comedies. Erika Rappaport uses this material with great sophistication, referring to theoretical works in film studies, cultural studies, literature, and history. The illustrations, too, are extremely engaging."--Ellen Ross, Ramapo College

"Shopping for Pleasure is an impressive, engaging and important book. Erika Rappaport has taken on the challenge ofdrawing together the currently diverging fields of cultural, gender and urban history, and she has succeeded splendidly."--Geoffrey Crossick, University of Essex

"In Shopping for Pleasure Erika Rappaport tells the fascinating story of women's relationship to commercial culture in London in the last half of the nineteenth century, and she does so with elan, clarity, and prodigious research. She moves from the creation of the first department stores to the era of the suffragettes, from the "Girl of the Period" to the Gaiety Girl, from Whitely's to Selfridge's, from Charlotte Bronte to Amy Levy, and from Bayswater to Regent Street. While touching on a wide variety of topics, among them the appearance of public toilets, the creation of women's clubs and tea rooms, the proliferation of women's magazines, and musical comedy, Rappaport's subject is ultimately the creation of a modern ideal of middle-class femininity: no longer merely domestic and private but engaged as well in the public realm of consumption, display, and civic action."--Deborah Nord, Princeton University

How the global tea industry influenced the international economy and the rise of mass consumerism Tea has been one of the most popular commodities in the world. For centuries, profits from its growth and sales funded wars and fueled colonization, and its cultivation brought about massive changes-in land use, labor systems, market practices, and social hierarchies-the effects of which are with us even today. A Thirst for Empire takes an in-depth historical look at how men and women-through the tea industry in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa-transformed global tastes and habits. An expansive and original global history of imperial tea, A Thirst for Empire demonstrates the ways that this powerful enterprise helped shape the contemporary world.

How the global tea industry influenced the international economy and the rise of mass consumerism Tea has been one of the most popular commodities in the world. Over centuries, profits from its growth and sales funded wars and fueled colonization, and its cultivation brought about massive changes--in land use, labor systems, market practices, and social hierarchies--the effects of which are with us even today. A Thirst for Empire takes a vast and in-depth historical look at how men and women--through the tea industry in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa--transformed global tastes and habits and in the process created our modern consumer society. As Erika Rappaport shows, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries the boundaries of the tea industry and the British Empire overlapped but were never identical, and she highlights the economic, political, and cultural forces that enabled the British Empire to dominate--but never entirely control--the worldwide production, trade, and consumption of tea. Rappaport delves into how Europeans adopted, appropriated, and altered Chinese tea culture to build a widespread demand for tea in Britain and other global markets and a plantation-based economy in South Asia and Africa. Tea was among the earliest colonial industries in which merchants, planters, promoters, and retailers used imperial resources to pay for global advertising and political lobbying. The commercial model that tea inspired still exists and is vital for understanding how politics and publicity influence the international economy. An expansive and original global history of imperial tea, A Thirst for Empire demonstrates the ways that this fluid and powerful enterprise helped shape the contemporary world.

In twentieth-century Britain, consumerism increasingly defined and redefined individual and social identities. New types of consumers emerged: the idealized working-class consumer, the African consumer and the teenager challenged the prominent position of the middle and upper-class female shopper. Linking politics and pleasure, Consuming Behaviours explores how individual consumers and groups reacted to changes in marketing, government control, popular leisure and the availability of consumer goods.From football to male fashion, tea to savings banks, leading scholars consider a wide range of products, ideas and services and how these were marketed to the British public through periods of imperial decline, economic instability, war, austerity and prosperity. The development of mass consumer society in Britain is examined in relation to the growing cultural hegemony and economic power of the United States, offering comparisons between British consumption patterns and those of other nations.Bridging the divide between historical and cultural studies approaches, Consuming Behaviours discusses what makes British consumer culture distinctive, while acknowledging how these consumer identities are inextricably a product of both Britain's domestic history and its relationship with its Empire, with Europe and with the United States.

In twentieth-century Britain, consumerism increasingly defined and redefined individual and social identities. New types of consumers emerged: the idealized working-class consumer, the African consumer and the teenager challenged the prominent position of the middle and upper-class female shopper. Linking politics and pleasure, Consuming Behaviours explores how individual consumers and groups reacted to changes in marketing, government control, popular leisure and the availability of consumer goods.From football to male fashion, tea to savings banks, leading scholars consider a wide range of products, ideas and services and how these were marketed to the British public through periods of imperial decline, economic instability, war, austerity and prosperity. The development of mass consumer society in Britain is examined in relation to the growing cultural hegemony and economic power of the United States, offering comparisons between British consumption patterns and those of other nations.Bridging the divide between historical and cultural studies approaches, Consuming Behaviours discusses what makes British consumer culture distinctive, while acknowledging how these consumer identities are inextricably a product of both Britain's domestic history and its relationship with its Empire, with Europe and with the United States.