Modern warfare and modern consumer culture both began to emerge in the late-nineteenth century and their development has been and remains intertwined in multiple ways. Modern, or total war disrupts the ways people spend their time and their money. It affects access to resources and chains of distribution, often forcing the conservation and even rationing of goods and materials. Modern war changes states’ economic priorities. Troops need to be armed, fed, and outfitted, factories repurposed, and the culture industry, since the beginning of the First World War, has often been enlisted to boost morale or indeed to spread propaganda. Still, during war, life goes on, and while war limits the availability of goods and curbs consumption, it also stimulates certain kinds of consumer habits and trends. Wartime conditions often lead to new fashions, haircuts, styles, music, and dances, forged out of scarcity and the intensity of experience. And war’s consequences for the consumer linger long after peace is declared. While the end of World War I saw the spread of poverty and hunger across Central and Eastern Europe and a global cycle of prolonged economic instability, after the Second World War economic life blossomed into a period of tremendous affluence and consumer abundance, at least in North America and parts of Europe. War, especially in the modern period, has also led to, and often forced, widespread internal migration and emigration, which exposes consumers to different styles and creates new vectors of influence and hybridity. In short, modern wars are won and lost by states’ ability to keep soldiers adequately provisioned and to keep civilian populations fed and relatively content. Consequently, in the post-World War II world, the consumer gained a political voice, as levels of consumption became an index of citizen satisfaction and a weapon in Cold War competition.

These are among the many themes and questions that run through The Consumer on the Home Front, a substantial compendium of new scholarship on domestic consumption during World War II. This rich and compelling volume challenges conventional assumptions and periodization in several ways. For one, despite its title, it questions the very idea of a home front (or a homogenous home front experience), showing the multiple ways in which zones of war and domestic affairs were interwoven and interdependent during the Second World War. Secondly, its essays disrupt the notion of a Zero Hour after the end of the war; they emphasize continuities between the war and the postwar period in terms of specific products and product technologies, consumer attitudes and expectations, and state policies toward the market. A third contribution lies in the book’s comparative focus and broad transnational framework. While attentive throughout to ideological and geographical differences, most of the volume’s authors place their essays in conversation with the larger problematic, allowing for comparison across Europe, North America, and (to some extent) Asia, and across ideology and economic system, devoting significant attention to liberal democracies, the Soviet Union’s state socialism, and Nazi and post-Nazi Germany.

The book is divided into four major sections in addition to a useful introduction by Hartmut Berghoff and an extensive conclusion and outlook by Frank Trentmann. The first part consists of four essays on wartime policy and provisioning in Japan, the Soviet Union, Britain, and Germany respectively. Taken together these essays shed light on four different state strategies for food – or in one case tobacco – distribution amid the scarcities of war. Despite being keenly aware of the importance of civilian morale on a state’s ability to wage total war, Japanese planners, as Sheldon Garon shows, failed to adequately provision their population during the war, and domestic hunger, he argues, influenced the Japanese decision to surrender. Of the belligerent countries under discussion, only the Soviet Union experienced worse shortages than Japan, while the British population had little to complain about beyond the the dullness of the wartime diet, the tedium of queues, and persistent gender and class inequalities. Part I concludes with a fascinating analysis of German tobacco consumption during the Nazi period by Nicole Petrick-Felber who frames the question around the competing Nazi-era imperatives of prioritizing heavy industrial output over consumer goods and keeping the population happy and well-fed to avoid the civilian morale collapse of World War I. Hitler’s own distaste for smoking and the Third Reich’s anti-smoking campaigns add to the complexity of the picture surrounding this crucial, yet increasingly scarce wartime product.

Part II shifts the focus to advertising and the media and consists of chapters on Britain, Japan and Germany. In the British and Japanese contexts, advertisements associated products with the national cause, while in the German case, as Pamela Swett shows, a clearer line of demarcation separated commercial advertising and state initiatives, as the Nazis wished to keep their political message untainted by vulgar consumerism. In all three countries, advertisements portrayed war as a disruption of normalcy, and visions of a postwar life increasingly stressed consumer goods and satisfaction which helped consumers find meaning in the war and in some ways helped create dispositions that anticipated the return of prosperity in postwar Western Europe, Germany, and Japan.

A short third part turns to fashion and the media in the German and Russian contexts. Like advertising, fashion periodicals and feature films offered up visions of luxury and elegance that lay beyond the grasp of all but the very wealthiest. While the Soviet Union’s appalling wartime conditions left little room for fashion for most Soviet citizens, several fashion magazines continued to appear through the war, Sergey Zhuravlev shows, as a way of keeping up morale and promising happier postwar times. Intriguingly the flight of many Jewish clothiers away from the advancing German army and deeper into Russian territory helped bring new trends and styles into Moscow, Leningrad, and other major Soviet cities.

The book’s fourth and final part, on the impact of the war on postwar consumption, picks up on lines of argumentation suggested by the earlier essays, namely that war experiences were crucial to postwar consumer expectations and state policies, as states navigated between the poles of prioritizing domestic mass consumption (US) and implementing fiscal austerity (Britain). The four essays concentrate on the Canadian, American, German, and Soviet contexts, although each frames its analysis, at least to some extent, in transnational or comparative terms. Several essays posit fascinating lines of continuity between war (or even prewar) and postwar, as for example, Uwe Spiekermann’s chapter on Wehrmacht products and food technologies such as potato dehydration which became linchpins of postwar convenience, and Jan Logemann’s contribution which positions several European émigrés as forerunners of American market research and consumer engineering.

This thorough and far-reaching collection stitches together the study of modern war with the history of consumer culture in useful and suggestive ways. The book’s synthesis of political, cultural, and economic categories of analysis add to the fullness and nuance it brings to the subject. Its inclusion of the Japanese context broadens the focus considerably and its placement of the Soviet experience alongside Germany, Britain, and North America adds crucial depth and context. A chapter on Fascist Italy and perhaps even some attention to other parts of the world would have made the book even more valuable. Nevertheless, The Consumer on the Home Front represents a most welcome step in bringing the study of consumer culture into dialogue with the history of the Second World War, and its essays offer examples of the newest and most nuanced work at the intersection of the two fields.